How to Build Your E-Zine List

Permission to send e-mail newsletters to a consumer needs to be proactive and voluntary. The only correct way to get permission is by having people sign up with the understanding that they want to receive e-mail from you.

The five levels of permission, from worst to best for consumers, are:

1. Opt-out: You obtain an e-mail address for a consumer (it doesn’t matter how) and begin e-mailing that consumer, allowing him to e-mail or click to opt out of future mailings from you. Obviously, you can end up with huge amounts of subscribers this way, and there are ways to be an opt-out mailer and still be CAN-SPAM compliant, but this is the lowest form of permission, since one could argue it doesn’t actually involve permission! While opt-out mailings will certainly drive some sales, in almost all circumstances, we think it’s too close to spam to be advisable.

2. Negative Opt-in: Here, you offer consumers an e-mail subscribe form, usually as part of an order form of some other kind, and you place a pre-checked box for an agreement to receive e-mails. The person must uncheck it in order not to receive the newsletter. Negative opt-in will get you more subscribers, but it also may leave you with more angry customers who don’t realize they “agreed” to receive e-mails from you, think they’re being spammed, harbor bad feelings about your products and brand, and usually will unsubscribe, anyway. Those who feel abused by this process certainly are not buying anything from you.

3. Opt-in: A subscriber must proactively check a box in order to receive your newsletter. Opt-in is the most common form of subscription because it is voluntary on the part of the subscriber and it keeps things simple.

4. Confirmed Opt-in: A subscriber opts in to your newsletter and then receives an e-mail message from you confirming their subscription and offering them the option to immediately unsubscribe if the subscription was in any way a mistake. This level of permission increases the value of your list and protects you to some extent against charges of spamming. It also increases the deliverability of the list, since bad addresses will generate immediate bounces to the confirmation mailing and never get on the list.

5. Double Opt-in (sometimes referred to as verified opt-in): In this scenario, someone subscribes to your e-mail list, and then receives an e-mail message from you to which they must reply in order to officially be on your list. This is the gold standard for permission, as consumers essentially have to subscribe to your list twice in order to get on it (so they really, really want your e-mails!). However, you do run the risk of losing subscribers who don’t realize they need to send you another message to actually get on your list. You can take steps to minimize this risk by sending the confirmation e-mail immediately, and by messaging to the consumer on the web page following the subscription to remind him to go check his e-mail and confirm, but we’ve never seen a double opt-in rate higher than 80% of subscribers, and many come in closer to 60%.

Which is best for your program?

We believe there is absolutely no reason to have anything less than a confirmed opt-in standard for your newsletter. In our experience, opt-out and negative opt-in lists, while large, perform poorly and generate complaints that lead to blocking and filtering. If you’re going to have an opt-in list, there’s no reason not to make it confirmed opt-in to take an extra step to improve customer service and deliverability and prevent fraudulent subscriptions (we’ll talk more about sending welcome messages later). Many mailers find that the higher hurdle for double opt-in is worth it in terms of producing an even more responsive list — we think it depends on what kind of newsletter you have and what you’re trying to achieve with it whether confirmed opt-in or double opt-in is right for you.

Ways to Build Your List

There are many ways to build a huge list of e-mail addresses of people who are interested in your company, its products, or services, and are willing to give you permission to send e-mails. These ways can be placed into two broad categories:

1. Organic Capture: Non-paid means to inspire people to provide their e-mail addresses

2. Paid Acquisition: Gaining addresses through advertising, list rental, partnerships, and more

Leveraging Organic Capture to Build Your List

What could be better than building a good mailing list without having to put out critical marketing dollars? You’d be hard-pressed to find a marketer who wouldn’t be interested in a no-cost, yet high-quality method of building an e-mail list. This is the whole premise behind organic capture: using methods and mechanisms that you already have in place to create or grow your e-mail address list. Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Best of all, when you employ organic methods, you will almost definitely build a list that is more accurate and targeted than one you might rent or purchase. Even better, there are many ways to do it. We’ll go over some of the most effective techniques we’ve seen, but as you read, you’ll find that gathering e-mails organically should become more than an exercise, it should become a part of your marketing lifestyle.

Using Your Web Site to Build Your List

Making e-mail collection a priority means giving it prominence throughout the design of your web site. A call to sign-up for your newsletter must be prominent on every single page of your site. Remember that most visitors are there to browse and learn more about your company and products. Entice these browsers to engage with your company. No one should leave your site without leaving behind his or her e-mail address. The success of your site should be measured by its ability to capture e-mails, not just hits or sales.

Start with the home page. A prompt or link encouraging a reader to sign-up should be in the top half of the screen as well as in multiple locations throughout the page. If visitors have to scroll or search to find the sign-up form, you will earn a much lower capture rate. Take special care to craft a compelling offer — visibility is only half the battle. Your sign-up invitation must also entice and persuade.

But don’t stop there. People may come to a page on your site through the side door, so to speak. Web searching is non-linear, meaning people do not always enter your site through the home page. A search engine link may land the reader on any of the pages on your site. They may never even see the home page. Therefore, you must have prompts for e-mail sign-up prominently displayed on every page of your site. Even if you have a site that most users do visit from top to bottom, having a sign-up form on every page is still important to make sure that at any time in a user’s brief visit to your site, an e-mail subscribe form is visible, or at least on the same page. And a link to a “newsletter subscription” page doesn’t do the job nearly as well as a live form on the page itself.