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Want to grow your email marketing list? Let’s rephrase that: Want to make more money?

The self-proclaimed “Marketing Sherpa” blogger, Adam T. Sutton, recently offered three ways to do just that.

“Yeah, sounds great,” you say, “but just expanding my email marketing list, I mean, other than the fact that it’s bigger?”

There are other advantages, as Sutton says, pointing out that new subscribers are a bit friskier than your old ones, they’re still exploring what you have. It’s not how big your email list is, really, it’s how new it is. And there’s no point in dropping older customers off the list, is there? Size matters, in the respect that it means you’re adding new customers. A huge, static list isn’t the idea here.

What you want is a list that’s big because it’s constantly growing, not because it got big at some point last year.

Sutton’s blog offers a chart of the ten most popular email marketing list enhancers as pulled from their 2012 benchmarking report. The top responses won’t surprise you -- “Registration during purchase,” “Online events” such as a Webinar, “Web site registration page,” “Paid (News - Alert) search,” and so on.

Sutton focuses on the top three, offering some ideas and hints to get you started in the right direction.

Registration during purchase. The advantage here is you know they already love you, they’re in the mood and it’s a cinch to close the deal. In fact, Sutton claims that according to their research, “more than 90 percent” of email marketers they contacted say an opt-in request to the purchase process is “somewhat effective” or better.

But strangely, it’s only the sixth-most used tactic, according to the Benchmark Report. And if it wasn’t for the e-commerce marketers, 59 percent of whom use it, far and away the highest of any industry -- in Education & Healthcare only 26 percent bother with it -- the figure would be even lower.

Come on, people. You want the results, you use the tried and true approach.

The trick to online events is to offer something the prospect really wants, like information via Webinar or white paper, something they perceive as genuine value. They work best in the software sector, Sutton writes, adding that it’s not considered much of an effective tactic at all in e-commerce -- “When was the last time you attended an event to buy something on Amazon?”

And the Web site registration page is easily the number one most used tactic -- 75 percent of email marketers do it, according to Sutton, who adds that “adding several calls-to-action to join your list throughout your website is an effective tactic.”

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