Study Reveals The Importance Of Email List Growth

Website visitors are the key to email list growth, but it’s important to keep in mind when discussing traffic that more isn’t always better. The quality of your traffic is equally, if not more important, than the quantity. You don’t want just any random person or company coming to your website and joining your list. You want to attract the specific type of person who is going to be interested in what you have to say and the solutions your business offers.

Recently, Ascend2, a company that provides research-based demand generation for marketing agencies, conducted a pretty awesome study that looked into the importance of email lists to businesses. The study surveyed marketing professionals all across the globe, asking about list growth, growth tactics, and the most difficult tactics to execute in list growing.

According to the study, 67% of those surveyed reported that growing their lists is ‘very important? to their marketing program success, with 29% saying it is only ‘somewhat important.? A problem that many marketers shared was in regards to the speed in which they grow their lists, as 61% agreed that their list grows slowly. Oddly enough, 15% said that it’s growing rapidly, and 16% admitted that theirs are not experiencing any growth at all.

As for the best tactics to list growth, website ruled the day with 43%, and content downloads was one behind with 42%. The second and third most popular tactics, as you can see below, were upcoming events, and social media sharing.

Despite that social media sharing was considered the 4th most effective tactic by marketers for list growth, it was still considered the most difficult tactic to execute, with 40% of respondents agreeing to the difficulty of grabbing emails through it. 39% found that paid search campaigns was also a difficult tactic, along with email forward to a friend. Though social media sharing can be as simple as a click, the results of this study are sure to raise eyebrows, as marketers may now have to look for new ways to incorporate social sharing into their list growing strategies.

Baris Ergin

Baris is the founder of DirectIQ with over 20 years of experience in email marketing campaigns. Baris is an expert in all aspects of email marketing, and he created DirectIQ as an alternative to mass marketing tools like Mailchimp because he knows how to deliver individualized experience en masse to niches like hotel and real estate marketing, where a personal touch means everything.