Effective email list management depends heavily on your ability to keep bringing in subscribers. You can expect an average yearly churn rate (that’s industry jargon for unsubscribe) upwards of 30 percent. This means that if you have 1000 bulk email list subscribers, you stand a chance of losing 300 of them every year. In order for your pursuit to not become a lost cause in exactly 3.3 years, you’ve got to do everything you can to keep new people subscribing.
One of the ways to do this is by earning their trust. The last thing you want to do is scare the living daylights out of every visitor to your opt-in page by asking them for information they only share with their doctor or priest. Start by determining what information is absolutely necessary to capture. Most organizations only bulk email list subscribers to provide three things:
1. Their email address, of course!
2. First and last name. Though you may encounter some reluctance, this requirement has become par for the course and it is best to capture this information.
3. Their email format preference. This is where your subscriber gets to decide if they want your email messages to come through in plain text or HTML.
And that’s it. For good measure, here are some things you should never ask your email subscribers to provide:
1. Home address. No one wants to risk having their physical address sold to a junk mail distributor.
2. Credit card information. What would you do with it, anyway?
3. Race, ethnicity, or religious affiliations. Who are you, the Census Bureau? Don’t even think about it.
4. Personal details about their children, in particular those under the age of 12.
In the end, you should only be asking for relevant information, and data that can help you gauge the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. But in order to give your customers the respect they deserve, be transparent in your information gathering. If you’d like to know their age, be up front with them and let them know that the information will be useful to your determining your target demographics. As always, ensure that the information you collect won’t be shared with anyone else.