• by David Goetzl , May 2, 2013

On a panel about acquisition at the Email Insider Summit, Experian's Justin Orgel said clients are starting to benefit from the Facebook custom audiences program, which helps improve targeting on Facebook, to grow an email list. So, through targeting, there's an opportunity to close the gap between Facebook fans and email addresses. For example, when a brand has 1 million Facebook fans, but only 500,000 addresses, there's an opportunity to capture addresses from the other 500,000.

Greg Martz of Motley Fool said Fool.com had steady traffic, which was good and bad, but faced the question how to build traffic? So, a Motley Fool blog network was created and it doubled traffic and more recently growth has continued. But it wants more than traffic, it wants email addresses and information about specific stocks can help acquire new email addresses with special opportunities.

Chris Epper of P.F. Chang’s Pei Wei Asian Diner said the mobile sphere offers an opportunity for list growth, but not so much with QR codes, which the company found was more of a "niche community." Customer sign up with the codes was a multi-step process which was a hindrance, so the company moved ahead with ways to make sign-ups easier.

Dallas Stars emailer Kelly Briggs said the team has used giveaways in the arena to help obtain addresses. Social media has also helped with sports fans going to Twitter and Facebook for conversation and voicing opinions.