Email List Growth: An Economic Indicator for the Email Industry

Author:

Fred Tabsharani

Source:

When healthy discussions take place in the Email Industry, they tend to give birth to new ideas.  Collectively, we reinforce these ideas by sharing them with our peers through blogs and commentary.  One such discussion covered the collection process of email addresses.   Specifically, the topic was discovering more efficient ways to streamline the collection process among disparate legacy collections systems (many of which have been in place for years).  Morgan Stewart of ExactTarget delivered an excellent piece recently, aptly Three Rules for Email List Growth and Simms Jenkins of Brightwave Marketing penned two articles on ClickZ that may interest you.   Those articles inspired me to share a few thoughts on “future” list growth strategies; enhanced and accelerated through financial institutions.
 
 
The size of your list matters, but so does the quality.   And as your budget to grow your list increases or decreases, finding ways to replace unsubscribed addresses becomes more important than ever, because you run the risk of lower returns from your email channel.  To potentially erase these deficits, we must create ways to replenish lists with sterile data and accelerate list growth.   Economically speaking, with respect to list sizes, a sustained upward/downward trend in list sizes may be a key economic indicator of the overall health of the email industry. 
 
 
That said, financial institutions carry vast amounts of data on users’ purchase behavior.  Your institution knows how often you travel, which retail stores you frequent, and how much you spend annually at your favorite restaurants.  Additionally, they keep track of your verified email address.  Because financial institutions collect this type of data, the list growth challenge may be overcome by forward-looking credit card companies, who in my opinion will eventually become chief suppliers for approved merchants who seek to build a permission based opt-in list of highly relevant verified email addresses...