How To Grow An Email Mailing List – with Justin Premick

Justin Premick, aweber, Customer Acquisition, Marketing

When you signed up for Facebook or Twitter, did you start using it right away? Or were you like me and only started becoming an active user after getting a few emails for the company to remind you that you have an account and helping you get acquainted with it?

I’ve noticed that many of the most successful online companies–and many wellknown bloggers–understand how to use email well. To learn what they know, I interviewed Justin Premick, a teacher at aweber, an email software company.

Justin Premick

aweber

Justin Premick is the Director of Educational Products for aweber, an opt-in email marketing sevice.

A few lessons from this program

Here’s some of what I learned about growing a mailing list:

Understand why: Most people don’t understand the power of email marketing so they don’t make growing their list a priority. If you have a good mailing list, you can ensure that you’ll reach your audience–if you don’t, you never know if a user liked your site but never came because because he forgot about it.

I don’t even see it! One reason that users don’t join mailing lists is that they don’t even see where the registration process is. During our interview, Justin and I went hunting for the email registration form on a company’s web site and we couldn’t find it.

“Why should I?” Most people don’t say, “I want more email.” They say, “why should I register?” So you have to give them an incentive to join your list. When Justin looked at my site, he said I didn’t give people enough of an incentive to register and suggested I offer special interviews just to people who register.

Location, location, location: Justin told me that one thing successful list growers do is put their registration processes in multiple locations.

Do you know any other ways to grow a mailing list?