How to Win New Subscribers: Online and Offline – Email Marketing for Beginners 1
No Newsletter Campaign Without a Recipient List – How to Successfully Collect Addresses for Your Mailings
In newsletter marketing, your recipient list is everything. There’s no newsletter campaign without a list of recipients! To start your email marketing with CleverReach, it’s therefore first and foremost essential to collect address data. Here’s how to collect recipient data and at the same time fulfill all legal requirements!
How do I get a GDPR-compliant recipient list?
There’s more to a recipient list you can use for sending your newsletters than just a large number of email addresses. For legally secure and GDPR-compliant newsletter marketing, recipients must have expressly agreed to receive your newsletter. The solution: “Double-Opt-In”, in short DOI. After a potential subscriber has signed up, they receive an email with a confirmation link. The final newsletter registration will only take place after a click on this link. Double-Opt-In ensures that no third party can randomly or accidentally subscribe someone to a newsletter.
How and where can customers sign up for my newsletter?
There’s no need to ask: It’s best to place a signup form for your newsletter directly on your homepage, right? Or wait… are there any other options? Think about the touchpoints you have with your customers. Do your customers visit your website, your online shop or do you contact them by email? Are there other ways you haven’t thought about yet? Do you meet your customers in person, e.g. in your shop, workshop or restaurant? All these are perfect touchpoints for customers to sign up for your newsletter.
Your homepage
Of course your homepage is the most obvious way to place a form for your newsletter subscription. With CleverReach, you can create a GDPR-compliant registration form very easily and without programming skills via our form function – the configuration is self-explanatory. They’re all Double-Opt-in forms as this is legally required in many countries. Once your registration is configured, copy the automatically generated source code and paste it into your homepage.
Other ways to sign up online
You can place our newsletter registration forms not only on your company website, but also elsewhere – for example in the email boilerplates of your employees and on your social media pages.
„Real-life“ newsletter subscription – offline
There are also attractive and legally compliant ways for subscribers to sign up for your newsletter offline. You have a store? Use the wonderful atmosphere in your shop and your customers‘ positive shopping experience to ask them for their email address. Increase your success by combining a newsletter subscription with a discount for new subscribers. There are two ways of collecting GDPR-compliant addresses:
- Your customers sign up via a tablet you place in your store, classically via DOI signup form and confirmation email.
- You lay out a bound book in which the customer enters their data in handwriting. With this option, you should include a printed copy of your privacy policy explaining to the customer what their address is used for (and what it is not used for).
Be careful: When manually adding the address data to your recipient database, you need to really focus – just one little typo leads to undeliverability.
Importing recipient data
If you already have email data stored in a database, you can easily import it into our system: Our software supports all common data formats such as CSV, XLS, XLSX or TXT. Our system filters out duplicate addresses and incorrect data records. When importing your data, additional information is also transmitted if you know more about your customers than just their email address, for example age, gender, place of residence, interests, etc. Use this information to create personalized newsletters. Or enter address details manually. All you need for your recipient list is your recipient’s email address. Add additional information to the data records at a later date.
What makes people subscribe to a newsletter?
Just ask yourself the question under which conditions you decide to give out your email address and subscribe to a mailing list. Probably among the following:
A well-placed signup form
Theoretically, you can place your signup form anywhere on your homepage. It makes a lot of sense though, to place a signup form where customers are already providing their data, for example when registering for your website or placing an order in your shop. Keep in mind: a newsletter registration form is often placed in the footer, less often in the header and in the sidebar.
A subscription offers incentives
The greatest incentive for subscribing to a newsletter is helpful and gripping content that your customers are craving for. In addition, it doesn’t hurt to lure potential newsletter subscribers with goodies! For example, exclusive offers, vouchers, free shipping, a reminder service etc. – list the corresponding advantages clearly and unambiguously.
Get started with your recipient list
Now get started and win many enthusiastic newsletter subscribers with our tips. Stay curious for part 2 where we’ll explain how to quickly create appealing emails using email templates in our drag and drop editor.
Email marketing for beginners: Getting started with CleverReach
Email marketing continues to be the most important tool for addressing customers – and can initially seem somewhat unmanageable for newcomers. What should you look out for when starting out? In our four-part series, we explain everything newcomers want to know about newsletter marketing:
- Part 2: Create Your First Newsletter with Free Templates
- Part 3: How to Optimize Your Newsletter Before Sending it
- Part 4: The Key Figures of Your Newsletter Reporting
