Five Ways to Collect Email Addresses

By Jim Kinkade

Conducting effective email marketing imperatively means having a clean and manageable list of email addresses. Home grown email lists collected over time are by far the best and most productive option. When first entering the email marketing space however, it may be desirable to supplement a new inactive list with additional addresses. Here are five ways of acquiring email addresses.

Ask for customer addresses
Whether customers walk into your store or visit you online, make it a practice to ask for their email addresses. Include email address fields in web pages where other customer data is collected. In fact, supplying an email address should be the de-facto requirement necessary for your customers to conduct business with you online.

At your brick and mortar business, put a sign up sheet on the counter where customers can get discounts, special offers and new product announcements when they leave their email addresses with you.

Create a customer newsletter
One of the best ways to collect addresses is to put out an informative newsletter that offers value to your subscribers on a regular basis. Customers who come to your website are looking for information in your area of expertise. Sending informative industry updates or the scoop on the latest technology is a popular way to accumulate addresses.

If the quality of the newsletter content has value, the email has a good chance of being passed around to other individuals who otherwise may have never heard of you. A good email newsletter has a high viral marketing component to it, increasing its ability to attract new visitors and thus new subscribers.

Append existing addresses
A good way to build an email list is to append the email address to other customer information collected in the past. Commonly, a brick and mortar business that moves online already has a list of customer names and addresses, but may not have their email addresses. There are companies that perform email append services where they will attempt to find a known email address to associate with the other information already gathered.

Buy a list
This option offers the most risk to your email reputation; plenty of time and care must be used in researching the list broker. There are many email harvesters who collect addresses and sell them on the cheap to spammers, these lists must be avoided at all cost. Look for a targeted list that highly qualifies their leads, confirms addresses inclusion, and uses a clear statement on what the person subscribing can expect.

When shopping for a list, it is best to find one that is closely related to the industry niche your business covers. Once you buy a list, you can use it however you deem fit for your email marketing campaigns.

Rent a list
Like the purchased list, a third party collects rented lists. Rented lists are typically only available for a specified, one-off campaign agreed to by you and the list broker. Again, it is imperative to go with a reputable list broker when using a rented list. They will have email addresses seeded throughout the list to ensure that the address is not being sent anything outside the agreed email campaign.

It is possible to invite people on a rented list to sign up for future email marketing correspondence, thus turning a rented list into an in-house list.

In all cases, a clear email policy with a description of how the email address may or may not be used is vital. Conforming to the federal CAN-SPAM Act is imperative, and this includes honoring unsubscribe requests within 10 days and making sure a physical address is present in the outbound messages.

While not required by the CAN-SPAM law, the best way to accumulate quality email addresses is to confirm their inclusion to the list. When someone signs up initially, a confirmation email is sent to the subscriber, who must then take additional action to confirm that they really want the information offered. This helps prevent people from being maliciously signed up for emails they never intended.

With your opt-in list in place, it is time to start using the information gathered to take advantage of the high return on investment email marketing delivers. Keep the email list clean of failed emails, honor unsubscribe requests as soon as they come in, and the benefits of email marketing will be realized in no time at all. –Arial Software

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