How to Grow your Email Database from Scratch
The marketing landscape is constantly evolving.
Originally, it was all based on print and distribution. This meant newspapers, billboards, flyers, and so on. Then came innovations such as the radio and television, and marketers discovered new ways to reach their target audience with their messages.
Then, of course, came the internet and revolutionized the whole industry. With the internet, communication and the sharing of messages have become easier and more streamlined than ever. Today, there are endless different ways you can reach your target audience via the internet – from traditional display ads on websites to YouTube ads, to, of course, perhaps the most ”classic” of them all – email.
Email market has existed for quite some time now, unlike social media marketing, for example, which is only in recent times growing substantially.
More or less everyone who uses the internet has an email, and with that said, it is obvious that it can be a great way to reach your target audience effectively. But in recent years, there has been more talk about email marketing not working as effectively as it used to, and new online marketing methods may be more tempting. And yes, whilst the open-rates and conversion rates via email marketing have shown a decrease over the years, the number of people who use email is higher than ever. This means that it is still a highly relevant means of communication.
In addition, ”not working as well as it used to” is not the same thing as not working. In addition, email marketing has one huge benefit over many other marketing methods, and that is that the distribution of messages is extremely cheap. Once you have built your list of subscribers, communication with them free or close to free. In other words, it creates a direct communications channel with your target audience.
And if you think email marketing is dead, let us share some statistics to help you understand its significance and efficiency:
- For every $1 you spend on emails marketing, you can expect an average return of $42
- In 2019, global email users amounted to 3.9 billion users
- In 2019, 293.6 billion emails were sent and received each day
- In 2019 alone, 293.6 billion emails were sent and received each day
- 49% (Statista, 2017) of consumers said that they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis
- The average expected ROI is $42 for every $1 you spend on email marketing.
How to build your email list
The most work with email marketing relates to the building of your email list. The larger your email subscriber list, the greater effect the email marketing campaign will have. With that said, you need to focus on building your email subscriber list. And don’t expect that once you have built a large list, you can stop there. For obvious reasons, people will constantly fall off your list, for example, because they unsubscribe, get a new email address, or they simply stop opening your emails. Therefore, you need to consistently continue to build your list with new email subscribers.
We won’t go into detail about how you build your newsletter subscriber list, because this is a topic that takes many hours to cover in detail. But a popular way that you have likely seen many companies use is newsletter subscription pop-ups.
The fact is that a large portion of all businesses uses these on their website. Why, you may ask? The answer is that they work.
Yes, newsletter pop-ups on the website can be very annoying for visitors. They disturb you with what you are actually trying to do, and they can be very annoying. But companies wouldn’t use them unless they weren’t effective, but they are.
Another very important tip when building your email subscriber list is to give people an incentive to subscribe. This is very important as it sets the tone for how you are going to work with getting newsletter subscribers onwards. People need an incentive to subscribe to your newsletter. They need to get value by doing so in one way or another. There are of course many ways in which you can bring value to people, both in monetary form or in virtual form. A common incentive that businesses use is ”sign up and get X % discount on your next purchase!”. This gives a clear incentive but at the same time brings the businesses benefits as well, as it helps them sell more.
Another way to incentivize people is by bringing a different form of value, for example, ”subscribe and we will send a free e-book”.
Buying an email database
Now, this is another way to get people for your email newsletter list. You are probably aware of the fact that it is possible to buy an email database. This can be especially helpful for B2B business as rules are less strict. However, email databases have a bit of a dodgy reputation, and buying email data can be considered a dodgy technique. But it’s important that you understand the full story here. And the full story is that whether or not this is ”dodgy” depends on your data provider and their sources of data.
High-quality data has certain use restrictions, but the benefit is that your message will be sent to subscribers of certain thematic magazines or professional organizations who are actually willing to receive your offer. With that said, if you are looking to target a very niche sector and industry, buying an email database can be a great idea.
US Marketing Management has in-depth experience in this field because before you dig in, it’s important you have the right info and can make well-grounded execution. In addition, it is important to get the data from the right, quality sources.
It all depends on your industry and your purpose, for example, if your clients are pharmaceutical companies, it may make sense to buy a list of pharmaceutical companies for contact that includes the information you need for outreach, for example, email address, company name, company URL, first name, Surname, Job Title, and so on…
