How To Grow An Email Subscriber Base That Will Love To Hear From You

You want to get your sales message in front of as many prospects as possible. And growing your own mailing list can take a long time. So doesn’t it make sense to rent someone else’s list? Not so fast.

Large Investment, Little Return

Renting an email list isn’t cheap. List rental companies charge up to 30 cents a name. That may not sound like much, but it adds up quickly — even with a small list of only a few thousand subscribers.

When you rent a list, you’re paying money to send your sales message to people who don’t care about you – and might not even care about insurance. To them, your message is junk mail. They’re unlikely to open it. It’s not just a waste of your marketing dollars. It also makes your agency look bad.

If your recipients hit the “This is Spam” button, the next message you send them won’t even make it into their inbox. And if too many of them decide that your message is spam, you could get blacklisted — meaning that Internet Service Providers could decide to block every message you try to send to their customers. How effective would your email marketing be if suddenly you couldn’t reach anyone with a AOL, Yahoo! or Hotmail address?

Remember, the only prospects that matter are qualified prospects — the ones who are interested in buying insurance. When you rent a list, you’re sending to people with no interest. Will it generate a few leads? It might. Will it cost you a huge chunk of change? You’d better believe it. With rented lists, the cost per name is small. But the cost per lead can be enormous.

Building Your Own

Building your own list takes time, but it’s completely doable. And your list will be worth a lot more than a rented list. The people on yours are qualified prospects that you have a relationship with.

You build your list by encouraging prospects to opt-in to receive your marketing message. They are expressing interest in your agency, and giving you permission to market to them. When your email shows up in their inbox, it is greeted with name recognition and interest. Its chances of being opened go way up.

How do you encourage opt-ins?

Make it obvious. Put a link to your opt-in form on every page on your site. You’ll probably get better results from a stylized graphic link than from a plain “Join Our Mailing List” link.

Make it simple. Your opt-in form should ask for as little information as possible to start the relationship. It’s tempting to ask for their address, their phone number, and their spouse’s name. But people hate long forms — and they really hate giving out their phone number.

To start communicating by email, all you need is their email address. Getting their name lets you personalize the message. A zip code let’s you sort prospects by geography. That’s all you need to get started. You can ask for more information later, as your relationship grows.

Give Them Something For Signing Up. To encourage people to opt-in, give them something of value. Free papers or reports are a popular way to do this. For example, your opt-in page could offer a free guide for insurance shoppers. To get the free guide, the prospect provides their email address. You can send the link for the download directly to their inbox.

Managing Your List

As your list grows, you’re going to see drop-offs and undeliverable mail. People change addresses and don’t bother to opt-in again. People enter wrong information into your form — intentionally or not. And some people will lose interest, and click the “Unsubscribe” link in your message (yes, ALL your marketing emails need to have an Unsubscribe link).

To compensate for the drop-offs, keep your list growing. Encourage your recipients to forward the message to their friends. Test different strategies on your website to encourage opt-ins. If you’re buying internet leads, add them to your mailing list as they come in.

Sending junk mail is easy — but it won’t help your agency. Building your own list will bring you much greater returns. You could be sending unwanted junk. Or you could be sending meaningful communication that turns prospects into clients.

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