6 Tips for Building a High Quality Email List

If you’re a new website owner thinking about building an email list for your business, or if you’re someone who just wants to improve upon an existing one, we’ve outlined some of the most highly recommended tips and advice on how to build a superb, high quality email list.

Successful email marketing begins and ends with trust.

We’ve outlined the importance of establishing and building trust with your subscribers when list building in a previous post.  We cannot overstate the importance of building trust with your email subscribers.  To be successful in your email marketing, you have to be trusted by your subscribers to be effective over the long term.

If you’re building an email list from scratch, or if you’ve already built a substantial subscriber list, either way, you can make some simple, easy improvements to optimize and improve the size and quality of your lists.  Here is an outline of 6 of our very best tips for building a high quality list:

Build It, Don’t Buy It

As we’ve already talked about extensively, effective email marketing is all about gaining and building trust.  Many website owners are tempted to get a head start on their list building by renting or buying a list of names from an email list broker.  Building trust starts by building your email list from scratch.  Don’t even consider buying or renting a list – that’s a surefire way to undermine your subscribers trust right out of the gate.

Purchasing or renting email lists creates a myriad of issues and problems for list builders, starting with bad or expired email addresses.  At best, buying or renting will result in a slew of spam complaints from subscribers who have never heard of you and certainly did not give you permission to send them email.  Don’t buy or rent lists; doing so creates far too many problems for you than they will ever be worth.

Although far more difficult, building a list from scratch is (in our opinion) the ONLY way to properly conduct your email marketing campaigns.  You’ll be able to track your emails – who received them, who opened them and who responded to them. You’ll be able to segment your list more effectively, targeting and servicing subscribers who express interest only in specific categories of interest.  Above all, building a list from the ground up will provide you with a list of people who really want to read your emails – people who will refer their friends to your newsletter, and the friends of their friends, etc., helping it grow naturally, and in time, expansively.

In the end, building an email list from scratch is really the only way to go in my opinion, giving you active, qualified, subscribers from people who are genuinely interested in your products, your services, and your specific area of expertise.

Provide Your Subscribers with Value

You should strive to make your subscribers really want to open your newsletters every time they get them.  So, the next phase of building trust involves offering your subscribers real value with unique and interesting content.  Whether this value is in the form of product information, discounts, rebates, tips, advice, recommendations, testimonials or even some funny stories, your subscribers should feel a need to open your newsletter each and every time they get it.

It’s very important to have a “service first” mentality in order to build a quality list.  One of the most important questions you should ask before building your newsletter is this:

Asking that question as a premise to building your newsletters will provide a great road map for you in building a rock solid list.  Anything that you can provide in your newsletter that prioritizes and focuses on helping your subscribers first and monetizing (making money) last is the proper mindset to build a great list.  Whatever you do, make sure that you provide them with legitimate value in your newsletter, not just your latest sales promotion each and every week.

Prominent Placement of Your Sign-Up Form

You should prioritize your newsletter sign-ups as if it were another product you were trying to sell.  Market it, promote it, and feature the newsletter sign-up form prominently throughout your site.  The best place to put the sign-up form is “above the fold” and in such a high visibility location that your visitors can’t avoid it.  Make sure the sign-up form is on every single page of your site (preferably in your header or sidebar) which will give your users a chance to sign up whenever they want.

Limit Your Request for Information

A great way to increase the conversion rate of your newsletter sign-ups is to limit the amount of information that you request for initial sign-up.  You must understand that the amount of information that you request has an inverse relationship with the conversion rate for sign-ups.  In other words, the more information you ask for at sign-up, the fewer people will agree to it.  Keep your registration and sign-up data requests to a minimum.  Your best sign-up rates will occur when you’re simply asking for name and email address.  Certain businesses may require other information in their sign-up process such as zip code or telephone number, but for your initial sign-up really make a concerted effort to minimize the number of data fields you require for sign-up.  For example, instead of asking for a subscriber’s address, city, state and zip code information, simply ask for their zip code.  You can always ask for additional targeting information in subsequent emails, but initially, you really need to minimize your sign-up requirements as much as possible.

Prominently Display Your Privacy Policy

Privacy is a serious issue for all consumers these days.  Consumers have rightfully grown very cautious about sharing email addresses or any type of personal information.  To be successful in your email marketing and list building, you’ll need to reassure your subscribers that any private information, which includes their email addresses, will be proactively protected and defended by you.  You should start by prominently displaying your privacy policy and reassuring your potential subscribers that you’ll be actively protecting their information.  If you don’t have a privacy policy, here’s an example of a privacy policy that’s available under a “Creative Commons Sharealike” license that allows you to use it freely for your own use.  Having a privacy policy is absolutely essential nowadays for online marketers as more and more consumers are closely examining privacy policies on websites they are unfamiliar with.

Build Relationships with Your Subscribers

Your subscribers will stay with you longer if they feel like they’re getting something from you that offers value.  If you consistently offer them valuable content and information in your newsletter, your credibility and level of trust with your subscribers will grow over time.  You should also try to solicit feedback from your subscribers about what they like and dislike in your newsletters.  When you receive any feedback, good or bad, make sure that you respond immediately.  You can vastly improve the nature of your newsletters from listening to the feedback that you get.  Don’t take the feedback personally, just listen to it and try to build on it or improve your offering from it.  Responding in a timely manner and listening to your subscribers with improvements that your subscribers suggest shows them that you care.  Building relationships with your subscribers in this way is invaluable and can really cement the value of your newsletter with subscribers for the long haul.

Exercise restraint with your promotional activities and don’t beat your subscribers over the head with the same repetitive sales promotion.  Your subscribers will quickly burn out if you flog them endlessly with the same meaningless “50% Off Everything” sale.  Absolutely one of the worst things that you can do is to hassle your customers with what amounts to a newsletter blitzkrieg.  If you don’t constantly assault them with promotions, they’ll appreciate you much more. Remember, you are privileged to have subscribers on your list – it’s not the other way around.  Nothing will destroy your list’s credibility more than a deluge of heavy-handed, over-promotion.

And finally, whatever it is that you promise to deliver in your newsletter to your subscribers, make sure that you deliver on it.  Don’t pull the old bait and switch – promising them “tips and advice” and then peppering them with “Hot Sales Items”.  That’s another great way to undermine your subscribers’ trust.

Make sure that you deliver what you’ve promised to deliver.

Additional Resources for Building a High Quality Email List:

• Building an Opt-In Email List (ClickZ)
• Building Your Email Mailing List (InternetBasedMoms.com)
• Building Your List (Constant Contact)

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