5 Opt-In Best Practices For Any Email Marketer

Ensure your subscribers say yes the right way

A recent report found that email marketing is still one of the top marketing channels, according to both marketers and consumers. Its ROI is the highest for any online marketing path, and it can offer better rewards than most offline marketing channels.

The effectiveness of your marketing depends on the quality of your list. The better the match of the mailing list to your target audience, the greater the effectiveness of your campaigns. Likewise, how you sign subscribers up to your list can make the difference between conversion or not.

The opt-in process can be challenging. There are legal restrictions to consider as well as how your subscribers might react. Here are five best practices to help you create the perfect process.

1. Give The Audience A Choice Of Email Frequency

In the recent report from Marketing Sherpa, the survey found that customers prefer to set the frequency at which they receive emails from the brand. Therefore, by offering your subscribers a chance to determine how often you contact them, you can get your relationship off to a good start.

The top options to offer could be weekly, fortnightly, and monthly. While you might think that this stifles your marketing efforts; using segmentation could automatically reduce the number of emails sent to an individual subscriber that complies with their request.

2. Confirm Subscription

This is a legal practice in most countries – but not all. When someone enters their details on a sign-up form, send an immediate email to confirm their subscription. The new subscriber will then need to click on a link to confirm their subscription.

In the United States, this is a legal requirement. While it is not a strict requirement under UK, Canadian or Australian law – it is highly recommended in all countries. It does also provide you with some protection. These countries have strict anti-spam laws, and double opt-in provides you with evidence that the subscriber had intentionally subscribed, and it wasn’t entered by a robot or another person.

3. Collect The Right Amount Of Information

The more information you collect from subscribers, the better you can segment your email list and send relevant emails, and the easier it is to maintain your list.

In contrast, the more information you request – the fewer new subscribers you’ll attract to your list. Consider what information you really need and what information you could collect from your audience through your email marketing campaigns.

For instance, you could collect a name and email address and then ask subscribers to provide more details further down the line, or, monitor their behaviour to collect further information.

4. Provide Value To Your Opt-in

To increase the number of new subscribers, you should entice your audience with an offer. Free ebooks, discount codes and other freebies are the perfect gifts to attract new signups if the offer has value to the audience.

Don’t give away your freebie too easily either. And don’t use a pop-up that will give them access as soon as they’ve signed up. Instead, wait until after they’ve confirmed their subscription via double opt-in and then send their reward via another email.

5. Don’t Use A Pop-up

From January 2017, Google will introduce an algorithm change in their search engine that gives a negative rating for any pop-ups that aren’t required by law. The target is pop-ups suggesting the audience subscribe to a mailing list.

Therefore, using landing pages for offers is going to be the better option when generating subscribers and will enable you to still rank highly on Google search results. If people can’t find you – they can’t subscribe.

Conclusion

Email marketing is one of the best channels to sell to your audience. It helps you build trust and give relevant offers to list members. To get the most out of your marketing campaigns, you need to have the best quality lists, and this starts with your opt-in process.

Using the tips above you can start to manage your business’ email opt-in process and acquire a better marketing list to help you grow your revenue.

What are your email list opt-in tips?

Let us know in the comments below.

Tagged in: email opt-in, opt-in offers, opt-in protocols