Live Blogging: MarketingSherpa Email Summit - More on List Building

Richard from the MarketingSherpa Email Summit:

In my first post from the Email Summit, I mentioned that Marketing Experiments had said achieving success in getting someone to take action with your marketing (be it at the point of sign-up, clicking a link in an email, or making a purchase on your site) relies on ensuring your relevance, offer and incentives out weigh the friction and anxiety generated by your marketing. But what does that mean exactly? 

Let’s look at how each of these elements applies to a mailing list sign-up form:

Relevance

The relevance of your form relates to how compatible your emails are to what your potential subscribers are looking for.  If you’re sending out emails to farmers with information on tractors, this would not, for a very obvious example, be relevant to a college student looking to buy a pair of shoes.  Know what your audience is looking for and make it clear that what you’re offering in your emails will provide a match (and ensure then that your emails actually match what you’ve then said). 

Offer

The offer of your sign-up is the value you’re providing through the emails you’ll send following that sign-up.  You should very clearly state this offer and, again, try to make sure the message is relevant to what your potential subscribers are looking for. 
For our own mailing list we state “Get tips, tricks, and insider marketing secrets delivered right to your inbox twice per month.”  This gets straight to the point, telling a potential subscriber exactly what they’re getting and how often they’re going to get it.

Incentive

The incentive is an element that’s been added to make a sign-up more appealing.  This can be as simple as offering to enter the potential subscriber into a monthly drawing.  Incentive isn’t really necessary if your offer is strong enough to overcome any friction and anxiety on its own.

Friction

Friction is caused by psychological resistance to some element of your sign-up process.  This can be caused by confusion generated by a difficult to find form or poorly explaining what you’re offering as part of the sign-up.  It can also be caused by forms that are too long, which are somewhat daunting to fill out.  A form should be easy to find, have a good explanation for why someone would want to sign-up and look like it’ll be easy to fill out.  To look at our own sign-up form as an example - we only ask for email address in order for someone to join our mailing list, and we only ask for a few more pieces of information to allow someone to open a free account.

Anxiety

Anxiety is caused by a psychological concern about your sign-up process.  There doesn’t necessarily need to be a truly valid reason for the anxiety to be there - it's all about perception.  A reason someone might have anxiety about your sign-up process is if you ask for information that seems too personal and perhaps unnecessary for an email subscription (like phone number or postal address).  If you need this info, provide a short and honest explanation as to why during the sign-up.

That’s it for day 1 of the conference.  I’m going to go drink some wine and eat alligator fajitas now!

Comments

[E-consultancy]

I think it's also important to undertake regular list cleansing once you've captured email addresses, as E-consultancy's recent email census showed that a fifth of email marketers fail to incorporate any list cleansing at all.

Email marketers need to target users with relevant messages from an accurate database. Without clean, complete and accurate data, you can never be relevant and targeted, despite best intentions.

There's more information about the report here:
http://www.e-consultancy.com/publications/email-marketing-census-2008/

[Listbuilding]

Never seen anything like this on list building. Well thanks for sharing.