Ways to create your email list

Creating a list of your potential clients and keep expanding it, is the most important email marketing strategy you can use, to bring in more visitors to your site and increase your sales.

It's simple! If you don't have many addresses to send your mails to, then your online business won't be successful.

So, what can email marketers do to expand their mailing list?


According to my research, email marketers have 3 options:

1. buy email lists
2. rent email lists
3. create opt-in email lists or house lists

1. Buy email lists

There are many companies out there that make money by offering email marketers, and especially new marketers, a “shortcut” to build their own mailing lists.

Buying email lists is not a good idea, as there’s no guarantee that the company you choose got their addresses legitimately. There are plenty of unethical companies that look at the cookies on web sites or buy lists from people who obtain email addresses, and chances are that your ISP could ban you from their service.

A real world example is Javelin, a marketing/consultancy firm in the financial advising sector, that bought such an email list of supposed financial advisors and didn't have the desired results.

Upon emailing to 100,000 of the records, 85,000+ bounced, clogged up the mail server and also got them fired by our web-based email provider.

 
But, even if the company you choose has true opt-in lists, they have probably sold these same email addresses out over and over again.



2. Rent email lists

A different practise of building your mailing list, is called list rental. With list rental, you hand over your content to another person, that emails it to his/her list on your behalf. That's a little bit confusing, because subscribers receive emails with subjects they wouldn't expect, and many times they don't even open them.

In the following graph, as you can see only 12% of marketers voted for"rent lists" as a marketing tactic that has a great return, compared to 45% for house lists.

                              Presented here



3. Opt-in email lists

As shown in the graph above, there is a much better way to grow your list and market your business than list rental. I am talking about opt-in email lists or so called house lists, which are made up of people who ask you to send them information, having this way a guaranteed target audience and more possibilities to increase your sales.

For better results you can use confirmed opt-in to weed out those who signed up just for the incentive.



What do you think

So, what do you think? Would you buy a list with no guaranteed target audience or pay to  have a sponsored message sent on your behalf to another brand’s subscribers? Have you ever done so? What was your experience?

I am glad to hear your opinion!

How to code HTML email newsletters

Email marketing is a highly effective tool that helps you build strong customer relationships, using attractive and professionally designed newsletters.

Html newsletters are visually much more appealing, can track users' email opens, clicks and forwards and remind more of a website.

Despite these advantages, coding a newsletter in html can be a pain for a programmer. And that's because there are so many different email tools, from desktop softaware such as Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, Lotus, AOL, to webmail clients such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo. Gmail is the most restrictive one, so if your newsletter looks good in Gmail, it will probably look good to the other programs (most of them).

All these software tools can display the same email in a different way, because every email client has a different way of rendering the code, each with its own unique bugs, quirks, and methods for handling CSS.

Here I will present you some useful tips you have to take into account, when you start coding your html newsletter. These tips are from my own experience and my research on the Internet about this subject.


Dos and Don'ts

• First of all, your html has to be simple with limited use of css, beacause as mentioned above email programs use different HTML rendering engines  

• Use tables instead of divs for the layout of your html newsletter

• Use inline css styles to have control of colors, fonts, margins. Linked and Imported style sheets are not supported in the large majority of mailreaders. Most webmail browsers truncate/chop off the header.

• You have to specify the font, font color and the font size for all the text and links in every table cell. If you don’t specify a style, then most webmail clients will use their own style sheets.

• Don't use tag attributes on the body tag. Try using a div and apply inline styles to it.

• Don't use javascript, because your newsletter may be marked as spam.

• Upload your images to a web server and use absolute positions 

• Use width and height parameters for your images

• Avoid using background images, because it is not supported in most programs 

• The width of your html newsletter should be between 600px - 700px. Use fixed width for the template, by declaring width, cellpadding, and cellspacing for all tables and table cells.

• Before sending the html template to your client, TEST it. Use many different programs to see how the newsletter displays in them.

Useful links

Here are some links with guides to CSS support in different email programs.

1. http://www.email-standards.org/
2. http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css/

What comes next 

Usually, I use a single-column or a two column layout for my newsletters, both of them having a header, a footer and the main body. I am planning to post soon the approach that I use to create HTML emails.