Build Your Email List via Co-Registration

If the existing traffic at your website is not leading to enough email list registrations, try co-registration.

Co-registration makes it possible to build your mailing list from internet surfers that visit and register at other websites. During the sign-up process at these partner websites, registrants will be asked if they'd like to subscribe to your mailing list as well.

The good news is that you can grow your mailing list to hundreds of thousands, or millions, by seeking co-registrations at multiple partner websites. The bad news is that subscribers acquired via co-registration will be considerably less responsive than subscribers who registered directly at your own website. You may also receive complaints from co-registration subscribers who don't remember how they got on your mailing list.

Caveat Emptor: Co-registration also introduces perplexing database and payables challenges. For instance, if you purchase co-registration records from multiple, partner websites, you will need to develop procedures to avoid double or triple paying for the same subscriber, such as:

Complicating matters further: online subscribers give false email addresses about a quarter of the time. So, you will need to develop contract terms and testing procedures to pay only for co-registration leads that are deliverable.

Another caution: Review the "privacy policy" at the website of any potential co-registration partner to ensure that they have the right to share leads with you. For double-protection, your contract with the co-registration partner should include a clause which asserts that they have the right to share their leads.

Anyhow, despite the challenges and disadvantages, co-registration is among the fastest ways to build your e-mail list. Just make sure to measure the lifetime value of co-registration subscribers separately from the lifetime value of direct subscribers. For instance, you may find that co-registration subscribers are only a third as responsive as your direct subscribers. That's fine as long as you only pay a third or less to acquire co-registration subscribers from your partner websites and remove duplicates prior to calculating payment.

Co-registrant responsiveness will vary widely among your partner websites. When the audience and offer of a partner website is very similar to your own, you may get relatively high responsiveness from their subscribers. On the other hand, if the mission of a partner website is only loosely related to yours, the co-registration subscribers you acquire from them will be less useful. Pay accordingly.