The Email Research Center

In the 2009 List Growth Study we identified several things that contribute to success in building a strong and active list. At the top of that list--evaluating the performance of list sources. Take a quick look at this chart from the whitepaper.



It should not be difficult to figure out the moral of this story: Evaluate your sources of list growth and do it often.

In email marketing it is absolutely crucial that you know which list growth tactics are working for you. It may be even more important to know which tactics are not working. Why? Again, it's simple. Marketers who successfully grow their subscriber bases are constantly reallocating their budgets from list growth tactics that are not performing to those that are.

So what are marketers looking at as they conduct these evaluations? Here are a couple things we heard while conducting the study:

1. Quantity - How many new suscribers is the source generating? Keep in mind, the NEW part. Some list sources provide influxes of duplicate subscribers.
2. Quality - Do new subscribers from this source regularly engage with your program or are they "once and done?" Worse still are they DOA? This critical component allows marketers to determine if they are getting the right subscribers. List growth is not simply a numbers game, it is a quality numbers game.
3. ROI - If there are hard costs involved, how long will it pay for the program to pay for itself? Some programs generate a lot of new subscribers that will NEVER pay for themselves. In this case, you are essentially hiring subscribers--you may as well just put them on your payroll.

For more insights from the study, take a look at the entire whitepaper. This is just one of the topics addressed in the 30-page whitepaper. (But don't worry, it's not a diffucult read and there are lot's of pictures!)