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Audience Development Strategy

How to Build Email Marketing Lists Using 4 Hidden Assets

You may be sitting on four significant hidden assets that you can use to build your email marketing lists quickly

Do you realize that you might be sitting on a few opportunities to increase your email marketing lists? In the investment world, hidden assets are considered those that don’t show up on a balance sheet. Real estate, for example, is a hidden asset of some companies that can be worth millions if they own the property they operate on.

Publishers have hidden assets, too. Besides following our best practices for email capture, there are other ways to grow your email list—sometimes very quickly!

Build Email Marketing Lists with Newsletter Exchanges

When you arrange email exchanges with aligned partners, you can instantly grow your email list with qualified names—the benefits are powerful and compelling. Email exchanges are quick email-list-builders for you while being inexpensive (just the direct email-sending cost of reciprocating an email exchange when you email your own list) and low risk—a great way to reach like-minded demographic audience segments with your offers.

Email exchanges are easy to execute and are powerful “endorsements”—with aligned partners sending your offers to their email list, you get an implied endorsement that helps boost response to your offer.

Build Email Marketing Lists with Postal Addresses

Do you have customers’ postal addresses, but not their email addresses? Print publishers with old but loyal lists of magazine subscribers have found great success in email appending—taking known customer data (first name, last name, and postal address) and matching it against a vendor’s database to obtain email addresses.

What companies like MelissaData or AccurateAppend will do is take your list of print subscribers and mine the web to fill in any missing field of your subscriber profiles—namely their email address. Once you have the email addresses in hand, the users can then be on-boarded onto your email marketing list. This strategy is so successful that our publishing partners who have done it have seen the 20 cents per name turn into $50 per name in revenue generated. If you have a database of postal addresses, use them! If you’re sitting on a big database of postal subscribers, including both actives and expires, they can be appended. The append system will dwarf anything a system—even the best-practice conversion architecture in a Mequoda System—can do.

Build Email Marketing Lists with In-House Email Lists

Does your company have other divisions or projects that maintain their own email lists? Use them! The users from these lists can be onboarded and become a part of your email marketing list. They will then receive all of your communications and promotions, and could become engaged users and even paid subscribers—all for the minimal effort spent obtaining the list asset.

Build Email Marketing Lists with Events

Do you conduct in-person events? Do you ensure that you capture attendees’ email addresses, either during event registration or at the event itself? Live events are a major opportunity to expand your audience and generate revenue when you use the registrant information to add new constituents to your list. These event attendees have already shown themselves to be interested and engaged in your organization and mission, and they may prove to be very profitable additions to your email marketing list.

Bonus: Want to create an asset for list-building?

You may not have a hidden asset yet, but consider all of your offer abandons. To maximize the new email addresses you get from your paid order flows, don’t ask for the credit card until you’ve got their delivery information, including their email address and permission to use it. Capture their delivery information and then have them click a “continue” button that brings them to a second page where you ask for their credit card information. About 90 to 95% of the folks that complete the delivery information page will not complete the order. This means you’ll get about nine email addresses associated with abandoned orders for every email address that accompanies a paid order.

Not only will this help you build your email file, it also represents a great opportunity to send an abandoned recovery marketing series to the nine folks that didn’t quite finish placing the order. One of our publishing partners converts an additional two orders from those nine abandons in the first 90 days of the relationship.

These are just a few tried and proven methods that we have found to very quickly add to your subscriber base. This does not mean that these are the only avenues for acquiring email addresses. If you have any ideas on other potential opportunities to expand your subscriber base, please leave a comment below.

If you already have assets in your possession and are looking to build your email marketing lists to increase your audience, revenue, and profits with Mequoda Broadcast Services, schedule a call with a member of our team.

By Don Nicholas

Founder & Executive Publisher

Don Nicholas serves as Executive Publisher for Food Gardening Network and GreenPrints. He is responsible for all creative, technical, and financial aspects of these multiplatform brands. As senior member of the editorial team, he provides structural guidance, sets standards, and coordinates activities with the technology and business teams. Don is an active gardener whose favorite crops include tomatoes, basil, blueberries, and corn. He and his wife Gail live and work in southern Massachusetts surrounded by forests, family farms, cranberry bogs, and nearby beaches. Don is also the Founder of Mequoda Systems, LLC, which operates and supports numerous online communities including I Like Crochet, I Like Knitting, and We Like Sewing.

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