Want to grow your email list?
Main rule: DO NOT BUY COLD DATA. EVER.
Even if the cold data is promised to deliver results because it fits your required Mosaic socio-demographic profile, because it has 100% valid email addresses, etc., it is still cold data. Even if the recipients know about you, your company, your products, but haven’t explicitly given you their email address at some point in time, the chance of them hitting a ’spam’ button increase exponentially once they start receiving email from you out of nowhere.
Besides, a cold data list also suffers from list fatigue and level of unsubscribes a lot more than a list of subscribers who engaged themselves in the first place. It also costs more to email to and usually doesn’t provide a good ROI per subscriber.
So, how can you make your money go further?
Plan 1: Copy Brussels Airlines’ strategy. Not only they have gained over 1400 active email subscribers who are just one step short from conversion (even considering stringent T&Cs), they have also converted subscribers into affiliates – I bet that ‘Forward to a friend’ form converts better than your average one. Awesome.
Plan 2: Define your target market and sponsor an activity on a high-trafficked website for that market or their email (even better). You will get access to their active database, promotion of your products and services under their hat (which would look more like a ‘house deal’ for the members) and your brand’s entrance into the recipients’ mindsets would be a lot smoother compared to ‘barging’ into their inboxes out of nowhere.
Plan 3: If you already have a database of customers which is not populated with email addresses, use an email append service. It is not the best way to acquire an email address, but you would be contacting people who have actively engaged into a business transaction with you.
Whatever you decide to do, always remember that relevancy and value would always bear better results than quantity. Give your recipients value – discount coupon, insider information – something that seems valuable enough to give away an email address for.
