Customer retention is an important thing to manage. It’s a lot easier to keep an existing customer than to find a new one, and a great way to do that is through retention tactics. One of these is re-engaging customers on your mailing list.
What makes a good mailing list?
Size isn’t everything. A mailing list with thousands of names but only a fraction of which engage with your messaging will never be as useful as a smaller but highly engaged audience. It’s much better to focus on building a mailing list with a focused strategy than to try and cast the net as wide as possible.
Effective strategies for building mailing lists from scratch
There are many different strategies that you as a business can use to get potential and existing customers to sign up for your mailing list while following all the laws and regulations in place.
Signup Website Popups
Encourage signups with a pop-up on your website. These can easily be bothersome, so be sure to include a great reason for disrupting your user’s session. Offering discounts or exclusive access to people who sign up are great ways to capture emails with minimal annoyance.
Incentives can be an easy way to encourage more sign-ups. Make sure they’re both time-sensitive and conditional. If you’re offering discounts for first-time users, send out unique discount codes with expiration dates to new sign-ups.
Here’s an example of a website pop-up with a sign-up incentive:
Social Media Promotion
Promote your newsletter on social media and provide links to a landing page where people can sign up directly using an incentive such as £50 off their next purchase when they sign up and refer a friend. This method will help to encourage your organic following to convert, all while building more awareness, your mailing list, and sales for your business.
Laws to follow when setting up a mailing list
Before sending your first email, you MUST make sure that you’re acting within the law. Failure to comply can result in legal consequences, so when attempting to capture emails you must make sure that:
- You get opt-in consent when signing new people up to your mailing list. This can be a check box where people must agree to share their details with you before confirming.
- You are getting emails organically. Purchasing or acquiring other people’s email lists is a breach of GDPR.
- You make clear that the emails you send are coming from you and your company, with appropriate sender names and subject lines.
- You provide an option to unsubscribe at the bottom of all emails you send to your mailing list.
- You honour unsubscribe requests quickly. When someone opts out of your emails, you must remove them from mailing lists right away.
How to retain your mailing list
What you do with your mailing list is just as important as building one. This is where you will utilise your chosen CRM’s tools to boost your business. Not sure which email marketing tool is best for you? Make sure to check out our guide on the best email marketing tools.
Every email you send must also provide great reasons for sticking around. If you’re providing free advice or blog posts, providing great quality information and assuring subscribers that your emails are the best, or even, the only place to receive this information provides both fantastic value and the ‘why’ as to why they should read future communications.
Feeling out of your comfort zone?
Building a mailing list and creating engaging emails to engage your audience isn’t easy. If you want to streamline your email marketing strategy, DBS Digital is here to help. To learn more about our email marketing services, get in touch with us today.
