Growing Opt-in List:
Pay-per-click", search marketing, website SEO optimization, business owners are investing more money than ever driving traffic to their Web sites in the hope of generating sales. According to Jupiter Research the number of people shopping online is well over 64 million and increasing at a rate of 10 per cent every year. More broadly, that translates into 17 plus billion dollars up for grabs during the holiday months of November and December alone.
It is no wonder business owners are scrambling to gain competitive traction, by utilizing loyalty building email marketing tactics to capture these visitors, and communicate with them in an ongoing revenue-producing way.
An Intelliseek survey by Forrester Research on US consumers trust or distrust by type of advertising, found that roughly two-thirds of respondents said they trusted emails they signed up for. This confirms what many industry experts have known all along, growing an opt-in list is extremely important. Email marketing is a powerful relationship building tool. So how does an organization implement a successful email loyalty program?
As in all email marketing endeavors, it starts with growing an opt-in list. The foundation of any successfully email program begins with a healthy database of customers and contacts that have granted permission to actively message them at a personal level. Without one, the handsome rewards of a successfully targeted email campaign are unattainable.
According to a new study on World wide email messaging by the market research firm IDC, daily email traffic is now estimated at 60 billion. Hence, it is not hard to understand why the immediate priority for online marketers is to find relevant email addresses to communicate to and ultimately fulfill the great promise of email marketing turning browsers into buyers.
Without question, the easiest way to find relevant email addresses is to ask every consumer who visits your Web site for theirs. Simple enough, but most sites do not generate enough online traffic to drive a high volume of opt-ins. And without a sufficient volume of site traffic to capture elusive opt-in addresses to drive strong relationships between buyer and seller; business owners will lose valuable market share faster than it takes the deliverability status on an unsolicited email to bounce. So what can marketers do to generate site traffic?
Channel surf
Start by using as many channels out there as possible to drive online interests and grow an opt-in list company database. A marketers' push and pull tactics can range from one, many or all of the channels listed to help create a steady flow of site traffic.
The data below illustrates different inbound channels available to online marketers and how effective each channel is at generating growth in opt-in lists.
Assuming a marketer's strategy of "reaching out" to use as many channels as possible to generate a steady flow of site traffic is successful, what next? How do marketers take the next step to capture just the right data and grow a list into an email database of loyal opt-ins that: will consistently attract interest in, build desire for, and ultimately generate repeat sales of your company services.
Best practices to success
Using a combination of easy-to-execute best practice list building methods to capture anonymous visitor site data and grow a opt-in list database, produces the highest percentage of positive results.
1. Prominent call to register With the optimization of search engines driving traffic deeper into Web sites and bypassing home pages altogether in the process, it's become more and more important that marketers make the most of capturing and collecting the anonymous visitor site data they have invested all that time and money to generate.
A survey by JupiterResearch on how US marketing executives capture consumer addresses, found that 60 per cent of all opt-ins came from the online registration process.
It is surprising how many companies do not take the simple step of prominently positioning opt-in requests to capture prospect data, or include email registration requests at every customer interaction point on their Web site. So never limit opt-in requests to only the home page of a Web site.
