Growing Your Email List

Here at Blackbaud Pacific, we've recently launched a new email service offering called Blackbaud Reach. 

 Blackbaud Reach is a consulting package designed to help your organisation reach the right audience at the right time with targeted emails and newsletters.

 I have had the opportunity to speak to a variety of Blackbaud clients while developing this offering, and I have been struck by the amount of organisations who tell me that they would love to improve their email marketing, but who have little or no email list. 

 Growing an email list should be an ongoing priority for all organisations, as at least 5% of any email list will likely be 'churning' (or unsubscribing) at any time.

 The easiest way to start growing your email list is to start asking your audience for their email addresses at every touch point you have. This extends from beyond just the online environment to every single touch point you have with your audience. 

I have started keeping a basic list of the places you should consider asking for email addresses to grow your email list. This is only intended as a starting point, so please make a copy and expand and grow on this as required:

• Capture subscriptions on all forms on your site
• Give users the option to opt-in to your list in all transactional emails
• Encourage your existing audience to forward your emails and content to friends/family
• Promote your email lists through your Twitter and Facebook accounts, as well as any other social media accounts you have
• Always ask in face-to-face meetings if anyone would like to join your email list
• Put subscription links in your email signatures
• Link to your email registration options from every page of your web site (and always list the benefits of subscribing)
• Promote your subscriptions via any RSS feed you distribute
• Include subscription forms or web site links on all printed materials (including business cards)
• Ensure that you have such engaging content on your web site and online aggregators that people deliberately seek out ways to keep up-to-date with your new content!

You also need to ensure that once people subscribe to your list, they have reason to stay subscribed. You need to manage your email frequency to ensure that you are not threatening your subscribers with information overload, but you need to be staying in touch enough for them to remember who your organisation is. Always remember that you are competing for a share of voice against more media than just the emails of your competitors.

Once you have promoted your list effectively, online and off, you really need to start looking at why your audience should give you their email address in the first place. What do you have to offer them that's worth them giving you their email address for? Have you focused on the benefits and special offers that come as being a part of your list? Why should people choose to subscribe to your email services and not those of another organisation?

Once your list starts growing, you can then start to consider exactly how you wish to engage your audience, and what type of emails you will be using to do this. You may even wish to start up multiple lists depending on the type of subscriptions you plan on offering. Two of the most obvious starting points are eNewsletters, and eDMs (electronic direct mail).

I will touch on how you can use these two different email types to engage and motivate your audience in my next post.

For information on the new Blackbaud Reach offering for Blackbaud Pacific clients, visit this Brainshark.