Permission to send e-mail newsletters to a consumer needs to be proactive and voluntary. The only correct way to get permission is by having people sign up with the understanding that they want to receive e-mail from you.

The five levels of permission, from worst to best for consumers, are:

1. Opt-out: You obtain an e-mail address for a consumer (it doesn’t matter how) and begin e-mailing that consumer, allowing him to e-mail or click to opt out of future mailings from you. Obviously, you can end up with huge amounts of subscribers this way, and there are ways to be an opt-out mailer and still be CAN-SPAM compliant, but this is the lowest form of permission, since one could argue it doesn’t actually involve permission! While opt-out mailings will certainly drive some sales, in almost all circumstances, we think it’s too close to spam to be advisable.

2. Negative Opt-in: Here, you offer consumers an e-mail subscribe form, usually as part of an order form of some other kind, and you place a pre-checked box for an agreement to receive e-mails. The person must uncheck it in order not to receive the newsletter. Negative opt-in will get you more subscribers, but it also may leave you with more angry customers who don’t realize they “agreed” to receive e-mails from you, think they’re being spammed, harbor bad feelings about your products and brand, and usually will unsubscribe, anyway. Those who feel abused by this process certainly are not buying anything from you.

3. Opt-in: A subscriber must proactively check a box in order to receive your newsletter. Opt-in is the most common form of subscription because it is voluntary on the part of the subscriber and it keeps things simple.

4. Confirmed Opt-in: A subscriber opts in to your newsletter and then receives an e-mail message from you confirming their subscription and offering them the option to immediately unsubscribe if the subscription was in any way a mistake. This level of permission increases the value of your list and protects you to some extent against charges of spamming. It also increases the deliverability of the list, since bad addresses will generate immediate bounces to the confirmation mailing and never get on the list.

5. Double Opt-in (sometimes referred to as verified opt-in): In this scenario, someone subscribes to your e-mail list, and then receives an e-mail message from you to which they must reply in order to officially be on your list. This is the gold standard for permission, as consumers essentially have to subscribe to your list twice in order to get on it (so they really, really want your e-mails!). However, you do run the risk of losing subscribers who don’t realize they need to send you another message to actually get on your list. You can take steps to minimize this risk by sending the confirmation e-mail immediately, and by messaging to the consumer on the web page following the subscription to remind him to go check his e-mail and confirm, but we’ve never seen a double opt-in rate higher than 80% of subscribers, and many come in closer to 60%.

Which is best for your program?

We believe there is absolutely no reason to have anything less than a confirmed opt-in standard for your newsletter. In our experience, opt-out and negative opt-in lists, while large, perform poorly and generate complaints that lead to blocking and filtering. If you’re going to have an opt-in list, there’s no reason not to make it confirmed opt-in to take an extra step to improve customer service and deliverability and prevent fraudulent subscriptions (we’ll talk more about sending welcome messages later). Many mailers find that the higher hurdle for double opt-in is worth it in terms of producing an even more responsive list — we think it depends on what kind of newsletter you have and what you’re trying to achieve with it whether confirmed opt-in or double opt-in is right for you.

Ways to Build Your List

There are many ways to build a huge list of e-mail addresses of people who are interested in your company, its products, or services, and are willing to give you permission to send e-mails. These ways can be placed into two broad categories:

1. Organic Capture: Non-paid means to inspire people to provide their e-mail addresses

2. Paid Acquisition: Gaining addresses through advertising, list rental, partnerships, and more

Leveraging Organic Capture to Build Your List

What could be better than building a good mailing list without having to put out critical marketing dollars? You’d be hard-pressed to find a marketer who wouldn’t be interested in a no-cost, yet high-quality method of building an e-mail list. This is the whole premise behind organic capture: using methods and mechanisms that you already have in place to create or grow your e-mail address list. Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Best of all, when you employ organic methods, you will almost definitely build a list that is more accurate and targeted than one you might rent or purchase. Even better, there are many ways to do it. We’ll go over some of the most effective techniques we’ve seen, but as you read, you’ll find that gathering e-mails organically should become more than an exercise, it should become a part of your marketing lifestyle.

Using Your Web Site to Build Your List

Making e-mail collection a priority means giving it prominence throughout the design of your web site. A call to sign-up for your newsletter must be prominent on every single page of your site. Remember that most visitors are there to browse and learn more about your company and products. Entice these browsers to engage with your company. No one should leave your site without leaving behind his or her e-mail address. The success of your site should be measured by its ability to capture e-mails, not just hits or sales.

Start with the home page. A prompt or link encouraging a reader to sign-up should be in the top half of the screen as well as in multiple locations throughout the page. If visitors have to scroll or search to find the sign-up form, you will earn a much lower capture rate. Take special care to craft a compelling offer — visibility is only half the battle. Your sign-up invitation must also entice and persuade.

But don’t stop there. People may come to a page on your site through the side door, so to speak. Web searching is non-linear, meaning people do not always enter your site through the home page. A search engine link may land the reader on any of the pages on your site. They may never even see the home page. Therefore, you must have prompts for e-mail sign-up prominently displayed on every page of your site. Even if you have a site that most users do visit from top to bottom, having a sign-up form on every page is still important to make sure that at any time in a user’s brief visit to your site, an e-mail subscribe form is visible, or at least on the same page. And a link to a “newsletter subscription” page doesn’t do the job nearly as well as a live form on the page itself.

If you have several newsletters, you’ll want to specifically have calls to action that match content on your site with the topics of the newsletters. For example, the Business & Technology page at BarnesandNoble.com includes a very prominent subscribe form on the left-hand sidebar for newsletters related to business and computers. One of our clients, Business & Legal Reports, created a mini-subscribe form with specific newsletters for their interior pages that quickly accounted for over 50% of their web sign-ups, and increased their web to e-mail conversion by 108%!

Since e-mail capture is the single most important aspect of your marketing campaign, keep tweaking the wording of your calls to action and the placement on the pages until you see optimal results, as measured by a rapidly-growing e-mail list.

In addition, encourage and provide an easy way for readers to forward all the goodies you offer via e-mail, including product specs, graphics, articles, statistics, surveys or any other material featured on your web site.

For example:

*Next to that fabulous new pair of boots featured on your site, shoppers can click to, “Tell a Friend About This Sale.”

*Along side an article about the latest in Mediterranean Cuisine, readers can “Share Recipes With A Friend.”

*Right below your bold and vibrant invitation announcement of a new gallery opening, readers can choose to “Invite a friend to the cultural event of the summer.”

Always encourage readers to pass your web site content along via e-mail, and always make sure those e-mails have at least a small pitch or even a live form for the recipient to subscribe to your regular newsletter program. After all, the more opportunities you present for organic capture, the greater the potential for positive results.

Designing Subscribe Forms that Encourage Sign Up In your efforts to collect e-mail, don’t put up data-collection obstacles. Every time you ask the reader to register, use a password, answer questions on a survey or provide personal data, you are essentially setting up roadblocks each of which carries the potential to make the would-be subscriber decide it’s not worth the trouble. Just as e-commerce sites never put any barrier between the shopper and the sale, don’t prioritize getting a lot of data over getting the one piece of information you need most: her e-mail address!

You can always gather additional data later on using surveys and feedback forms, once you’ve opened the lines of communication (much more on this in Chapter 6), or by appending the data (which we cover later in this chapter). By asking only for the person’s e-mail address and permission to send them e-mails, you are keeping it simple and not driving away potential business.

Creating an irresistible subscribe form boils down to two key imperatives:

*Provide a compelling reason to sign up—This might mean an incentive, such as a money-saving coupon, a free gift, or perhaps a gift certificate for another company with which you have a partnership. But whether you have an incentive or not, be sure that your form has strong promotional copy touting the benefits of receiving the newsletter.

*Design a super-fast sign-up process to quickly capture the e-mail address and only the most basic additional information (we recommend either just e-mail, or at most one other field, like zip code or gender). Close while the prospect is hot.

We worked with a major consumer packaged goods company that had a newsletter that was well designed and filled with terrific content. In spite of these good qualities, they couldn’t get anyone to sign up for the newsletter. When we dug into it, we discovered the subscribe form had 17 required fields. Seventeen fields! We weren’t surprised that most consumers weren’t willing to go through all of that work just to get e-mail, even if it was from a brand-name marketer. We advised that they just ask for the e-mail address up front. Within weeks of making the change their sign-up rate skyrocketed, at one point hitting a high of 400% improvement!

As we mentioned earlier, you can always gather more data later, once you have built up a level of relationship and trust. For example, when a prospect requests a download of your latest white paper, ask for their e-mail address and include a checkbox to subscribe to your newsletter. Later, when the prospect responds with interest in a product demo, then you might ask for telephone number, company name and job title. The prospect will be much more likely to provide this information when they have learned more about your company.

One way to entice people to give you more data is to offer an incentive. This works particularly well when the data and incentive are tied together. Remember the marketer with the 17 fields? Well, what they really wanted was their customers’ mailing addresses. Our suggestion was to offer the incentive of a $1 coupon that would come in the mail. How did it work? For starters, this eliminated the garbage-data problem, because if you didn’t give the correct address you wouldn’t get the coupon. And while not everyone who signed up for e-mail filled in this second form, many others did. In fact, the postal data supplied under the new offering was much more accurate.

So always think about why you want a certain piece of data and how you intend to use it. If, for example, you want to do geographical target marketing, but not actually send anything by mail, then ask only for their area code, Zip code, or state. This allows you to target an area for marketing purposes without requiring a high level of trust, since the data is not personally identifiable.

Surveys are also good ways to acquire additional information. People love to share their opinions, and you can often sneak a few demographic questions in at the same time.

Finally, don’t fall into the trap of gathering information just for the sake of it. If you have no reason to be gathering data at this time, don’t ask for it. Remember, the more data you own, the more privacy issues you have to contend with. In today’s climate, if you don’t really need it or use it, you might not want it.

Asking for E-mails in the Real World

Think of your offline customer touch points the same way you do your Web site — every point is an opportunity to gather e-mail addresses. Of course you’ll want to ask in a way that reassures their privacy will be upheld and offers a compelling benefit statement.

*Trade shows and other live events—Every booth at every trade show on the planet has a fishbowl or some sort of container designed to gather business cards. The whole point of trade shows is to meet lots of people in your market and get their information so you can continue the conversation after the show.

Since trade show attendees are always looking to win something or get something for free, an incentive such as a prize usually works best. The trick is to balance volume with quality. This begins with choosing trade shows that are likely to have high-quality prospects. But, beyond that, you can further segment the crowd by offering several newsletter checkboxes on the sign-up card. Also take care in choosing your prize. Everyone is going to sign up to win the hot consumer gadget of the week. That’s probably not helpful. Instead, identify the prize that will quicken the pulse of your target prospects — and be completely uninteresting to everyone else. And, of course, have a sign posted that clearly states that submission of a business card serves as permission to be sent e-mail!

*Call center, direct mail, advertising and more—Operators working in your call center should be asking for e-mail as part of their call center script. There should be a short benefit statement to read, letting people know why they should sign up. And the operators need to be trained to take down an e-mail address with the proper format. Alert your customers to watch for a welcome e-mail within a few hours (or the fastest time-frame you can manage). The first e-mail should reference the fact that the sign-up was via the call center.

Direct mail, including catalogs, should also have a call to action, asking people for their e-mail and explaining the benefits they will receive from your newsletter, such as great shopping tips or inside information on the hottest new home decorating trends. In fact, anything you send to customers or prospects by mail, including products and promotional items, should include a card that promotes your newsletters and asks for their e-mail address.

*Using Forward to a Friend (FTAF) in E-mail—Viral marketing is a terrific way to get your content distributed to an even wider audience and ultimately built your list. After all, what could be better than having your customers do your marketing for you? It’s an idea that has been around for a long time — word-of-mouth. It’s a primary factor in keeping books on the bestseller list, restaurants crowded on a nightly basis and movies popular long after the initial box office blitz.

E-mail is ideally suited for this type of information sharing with the forward button a standard part of all e-mail software programs. One look at your own inbox should be enough to convince you that people know how to forward. So use it to your advantage. But don’t trust that it will happen without some encouragement. Always include links or forms in your e-mail message that encourage subscribers to forward your e-mail to any friends who might appreciate the information.

One reason is psychological. Seeing the word “forward” will induce people to do so. In fact, just including the word, without any fancy forms or links, will increase your chances of someone hitting the forward button. For example, MarketingSherpa always includes the notation “Pls Forward” at the end of every subject line.

More importantly, you can better track viral behavior if readers use the tools you provide, rather than hitting their program’s forward button. You also have more control over the message that the recipient gets with a system designed for that purpose. It’s worth your time to make your forwarding tools easy to use.

So, don’t stop with just a link. While a link will encourage forwarding, an even more effective way is to have a form embedded in the e-mail. Here, you can have the pre-filled name and e-mail address of the sender and include an open box where he or she can put the names of friends along with their e-mail addresses. It makes the whole process faster, easier, and much cooler.

As with all e-mail, you want to make sure your messages look good when forwarded to different size monitors and handheld devices, so be sure to check for broken text or graphics and make sure that the entire message, including all instructions are visible and easy to read.

*Creating A Forward-To-A-Friend Form—A successful FTAF form is one that successfully delivers on your invitation or call to action.

From a functional perspective, FTAF forms should allow you to control the data flow, collect some additional data on your customers, insert marketing messages, and encourage the people receiving the e-mail to opt in for your newsletters. Keep the form short and easy to navigate. And prominently display your privacy and spam policy on the form — make it clear that you will not send other e-mails to their friends unless they explicitly subscribe.

Make it obvious and easy. Place the call to action for your FTAF in an obvious place right up top, as well as in several other locations, including in the footer. And have the form set up so that readers can easily enter the names of friends without having to think about it too much. The more work, the less likely they are to forward.

The more the merrier—Why stop at one friend? Typically, if you provide several boxes for signing up friends, the sender will do just that. They may not include friends on every line, but will likely list two or three people. Set it up so that friends will be listed in separate form fields and include subscription information for each friend. Try providing a different number of address lines to find out how many friends most people are comfortable forwarding to. You can even have some programming done to create cookies that automatically repopulate future forms with the addresses from previous forwards!

Allow people to personalize it—When someone forwards a great e-mail to a friend, they will usually want to put their own personal stamp on it by adding something such as; “This reminded me of our conversation this morning” or “I thought of you when I saw this.” For this reason you’ll want to leave a space where the sender can write her own personal message. In addition, you want the e-mail to appear to come from the sender (the “From” line) and not from your company so that it is more welcomed and won’t be misconstrued as spam.

Once someone has signed up for your newsletter and then forwarded it to his friends, you need to get the friends’ explicit permission to receive your regular newsletter e-mails. You can close this loop if you construct your regular e-mails with the non-subscriber also in mind.

So make sure that every e-mail that is forwarded features a way for the receiver to subscribe. Make the subscribe instructions clear and have them lead directly to a simple sign-up form on which e-mail address is the only “required” data field. DailyCandy.com, a fashion site, uses a simple, fun, and effective call to action that asks: “Did a friend send you this? From now on, be the first to find out. Sign up for DailyCandy. It’s fun, it’s pretty, and it’s free.” It’s a clear wording, a strong promotion and makes sense for their audience and their content.

*Using Cross Promotion Opportunities—To maximize your marketing possibilities, always mention your other newsletters in each mailing. Every e-mail and every subscribe form should cross promote all other e-mail newsletters you publish. This gives each reader options. If, for example, someone receives your e-mail newsletter about the latest shoe fashions, forwarded from a friend, they may like it enough to sign up for your e-mails, which will put information about your shoe line in front of them every week. However, if given the opportunity to read about great ways to accessorize as well, they might also sign up for your other newsletter on great accessorizing tips. This builds your list and deepens your relationships with subscribers.

Asking for E-mails in Non-Marketing E-mails—Take advantage of every e-mail communication that your company has with a customer or prospect to encourage them to sign up for your newsletter. Many companies don’t do this and frankly, they’re missing out on a huge opportunity to build their lists easily and effectively.

Use every other e-mail that you send in the normal course of business. Anytime you send an e-mail you should include information about your e-mail newsletters. This includes customer service auto-replies, order confirmations, shipping notifications, and account management messages. If someone makes a purchase from you, they are expecting to get notifications by e-mail that their order was received or that it has been shipped. You can easily include a few well-placed and relevant marketing messages for your newsletters and other e-mail offers.

Also, think about how many individual e-mails you and your employees send out each day to partners, customers, vendors, and prospects? Depending on the size of your company, it could be hundreds, if not thousands. Each person receiving one of these e-mails is already someone who has reason to be communicating with you, so they should be receiving your newsletter.

Create a templated block of copy that promotes your newsletter and provides subscription instructions. Then have each employee in your company insert this information at the bottom of their signature file. That’s it.

One final tip: A good way to build your list is to actually run ads that encourage people to sign up for your newsletter. It’s no different that how any magazine or newspaper advertises for folks to subscribe to their publication. This can be a wise move since the initial investment of marketing dollars can increase your ability to communicate more cost-efficiently by e-mail and gain many more opportunities to sell them.

This is an easier case to make with online advertising, since, in addition to still being more affordable than other media, it speaks only to people who are online—your prime targets to receive and read e-mail.

Along this same idea, be sure to promote your newsletter in all offline forms of advertising, whether its print, direct mail, even broadcast. If you’re spending money on promoting your company, be sure that it encourages sign up to your e-mail program. In the long run, you’ll be converting prospects to a much more affordable method of marketing.

Matt Blumberg and Michael Mayor are the driving forces behind Return Path, an e-mail performance company. Collaborating with them on this project are their colleagues, e-mail strategists Stephanie A. Miller and Tami Monahan Forman. This article was excerpted from their new book, “Sign Me Up! A Marketer’s Guide to Creating E-mail Newsletters That Build Relationships and Boost Sales (iUniverse Inc., 2005) © 2005 Return Path, Inc. All rights reserved.

Permission to send e-mail newsletters to a consumer needs to be proactive and voluntary. The only correct way to get permission is by having people sign up with the understanding that they want to receive e-mail from you.

The five levels of permission, from worst to best for consumers, are:

1. Opt-out: You obtain an e-mail address for a consumer (it doesn