Growing Your Email Marketing List

Unlocking Growth: Strategies for Expanding Your Email Marketing List

Building a quality email list is often considered one of the most challenging aspects of email marketing. Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just beginning to cultivate a subscriber base, it takes more than just a standard opt-in form to attract and retain valuable leads. In Episode 7 of Email & More, moderator Skip Fidura explores this topic in-depth, leading a lively panel discussion with Auri Pope (Director of CRM at Zenni Optical), Ornella Gallo (CRM and Automation Lead at Action), and Kath Pay (Founder of Holistic Email Marketing). This insightful session titled “Growing Your Email Marketing List” tackles some of the biggest questions around list-building strategies, common pitfalls, and innovative tactics that continue to drive success. Let’s break down some of the key takeaways from this engaging discussion and why you should tune in for the full episode.

Why Is Growing Your Email List So Hard?

Skip kicks off the session by addressing a fundamental truth in email marketing: without an audience to engage with, your content, no matter how stellar, falls flat. “Email marketing needs three things,” Fidura notes, “Something to say, a way to send it, and someone to send it to.” It’s that last part—getting a qualified audience—that often stumps marketers. Skip uses a nautical analogy to explain how nurturing and growing your list is like keeping a boat afloat: both require constant attention and effort.

The challenges don’t end once someone signs up; consumers’ interests and priorities shift. As Kath Pay points out, “What I find valuable today, I may not find valuable tomorrow,” which is why continual optimization and relevance are so crucial in retaining subscribers.

Proven Strategies for List Growth

Kath Pay offers a back-to-basics strategy: optimize your forms. “It sounds obvious, but optimizing forms—whether it’s a subscribe form, a checkout form, or any data collection point—remains one of the best ways to ensure continuous growth,” Pay emphasizes. She advocates for seamless experiences across touchpoints, ensuring that every form is optimized not just in appearance but in usability.

For example, it’s not enough to just place a form on a page—you need to ensure the placement, design, and copy are all finely tuned. “We often find that email marketers don’t even own their forms; it’s managed by web teams,” she shares, pointing out that this disconnect can slow optimization efforts.

Auri Pope also highlights the importance of knowing your data. She suggests that optimizing forms should go hand-in-hand with understanding user behavior. “You need to know what value you bring to each user at different touchpoints, whether they’re signing up for a product restock alert or subscribing to a newsletter,” she explains. The panel agrees that a personalized experience is the foundation of a successful list-building strategy.

Avoiding Common Mistakes

While growing a list is crucial, doing it the wrong way can harm your brand. Ornella Gallo addresses one of the most common pitfalls: purchasing email lists. “Don’t ever buy a list,” she urges. “It might be tempting to build a large database quickly, but that audience won’t engage, and your deliverability will suffer.” Kath Pay echoes this sentiment, explaining how purchased lists can kill your email deliverability and negatively impact your sender reputation.

Gallo offers another vital tip—set clear expectations. “Be upfront about what your subscribers will get and how often you’ll contact them,” she advises. Transparency helps to establish trust, which can lead to higher engagement and fewer unsubscribes. This ties back to Auri Pope’s suggestion to focus on consent and clear communication. In her experience, making consent explicit builds trust and sets a positive tone for your relationship with the subscriber.

Key Tips for Acquiring High-Value Subscribers

Not all subscribers are created equal. Auri Pope stresses the importance of understanding the difference between vanity metrics like list size and valuable KPIs such as lifetime value (LTV). “Your goal should be to attract high-value users who engage with your brand long-term, rather than just bulking up the list,” she explains.

One way to ensure you’re bringing in high-value subscribers is through targeted partnerships. For example, Pope talks about how Zenni Optical partners with sports teams and fan merchandise companies. These partnerships allow the brand to reach passionate fans who are likely to be highly engaged buyers, not just casual browsers.

Kath Pay expands on this by discussing the importance of tagging acquisition sources and using that data to understand which channels drive the most valuable users. “If one channel consistently delivers high LTV subscribers, invest more there,” she advises.

Optimising the Journey: Testing and Engagement

Testing is essential, and the holiday season presents the perfect opportunity to experiment with acquisition strategies. Ornella Gallo encourages marketers to test form placement, CTA buttons, and messaging across different stages of the customer journey. “The data you collect now will guide your optimization strategies during peak periods like Black Friday,” she says.

Kath Pay reminds marketers that during high-traffic periods, visibility is key. “You need to make it easy for visitors to find your forms and complete them,” she notes. Whether you’re offering a holiday discount or a value-packed lead magnet, make sure your forms are streamlined and optimised for conversions.

Wrapping It Up: Takeaways for Marketers

If there’s one thing to take away from this episode, it’s that building a sustainable, engaged email list is about strategy, not shortcuts. As Skip Fidura puts it, “It’s all about the giving.” Whether you’re optimising forms, setting expectations, or building high-value partnerships, successful list growth hinges on delivering consistent value to your subscribers.