When thinking about building up your list, there are two areas you need to look at.

Firstly look outside your email marketing system. This could be, for example, via networking, tradeshows, seminars or other events. There is also potential within your Sage CRM system, i.e. through the marketing, sales and service interactions with customers and prospects. Don't forget that each and every opportunity you have to get names, addresses and opt-in agreement to add to your email marketing list should be utilised!

Secondly, is within the email marketing system. Here we are looking at elements of design and layout, segmentation and strategy; however the goal is to package this up into a customer-friendly subscription process that also yields valuable information to you.

The registration and subscription process

As you can see from the below graphic taken from Marketing Sherpa's 2010 "Email Benchmark Survey", registration during the purchase of a product or service, or for downloads, is by far and away the most effective way to grow your list. Therefore it is important that you design a customer-friendly subscription experience that gets the information you need at the right times. It is important to note here that requesting too much information will impact on the customer experience.

In the next couple of blogs we will look at some of the conventions you could employ to grow your list along with some examples. These include:

• Making your sign-up process easy to find in the website
• Incentivising the prospect to sign up
• Improving usability of the sign-up process
• Don't ask for too much information!