Your contact list should consist of email addresses that have opted in to receive your email marketing messages.

A list of contacts that didn’t opt-in will lead to higher than normal complaints, bounces, and low engagement. Over time this behavior will effect the over-all deliverability of your email results.

Growing your list “organically” is the proper way to gain contacts.

A few ways to increase your audience the correct way would include:

• Adding a capture form to your website. You can do this with any one of our capture form options
• Utilizing physical capture forms. This is great for restaurants and brick and mortar stores that have customers who visit the store.
• Promote your emails through social media. Posting a link to sign up lets your followers become subscribers.
• Adding a way to opt-in to marketing emails upon checkout if you have an online store

DO NOT

• Purchase lists
• Use lists from previous companies
• Grab emails you find on websites
• try to guess email addresses by putting “info@” or other suffixes before a known domain (or any other form of guessing)

Email marketing is most effective with quality contact lists as opposed to a high quantity of contacts who didn’t opt-in. Bad practices lead to low deliverability and poor company reputation.

As email marketers, your goal should be to have the highest quantity of opt-in contacts as possible.