Size is an irrelevant number in email marketing. How big is your house list? How are you going to grow it? Can you get it to increase by 50% this year and how? Often times we hear from clients that they really want to grow their email list size and these are the kind of questions that they are being asked by their peers and bosses. Now why does size matter?

1. Size is a sheer numbers game.
If you are just of the batch and blast mentality, you could really care less. You know that if you can just get your message out to a large audience then you will drive sales, form completions, send to friends, and page views. Now that is great if you are in a mass market and you really don't have a strategy or ability to segment. But in the end, batch and blast mentalities are always looking for more numbers because they are churning more of their house file, turning people off with irrelevant marketing, and always on the hunt to replace those that you lose each campaign.

2. You are in the ad game.
If you are simply trying to get more people to see more pages and possibly serve more ads, like most main stream publishers, then you need size. You need the traffic and you need to grow the audience to sell your marketing efforts against to those that want to advertise to your site demographic. Sure, you can fight the battle of size and replace people as fast as they leave, but it is a game that is tied to sleepless nights, bad deals, and a constant attempt to find new sources of opt ins.

3. You need to grow in order to exit.
You are only looking at email marketing as a land rush/grab strategy. You think that tying list size to value is a direct correlation. If you are a 2.0 type of company living on the dreams of the boom of 1999, then you are stuck in the 90s. You are only trying to create a perceived value in order to sell your site or company.

So why is BIGGER not BETTER?

Well, here we are in 2008. We have all seen that the engaged house list that is segmented, sent targeted offers, news, stories, ads and promotions fares better from an ROI standpoint than anything else. We have all made tools available to our ESP clients/partners that make segmentation, customer life cycle campaigns, and trigger based emails from behavior something that is in reach to all marketers, but have we learned as a whole? My initial thought is no, we have not learned. We are starting to see people do better and when they do we see the numbers in check with performance metrics that we are strive to reach. And they are here at eROI for you to benefit from.

If you can take a step back this year and look at your last 6 months performance based on your campaigns, you might see a trend when you tried to be more strategic and not rushed to just get something out the door. Smaller can be better. Segmented can be better. Timing can be better. But how will you ever know if you are not trying?

Email Marketers need to spend more time being strategic and less time fighting against both a deadline and the orders barked down from those that are disconnected from the metrics and subscriber base. Be smart, think things through, and try to look at how you can use your email marketing tools and CRM together to start being smarter about marketing to smaller groups and targeted individuals. If you are fighting the battle without being able to see what people want, then you are not enabling yourself to listen to them.

Start small.
1. Set up an email preference center that allows for people to tell you more about themselves.
2. Attempt to tie your sales and traffic data to your campaigns.
3. Engage in a campaign that is not about sales, but about the relationship.

If you can digest this article and start to take the steps in order to do better you will empower yourself to smash your benchmarks and exceed your campaign/sales/traffic goals one small step at a time.