Challenges Faced by Email Marketers – Subscriber List Growth

Chart of the Day: What challenges you when it comes to email marketing? Part 2 of 4.

For email marketers, there will always be aspects of email marketing that are a challenge. The below chart looks at the various areas that email marketers are struggling with. I will be doing a 4 part series of issues pertaining to email marketing.

We will be looking at the following during the course of the series:

• Targeting & Segmenting
• Subscriber list growth
• Tracking results
• Main email marketing goal.

The second challenge in the series is "Subscriber list growth". Organically grown subscriber lists are challenging and it takes time to expand them. But having a large list isn't everything, you need to make sure it's an engaging list. Meaning clients trust your brand, open your email and ultimately click on the content that is relevant to them.

How do I grow a subscriber list?

In the chart below, we have various ways to grow your list. Opt-in forms and social media are on par, with 61% and 60% respectively. So you need to make sure you make it easy for a client to opt-in, but also to make very clear that they are being opted-in to an email subscription service, e.g: creating a account will automatically add them to your list.

What is worrying, is there are still 28% who rent/buy lists. Buying lists is bad email marketing practice. And it is/will be illegal in some countries. It may be quicker, but not better.

After you have the customer opted-in, you need to keep them interacted with you. So sending information that is relevant and of interest to them to keep them engaged.

Subscriber list growth is discussed in greater detail in our blog post, Growing email subscribers.

• Source: Email Marketers Finding List Growth Challenging
• Sample Size: 303 email marketers from companies with at least 100 employees.
• Recommended Resource: Email Targeting