Growing and Improving Your Mailing List via Your Website

The process used to collect addresses should include not only the registration form from the website, but also face to face or computerized collection at other points of contact between the organization and the target audience. 

Mailing lists are a very important part of how companies reach out electronically to their clients and customers. It is unnecessary to mention that the larger a mailing list is, the better it is, and indeed a large mailing list is one of the goals of companies that use email marketing. However, size is not the only important issue - the quality of the address list is equally important. The process used to collect addresses should include not only the registration form from the website, but also face to face or computerized collection at other points of contact between the organization and the target audience. In this article, we will however concentrate on the subject of registration through the website.

How to motivate people to join

The first question that needs to be asked is what benefits can we offer someone who joins our mailing list?
What added value can we give to someone who is willing to share his email address with us, especially in these days with so much junk mail (spam) flying around?
The answer can be to include important professional materials, or interesting materials (not necessarily both…), appealing marketing suggestions, or even simply amusing and refreshing content.
One thing is important to remember: as time goes by, and more spammers bombard our electronic inboxes with junk mail, it gets harder to convince people to share their email addresses.

Sign-up sheet layout / design

Whilst still in the planning stages of setting up your mailing list, you should be thinking about the general design of the mailing list you will collect. At this stage, you need answers to a number of fundamental and technical questions:
What information do you want to collect - what fields do you want to include on the registration form? A large number of mandatory fields to fill in may deter people from filling in the form, but on the other hand, it is useful to know more information about those to whom you are sending your mails.
What level of detail do you want? For example: in the address field, will you have one line or many lines (for road/ number/ city/ etc)? Will you have a drop down menu for people to choose certain things, e.g. list of cities in the city field?

Positioning of the mailing list registration on the web page

It is highly recommended to place your registration form or at least to have a box to fill in with your email address in a prominent place on your home page. "Pestering" the visitor to your website through links on the internal pages (customer club page, contact us page, etc) to join the mailing list ends up with significantly fewer people signing up.
It is recommended to post a link to your privacy policy next to the sign up box, affirming your organization's commitment to not pass their information on to any third party or use it for any unauthorized use.
If your mailing list is signing up to receive newsletters, you can add a newsletter archive. This allows the visitor to your site to peruse past editions, giving them an impression of your newsletters and their content. It would not hurt to explain in 2-3 lines about how the visitor is likely to profit if he registers for the mailing list. E.g. what benefits you offer, what information he will be likely to receive, etc. Using Double Opt In may result in fewer people registering, but will doubtlessly improve the quality of the people on the list.

Further means to grow your mailing list

• Viral marketing - everyone knows about amusing advertising, and chain letters that everyone passes on to their contacts ("because they will love it as much as I did"). If you plan on using this means to increase your mailing list, you will need to put in a lot of effort to be very creative to encourage people to pass on the message to their friends. The more people receive the message, the more people receive the opportunity to sign up. Other than this, having interesting and beneficial content in your newsletter will certainly encourage people to recommend to their friends to sign up, even without further marketing effort on your part.
• Client feedback - some organizations will add any customer who sends a request for further details through their website to their mailing list. In all marketing relations between your company and potential clients, it is recommended to refer them to your website, and to encourage registration on your mailing list.
• Cooperation - it is possible to cooperate with other companies who are not competitors, but market to a similar intended audience, and merge your mailing lists, or advertise reciprocally on each other's mailing list. This should obviously be approached gently and sensitively.
• Affiliate - you can reward your readers for referring their friends to your mailing list. It must be stressed that the getting of email addresses and updating email addresses should be a part of every organization's contact with its contacts.