There’s always a lot of debate about how to best build your email marketing contact lists. SPAM Act guidelines steer companies away from buying lists more often than not, so organic growth becomes the go-to option. That being said, organically growing an email list can be a long, arduous task based on networking events, cold calls and intake from sales’ teams. To begin an effective email marketing plan, companies need to find the fastest, most SPAM compliant way to bulk up their contact list.
Focus on Interaction to Build More Reach
Sound redundant? Social Media Marketing offers a highly-interactive forum to promote your company’s email marketing plan and extend your brand reach. By building awareness about the unique and informative content offered in your email newsletters, your growing social media network has the potential to opt in for your news, with little effort on your part.
Consistency is Key
To effectively build interest about your email marketing plan via Social Media, you need to post your news to all your pages and profiles, with each send out. Post to your Facebook and LinkedIn status with your most interesting headline from your recent news or tweet your latest newsletter, and don’t forget to include a link where you can. Try and time your news on a consistent and expected schedule so any prospects that may have missed the last issue have the chance to catch the next one, or even better, tweet and post about upcoming news to build anticipation and increase registrations.
- Tip: Be sure to keep your news headlines engaging but not SPAM-like. There’s no need to call “FIRE SALE!” but saying “Everything Must Go” would draw some attention.
Oh Wait, Relevancy is Key Too
As anyone engaged in email marketing will tell you, a consistently growing email marketing plan is built from relevant content that is targeted to the recipients on the list. People receive so much email these days that content that is not specific and unique, as well as important to the contacts, will fall prey to the delete button, and if that happens often enough, “Unsubscribe” is only one click behind.
Be Accessible, and Oh yeah, Give Them an Incentive
Make access to your email marketing subscription easy for your prospective contacts. With the news iFrame page options for Facebook FAN pages, companies have the ability to not only share snippets of their email content, but to offer a subscription link to readers. Share the news on Twitter with each email send out with links to the newsletter content, and then share that tweet with your LinkedIn contacts.
- Tip: Offer some free content for signing up via your Social Media sites, a downloadable, discount or other bonus that will further entice your contacts to join your list.
Email marketing can be a powerful tool, and when integrating your Social Media Marketing pages and profiles to build your contact list, you can speed up the contact list building process exponentially and within SPAM boundaries.