Best Way - The Best Ways to Build Email Lists for Non-Profits

An email list is an excellent way to stay in regular contact with people interested in your products, services and organization. For nonprofits, the benefits are even more appealing because email lists are relatively inexpensive ways to keep donations flowing in. Building an email list is not difficult but it does take focused effort and planning.

List Building Basics

1. When building an email list, it's important to offer subscribers a compelling reason to sign up. Generally sending a regular newsletter or special offers to interested people will get them to sign up and respond to your mailings. If you create an email list and do nothing with it however, or you only send email out infrequently, you risk losing the interest and attention of your subscribers. Many may even forget they've willingly subscribed, and they'll be confused or annoyed when they do receive your email.
   
   Once you have a regular email contact plan in place, you'll need to start acquiring subscribers. The easiest and least expensive way to do this is to offer a free item in exchange for subscribing. Free items are incentives that are desirable enough for people to share their contact information, but they don't have to be expensive at all. Nonprofit organizations can offer a digital version of small special reports for example, or a free desktop background .
   
   You can increase the number of subscribers to your email list easily as well. In each email newsletter you send out, include a small line that encourages subscribers to forward the newsletter to their friends, family or colleagues. Be sure you include subscription information in each issue too, so that anyone who receives a forwarded copy will know how to subscribe for themselves.
   
   You can also ask subscribers to recommend the letter to their friends and family by using a tell a friend feature on your website. In fact, you can combine this technique with the free gift feature too. Give away one free digital book or report as a bonus for subscribing, and offer to give the subscriber one or two more special reports if they fill in the names and email addresses of three to five friends.
   
   Social marketing sites online are another wonderful way for nonprofit organizations to acquire new email subscribers. On FaceBook you can set up a fan page, and encourage existing subscribers to become a fan through that page. Everyone who becomes a fan will automatically show that status to their extended social network, thus new people will come over to see what your organization is all about. MySpace doesn't have fan pages, but using the "add friends" feature works in a similar way.