Growing your permission-based email list is a top priority for your business. Each address you add represents a new opportunity to build a relationship with someone who is interested in what you have to offer.

This month's resources are designed to help you grow an excellent email list. Ellen Siegel's article, An Email List that Sparkles, will walk you through the best practices of building and maintaining a quality list. In addition, my article, 8 List Growth Ideas from the Field, will give you some tactical ideas for list growth.

We also feature three email marketers who've had success growing their lists. They'll tell you how, in their own words. Do you have a creative way that you've grown your list or a question to ask? Speak your mind in our Hints & Tips forum.

And when you are done reading, please let me know if you found this issue helpful.

All the best,

Amy Black

Editor, Hints & Tips e-Newsletters

P.S. Click here to get a sign-up sheet you can print out (pdf).

 

8 List Growth Ideas from the Field
Constant Contact's regional directors share list growth tactics

By Amy Black, Editor, Hints & Tips e-Newsletters

Looking for ways to grow your list? To give you some ideas, I spoke with a few of Constant Contact's regional development directors. These email marketing experts provide training to small businesses and organizations across the country every day. They have some great ideas to share and some real life examples for you to learn from.
 
Here are some tactics, from the simple to the creative, that will help you capture more email addresses.

Get the 8 ideas

Serious List Growth: How Did They Do It? Three email marketers share the secrets to their list growth success Massachusetts For Sale By Owner www.ma4salebyowner.com   Massachusetts For Sale By Owner has been sending email newsletters for more than six years. Over those years, they grew their email list from 50 to more than 2,000. Here's how owner, Liz Provo, did it:   Our sign-up box is featured prominently on our homepage, but we also place it on a separate page that describes why one should receive our newsletters. We reaffirm that they can *** at anytime and that we do not solicit. We link to this page from both our buying and selling sections. Additionally, we promote the newsletter on many pages of both our main website and our blog. When buyers sign up for property alerts we offer them a complimentary subscription to the newsletter. We also sign many of our one-on-one emails with a lead-in to the newsletter.     Basketball Success www.basketballsuccess.com   Patrick Chylinski of Basketball Success has been successfully email marketing for eight years. He's come a long way; after starting out with no list at all, he now boasts a strong following of more than 7,000. In the beginning, he was getting 8 to 10 sign ups per day. He made some changes and lifted the daily sign-up number to 25 to 30 per day. Patrick tells us how:   First, I placed the sign-up box in a more visible spot, above the fold on my homepage. I used to have my sign-up box near the bottom of the homepage because I thought that people who came to my website didn't want to be bothered by something like a newsletter sign-up box.  But after doing reading and research on website owners who had been successful at building large email lists, I realized I had to move my sign-up box to a more prominent place on my website. So I moved it above the fold, towards the left-hand side of the page, so it's one of the first things site visitors see.    Second, I started offering a free "special report" to those who signed up for my newsletter.  It was an in-depth article I'd put together that I emailed only to those who joined my list. Providing my site visitors with an incentive to sign up increased the rate tremendously.      Vox Ama Deus www.voxamadeus.org   Vox Ama Deus, a nonprofit organization that brings the music of the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods to audiences, has more than doubled their email list in three years of email marketing. Starting out with about 350 contacts, they've now surpassed 700. According to Director of Marketing and Publicity Inna Heasley, this is how they've done it:   The sign-up box is a constant on our website. And at our events, we invite people to join the list and give away free tickets to our next concert. To encourage people to sign up, we let them know that once on the list they will receive incentives and ticket promotions to our concerts. This benefit is exclusively for members of the list. Lastly, all employees' email signatures have a sign-up link.

Do you have an email marketing success story?
Has email marketing helped your business or organization to be successful?
We want to hear about it.

 

 

Anchor Links, Default "From" name, *** Comment Box

New! Anchor Links - Now you can easily add Anchor Links to your emails. Your readers can quickly review and link to the articles that interest them, without scrolling!

Improved! Changing your "From" name - Now you can easily set your business' name as the default "From" name in all your emails. Simply go to the "My Settings" tab to update.

Improved! *** Comment Box - Sure, it's disappointing when someone ***s from your email list. But wouldn't it be helpful to know why they ***d? The *** Comment Box - now automatically turned on for you - gives them a chance to tell you why, so you can make improvements that will help keep more people on your list.

Learn about additional updates, including those made to ListenUp!^SM Survey.