I already bragged about what our company does and in which fields we can jump in and take the weight off your shoulders, now lets go into the practical advice part. To be more precise, we are kicking of the guidelines part of the series, starting with the most important part of email marketing: the List.
Lets face it, without subscribers there is simply no email marketing. You can make the best looking, the most engaging, and the cleanest filter-wise message there is, but without anyone to send it to it will still accomplish nothing.
Most of you probably already have some kind of list that you already collected, this also needs upkeep from you to make sure it’s still good, but we will talk about it in my next post. For now lets just assume that you are just starting out and try to get your first subscribers, or you simply want to expand your list trying to add new people to it (always a good idea).
Let me also add that this article is written from the Compliance worker point of view. There will be no tip on what layout and colors that catch the eye or any of other marketing typical lingo. There is a lot of good tutorials out there that cover this part of the issue.
I am focusing on the general dos and don’ts to help you earn your subscribers trust and keep the happy from the very beginning, which will also keep you away from the Compliances’ cold and all-seeing eye 
Online Subscriptions
The easiest way to get new subscriptions is through your website with the use of either a registration form or newsletter subscription form (or maybe both). While doing that you should remember about a few things:
1. Claim your web-form and be open about what it is for
Your relationship with a subscriber starts right here: the web-form. You need to remember to start out on the right foot, so what is the natural thing you do when you meet someone? You introduce yourself.
If this is a full site then that issue is basically mitigated (they already know who you are), but if it’s a landing page you need to remember to include information about yourself. And I’m not talking about some small footnote. Make it visible, make it clear. After all, you want them to trust you, they can’t trust you if they do not know who you are.
There is also no need for you to hide why you ask for their email address. Be open and honest about it. Do not be afraid to say “I would like to send you emails”, it’s much better to get it out of the way here than for them to find out later when they actually do get the message.
This is a big issue with registration forms. You know the drill, you register on a site to get access to additional content and suddenly you start getting random messages. You did not sign up for it, that is not what you wanted. It’s a spam.
Now, you certainly do not want to leave this kind of expression, so make sure that you make it clear. If it’s a newsletter subscription form – describe it as such so your visitors can’t take it as anything else. If it’s a registration form make an additional clear statement that you will send them emails, in big shining letter so they can’t miss it ;), better yet – make it an additional option (and don’t feel limited to a sad little checkbox under the form, you can be much more creative than that).
One more very important thing here: remember to give some kind of description of the content your subscribers will be getting. Don’t make it a Jack in the Box kind of thing, again you do not have any reason to do so. After all, if they came to your site that means they are looking for something and so they should have easy access to finding out if you can provide what they’re looking for.
2. Do not use it for any hidden purpose
Please take this to heart: if you try to trick your subscribers they will notice it as soon as they subscribe to your list, and they will not be happy. I’m sure you already had your share of experiences with angry customers and know how many issues they can cause. Now imagine a bunch of angry subscribers, we’re talking heavy damage to your reputation and deliverability that will take months, if not even years, to fully recover from.
To point out what do I mean by tricking subscribers, the most popular examples would be: sending content of a different nature than the one you advertised on your site and adding subscriber to multiple lists on single subscription.
As for the first example just don’t… ok? Plain and simple, there is never an excuse for doing that, you should never do that. Simply don’t.
If you want, for example, to advertise for a friend ‘s company there are much better ways to do so than just sending their content. Much better way to do so is to include it within your own content – it can be a reference in an email about your product (ie. Here is something that works great with what I have), or as an additional part of your email, but never ever as a standalone send.
Signing up to a multiple lists can also make you lose your subscriber’s trust very very fast. Imagine that you enter your email address in one web-form and suddenly you get multiple messages, what is the first thing you think? “they must have sold my email address to others”. Now that makes for a trust issue that is almost impossible to come back from.
I do realize that there is a lot of email marketers managing multiple lists with closely related products, and it’s an ideal situation to simply add one subscription. Someone can always unsubscribe from the lists if they didn’t want to end up on, right? Well, unfortunately at this time the damage is already done and if they will unsubscribe it will most probably be through a complaint – and from all lists.
Again, a simpler way to do lists is to let someone decide while they are signing up. If you manage multiple lists make the option to choose available at the web-from level. A simple check-box with a nice layout can still make for a very friendly looking web-form and spare your subscriber a surprising flood of email messages after his subscription.
3. Give your subscribers a choice
This is something I rarely see people do with it resulting in great effects. Different people like different things and while some of your subscribers will like short daily updates, others would prefer a complete weekly report. Others may have different preferences regarding the message color theme. I’m talking about small things that should be easy for you to manage through segments or campaigns.
This little trick gives your subscribers the feeling of power. Instead of being just a subscriber that is waiting patiently for the next message, they can call the shots here (at least to some degree 
). This gives them more confidence and helps them remember you better.
Now I know that this one is kind of unorthodox from a typical marketing point of view (where all web-forms should be as simple as possible), but like I wrote, this is a Compliance point of view. You can later compare and chose the option that you feel more comfortable with.
4. Keep your word
All of this above is worth nothing if you do not follow through. I can not stress this enough, if you decide on the above solutions you need to make sure that you will in fact respect people’s decision and keep your promise. That’s the difference between getting a positive or negative effect from it. You must be aware that ignoring your subscribers’ choice does not make it as if you did not ask them at all. To your subscriber it means you lied to him and that’s the easiest way to make him turn on you.
There are 2 more things I would like to touch before I wrap this up:
Offline subscriptions
I know this is a thing, especially in stores, restaurants, hotels, or any other businesses where you have direct contact with your customers. And I get it, it’s simple to just ask for an email address, write it down on a piece of paper, and then upload it. Not to mention that it’s a great way to get new subscribers.
However, speaking from my own experience this method has one very big flaw: typos. With an online subscription mechanism you have automatic validation that can check (to some degree of course) if the given address is correct. You lose that with offline subscriptions. The number of typos on these kind of lists, being it a domain or the whole address itself, is really noticeable and sometimes can even cause the list to be rejected during the import process. Not to mention that you are losing potential engaging subscribers.
There is an easy solution. These days you can get a decent and cheap tablet, and set up a subscription app that should take you no longer than 5 minutes’ work. In stead of handing a piece of paper you just hand the tablet and if anything is wrong with the email address you will know it then and there.
The tablet does not have to be good, lets face it, you will be using it for this purpose only. Or if you don’t want to invest in that you can even do it with your smartphone.
Still take my word for it, as I did handle a number of cases with offline generated lists, it is worth the fuss.
Purchased Traffic
Now again this is something I had a lot of experience with, and to be completely honest I do not advise doing that at all. But again I understand that this is a valid practice that can help you get off the ground with your business, so I’ll simply leave you with one more advice:
Be careful who are you buying your traffic from. There are companies that are using scripted bots to provide you with subscriptions, so just as you think everything is going great what you will get are fake or harvested addresses. This can do a lot of damage to your account, worse case scenario it can even cause its termination, so again please be careful.
If you do in fact want to use this kind of service do a decent background check of the company and work only with ones you can actually confirm are good. I also recommend monitoring the traffic that goes through your page and if you notice something suspicious, check it out it right away (or terminate the deal if you can’t explain it).
This will complete the first part of my guide on how you can improve your marketing from the best practices point of view. Following those tips should keep you safe and far away from any compliance monitoring tools ☺ For next week I will prepare tips on what to do with your already collected list to make sure it stays at high quality so stay tuned.
To catch up, check out Part One. Have any thoughts or personal experience? Leave us a comment below, we’d love to know how you handle your lists.
Lists, Dos and Don’ts of the List Generation Process: Deliverability Part II is a post from: GetResponse Blog - Email Marketing Tips
The post Lists, Dos and Don’ts of the List Generation Process: Deliverability Part II appeared first on GetResponse Blog - Email Marketing Tips.
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