According to industry research, around 22.5% of your email list becomes out of date every year[1]. While this is a business-to-business-biased statistic it's still relevant in a business-to-consumer context. A pro-active approach is needed to maintain a fresh list, if you want your email marketing game to remain on point. Of course, you’ll be adding in new prospect and customer emails in that time from your CRM system but, you can’t rely on this single act to keep your lists looking healthy. What you need is a strategy of effective ways to build your email list. Try these ideas on for size…

1. Great content:

You’re probably a bit tired of hearing how content is king. Unfortunately there’s nothing new we can add here– the simple truth is that recommendations and word of mouth remain one of the best ways to win over new brand fans. If we extrapolate that out to email marketing, one of the best ways to get new subscribers really invested in your email comms is those recommended by a friend or colleague.

The only way that your recipients will forward on your email marketing is if it contains great content they want to share with someone they know. So, content truly is king, even when it comes to growing your email lists. The good news is that any time and resources you invest in creating a stellar collection of red hot content, should effortlessly translate into new subscribers. It can also be repurposed and used as part of your wider content strategy to help with other digital gains.

2. Try and oldie but a goodie:

Lead gen may be a phrase that’s been somewhat overshadowed by shinier and newer marketing terminology (programmatic advertising anyone?). But that doesn’t mean it’s outlived its usefulness. In fact, creating a really valuable lead generation tool, which collects email addresses is worth its weight in gold for your email list.

At this time of year an annual predictions or trends piece will always be an easy winner. If you’re a fashion retailer for example, a 2016 trend forecast ebook makes for an on-topic way of collecting email addresses. Promote via your website and social channels and grab email addresses so the follower or reader can gain access to exclusive content. Other ideas include: recipe books, guides (one of our clients has a marathon training and nutrition guide for example), even competitions.

3. Incentivise

Promotions aren’t just for in-store. Try adding an incentive on your home page, blog and across your social channels to reinvigorate your email list. Offering a discount code such as 10% off or a perk such as free delivery is a low cost way to kick start more email marketing subscriptions. Lots of e-commerce businesses use a subscription pop-up to facilitate this.

4. Use a Facebook call to action

If your social media presence is relatively mature with a good pool of followers, use Facebook’s recently introduced call to action button. Simply select ‘Sign Up’ from the available options and direct your social fans to sign up for your newsletter for a cross-channel experience. The key for this though is to give them a reason for going one step further than simply liking your Facebook page - let's face it, a very passive action. Getting them to pro-actively subscribe to your email list needs to have a strategy wrapped around it, which incentivises and proves on an on-going basis which it's worth being part of the list. Think about how you might share on your Facebook news feed stories about the latest email subscriber competition winner and anecdotes from happy customers who got a great deal as a result of an email they received. Followers need to know what they're missing out on.

Did we miss anything? What tricks will you be trying to grow your email marketing list? Let us know in the comments.

[1] Source: http://www.hubspot.com/database-decay