In a survey conducted by Atlanta-based e-mail services provider Silverpop, e-mail marketers ranked online marketing/search; offline advertising/direct marketing; trade shows; and cross-promotions as the four most successful methods of growing their e-mail lists. So what tactic were respondents most likely to implement during the next 12 months? Viral marketing.
Twenty-four percent of the 321 marketers who participated in Silverpop’s 2006 E-mail List Growth Survey said they planned to implement a viral marketing campaign, even though only 10% said that viral marketing had worked for them.
Similarly, 15% of survey respondents said that they planned to grow their e-mail files by appending e-mail address to their house files, but only 4% of those who had tried doing that rated the tactic as successful.
Conversely, 12% of respondents said that they’d had success growing their e-mail lists by having contact center reps obtain the addresses of customers. Yet only 7% of respondents planned to implement that tactic.
“Ultimately there should be no doubt that adding names to e-mail lists is becoming increasingly difficult,” Elaine O’Gorman, Silverpop’s vice president of strategy, said in a statement. “Not every method will work for every company. However, a good starting point to help evaluate new methods to consider should be the tactics found to be successful by survey respondents.”
The survey was released Monday here at the Annual Conference for Catalog & Multichannel Merchants (ACCM), which is co-owned by MULTICHANNEL MERCHANT magazine and the Direct Marketing Association.