Contact base collection guidelines
The effectiveness of email marketing is directly tied to the quality of the contact base. Most importantly, the user must submit the real contact data of their volition. To ensure that, you can use Double opt-in, a two-factor subscription consent. The user must provide their email address, give consent to receive emails, and confirm their choice by clicking the link in the email sent to that address.
The methods of contact base collection can be roughly divided into the illegal, gray area, and legal.
Illegal methods
Illegal methods cover all cases of collecting email addresses without the recipients’ explicit consent. View common illegal methods below.
Buy a contact base or email parsing services
Buying email addresses for a contact base can decrease the sender’s reputation drastically. It can also provoke a negative reaction from the recipients upon the very first contact since they have not consented to receive emails. Free contact bases are known to deliver equivalent results. Such bases are made of contacts who leave their addresses publicly available, accept formal offers and other agreements. Despite the formal consent, such a base might contain invalid emails or spam traps.
To avoid problems with third-party bases, we recommend taking the following steps:
- Validate your subscriber base.
- Get consent to receive emails.
- Use an audience warm-up mechanism. Learn more: Set up the email throttling queue.
- Purge the database of recipients who do not react to the emails or make spam complaints.
- After reaching the target recipient engagement level, send the new recipients newsletters on the same schedule as the main recipient base.
Make a contact base from website forms
Filling out a website form (such as registering with the website) does not necessarily imply consent to receive emails. To work with such a base efficiently, we recommend taking the following steps:
- Add an "I want to receive emails" field to the registration form and/or website landing form so that the user can select the checkbox to consent to receive emails.
- If a contact who did not consent to receive emails is already in your contact base, get their consent or, failing that, remove their email address from the base.
- Increase the engagement rates of subscribers by using warm-up strategies. Learn more: Set up the email throttling queue.
- Purge the database of recipients who do not react to the emails or make spam complaints.
- After reaching the target recipient engagement level, send the new recipients newsletters on the same schedule as the main recipient base.
Gray area methods
Partner bases are the primary gray area method.
Technically, a partnership agreement between two companies lets both include information about their partner in the emails. However, like with illegal methods of contact base collection, the users can be dissatisfied with receiving materials in which they are not interested. That may cause multiple unsubscribes and spam complaints, which decrease the sender’s reputation.
Manage a partner base similar to managing a third-party base as described above.
Legal methods
Legal methods cover cases where the user explicitly consents to email communication.
Manual base collection
This method is too time-consuming for companies that have a large number of orders but is the most optimal for long sales and unique goods. To get users’ consent to receive emails, you can send them short welcome emails that contain an offer to subscribe to a newsletter and receive interesting and valuable content.
Consent to receive emails upon registration
Add an "I want to receive emails." field to the registration form so that the user can select the checkbox to consent to receive emails. Set up two-factor consent to receive emails (Double opt-in) as described in this article’s intro. This approach rules out situations where a user provides someone else’s address.
We recommend that you keep the logs concerning the received consent in case of complaints.
Pop-up windows
Pop-up windows help to generate leads and retain users. You can use them to offer valuable materials, promos, or discounts in exchange for the email address and consent to receive emails.
To prevent such pop-ups from inciting a negative reaction, make sure that they have an easy to notice close button.
See also
Responsive email layout guidelines