Growing and shrinking your email list
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 27, 2007
I sometimes compare email marketing with forest management. Both, for example, have a dark side: spam...wholesale logging of rainforests. The comparison works well for list building, too.The commercial forester seeks to plant out an ever-growing (!) acreage of forest with seedlings. But while expanding the size of the forest is a goal, the forester also takes care to ensure the good health of those stands already planted.
So, for example, she will thin out the plantation by taking out the poor performing trees, giving more scope for the remaining forest to thrive, prosper and yield high-quality sustainable timber. Quality counts as much as quantity, a concept familiar to email list owners.
Anyway, list growth needs to come hand-in-hand with list shrinkage. Dead addresses, unresponsive addresses are holding back your yield.
They pull down your stats and likely lead to delivery problems. Unresponsive recipients mark you as spam and email services do the same if you insist on emailing non-existent accounts.
Unlike the forester, however, it pays to give the low quality trees a chance to catch up with their more robust peers. In other words, get those quiet addresses to respond after all.
Megan Ouellet has some ideas on how you might do that in this post.
And in terms of fresh growth, MarketingProfs just released an old, but still relevant, round up of list acquisition approaches.
One recommended technique is encouraging forwards to a friend. Which by coincidence is also the topic of a new article by Adam Covati.
Happy harvesting.
More on list growth | Tags: email marketing, email list growth, building an email list, list hygiene
[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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