Back to Basics: Building Your Database

You've got your email message, and you have a list of a million email addresses that you bought on the Internet for 99 pounds. You're ready to go, right?

Sadly, no. That is the fast route to Spamland. Those addresses on most likely are forged, stolen or long since dead. There simply is no replacement in email marketing for a database of addresses whose owners have given you explicit permission to send email to them.

Building a database with permission takes more time than buying or renting a mailing list, but it will pay off better in the long run:

1. Email recipients who expect your messages and recognise your name in the inbox will be less likely to click the "this is spam" button in their email clients.
2. Permission lists (also called "opt-in") perform better than opt-out lists:
1. They have higher open and click rates on average
2. They generate better responses, especially in return on investment
3. They have fewer inactive or non-responding addresses
3. ISPs are less likely to block your email messages or route them to spam folders because they generate fewer spam complaints.

So, why doesn't everybody do permission emailing? Because they're too impatient and don't want to invest the time it takes to build a solid-gold internal database – what direct-mail folks call a "house list."

Permission-based house lists perform the best of all, but they also take the most time to build. However, you can build your own list fastest with these 11 steps:

1. Put an invitation to subscribe to your email program on every single page of your Web site. Yes, even internal pages like your "About Us" and privacy-policy pages.

2. Emphasise the benefits your email program will provide, instead of just saying "Sign up for our emails." People will think, "Why do I want more email?" Tell them exactly what they'll get.

3. Add a subscription invitation on your order page and in your confirmation page.

4. Add a subscription invitation to the emails you send out to request or confirm transactions, such as order confirmations, shipping notices, news bulletins, payment requests and confirmations, etc. Even add it to your regular email signature.

5. Have your readers help you do the work: Invite them to forward your emails to their friends, and add a subscription invitation to your regular emails that speaks to anyone who received the email from a friend.

6. Redesign your email landing pages to make the subscription invitation stand out. This gives you another option to sign up someone who lands on your page after doing a search but doesn't want to buy the product or read the article.

7. Archive your emails on your Web site, as appropriate, and optimise them to reflect your search keywords. This gives you more opportunities to show up in natural search queries along with any paid search you now use and exposes more people to your email invitations.

8. Make your subscription process as easy as possible to complete. You should first ask for only the information you need to start the subscription: an email address for sure, and then a name, optionally, if you want to personalise your emails. You can always go back in later special emails to ask for more information, such as a postal address, demographic information, etc.

9. Have subscribers confirm their email addresses before adding them to your database. This is called double opt-in subscription. It reduces typing mistakes or someone subscribing someone else to your list as a joke or a malicious event.

You will lose some addresses this way – the alternative is single opt-in, where the subscription begins as soon as you get the email address – but you'll know that every address in your database belongs to someone who really wants to be there.

You can increase your number of confirmations by telling people right at the opt-in about what they have to do activate their subscriptions and testing your confirmation message to make sure it goes to the inbox and not the junk folder.

10. Make yourself as trustworthy as possible. This means stating up front what you will and will not do with the email address and linking to your privacy policy; explaining how the subscription process works, especially if you use double opt-in; explaining what you will send and when.

11. Give subscribers options such as frequency, format and content to customise their subscriptions and make them as valuable as possible. And then, honour those preferences. If you don't, your subscribers will unsubscribe, report you as spam, or just go inactive.

Kath Pay is Marketing Director of Ezemail, an innovative company that provides comprehensive email marketing solutions. For more information on how easily email marketing can be implemented, please contact Kath at kath@ezemail.com.

©Kath Pay 2008