How To Grow Your Email List
Did you know that your email-marketing database depreciates by approximately 22.5% each year? Your subscribers’ email addresses keep changing and you should take it upon yourself, as a marketer, to add fresh contacts to your list.
Using Email
- Create outstanding email content. People will stay subscribed and even forward your emails to colleagues, family, and friends if the content is remarkable.
- Encourage your list to forward and share the emails. “Email to a friend” and social media sharing buttons are effective if you want to access a fresh network.
- Conduct an online contest. This could be a giveaway where interested parties enter by submitting their email or signing up for the email list.
- Create a number of email subscription types in order to send targeted content to relevant segments of your email subscribers.
- Revitalize your stale email list by having an opt-in campaign. Is your list too old? Send an interesting opt-in message to the old list and encourage them to re-opt-in.
- Incorporate a link to employees’ signature leading potential subscribers to a landing page for them to sign up for your email-marketing list.
With New Content
- Come up with a new lead-generating offer. This could be a free ebook where interested readers have to provide a valid email address to download the book.
- Have a free resource or online tool. The users will then be required to sign up with their email to access the tool.
Using Social Media
- Use Twitter to promote your lead-generating offer. Promote a free resource like an eBook on Twitter and have followers give their emails to redeem it.
- Promote an offer on your Facebook page that requires followers to submit an email address.
- Somewhere on your Facebook page, include a call-to-action-button, preferably at the top. The button should link to a landing page which people access using their email addresses.
- Have links to premium offers published on your LinkedIn Company page.
- Promote offers where users sign up using email on Pinterest.
- Utilize your YouTube channel, if your company has one. Include URLs and CTAs in your videos encouraging viewers to sign up for your email list.
- Use your Google+ page for promotional offers.
On Your Website
- Throughout your website have links that lead back to offers that need email sign up. Subscription options should be sprinkled all over the website.
- When guest blogging, incorporate a CTA and links for readers to subscribe and join your list.
With A Partner
- Running a campaign on a partner newsletter or website will help you reach a new audience and it is a fresh source of addresses.
- Join a partner and host a co-marketing offer like a webinar or ebook.
With Traditional Marketing/Advertising
- Offline events such as trade shows are great places to collect email addresses. Later, send them a welcome email to confirm their opt-in.
- Host offline events such as conferences, educational panels, and meet-ups, among other events, where you collect email addresses during online registrations.
- Encourage prospects to opt out of traditional marketing campaign and opt in email communication.
- Host webinars online and collect emails during registration.
- Utilize paid search ads and link back to a landing page.
- Include a QR code in your print marketing collateral for people to scan and join your email database.
A 2014 survey found out that email marketing has the highest ROI compared to other marketing channels when it comes to web-based businesses. Given the results of that survey, instead of wondering whether you should build an email marketing list you should be asking yourself how to create one right now. Content upgrades are the difference between a 6% and a 60% conversion rate.
This is how you do it: create a new blog post, write in-depth content, and then offer your readers the option to access upgraded content when they provide their email. Take advantage of their interest in the topic. You send your blog posts to your list in the hope that you will get click-through to your site and generate traffic. Although having multiple links may cause less clicks on the one you want, if they click on the share button you are likely to get clicks from several visitors (even if your subscribers do not click and read your blog themselves). Engaging people more increases the likelihood of having them subscribe to your email list.
Ensure that the prize is appealing and have value to your audience. Offer bonuses for referrals and guaranteed incentives for those that will not win, maybe a free resource. Almost all high-traffic websites have opt-in incentives. It is usually a white paper, eBook, resource list, a free software tool, or just any content. All these are incentives for giving up email addresses. Tests and experiments have proven that pop-ups cause a steady increase in subscribers even though they can be annoying. They are very easy to implement and their results are insane.
Social proof is a powerful tool. 63% of customers are more likely to buy from a highly rated site. It is more influential than saving money. In social proof, bigger numbers are more impressive. To make a bigger number, add the number of your email subscribers to that of Twitter followers, Facebook, and any other platform followers, then throw in the total number somewhere whenever you need to make a statement. When you name drop big names, even people who are new to your area of expertise will not need to know anything else about you.
They will assume right away that you are a guru. Strive to have just one credible name and work with it. If your customers are happy and satisfied, they will want to spread happiness to their friends and colleagues. Instead of just asking them, offer them a bonus they cannot resist. Why are celebrities paid crazy rates for endorsements? There is a lot they can do to drive conversions.
To partner with the big shots you can:
- Use the poster boy method
- Fill a need for a fee
- Work with tomorrow’s influencers
Speeding up your site should be a top priority. 40% of visitors are likely to leave your website after two seconds of load time. A great webinar might only take 15 minutes to record. They are way more captivating than the usual videos because of their limited run time.
Email marketing is an aspect of online marketing that every successful marketer has to know how to do—and do it successfully. In your business journey, you have probably heard email marketing jargon like drip feeds and segments. What do all those words mean, and how do they work together to give you your desired results? An even better question is how can you make it automatic and make every email sell itself? Automated email marketing is sending emails to your subscribers automatically, on a schedule that you have defined. Although it sounds simple, you must invest time in learning and experimenting to learn more, just as in any other online marketing skill.
Automated email marketing does not involve transactional emails even though you can use those too to market your business. Email may seem old compared to other channels like Facebook ads, mobile text alerts, and other modern marketing methods. Despite this fact, however, email remains on the list of best lead generation channels today. There are two major types of automated emails that you can send:
- Event-based trigger emails
- Drip-feed email content
Depending on what you want to achieve, you can use them together or independently. Trigger emails, as the name suggests, are emails triggered by the behavior (or lack of it) of your subscribers. Trigger emails are the most common kind of automated emails. They include:
- Welcome emails (getting started with your service/product)
- Refer-a-friend
- Abandoned cart emails
- Milestone emails (like birthdays)
Drip-feed emails deliver scheduled messages on a timeframe of your choice. These emails could be a great source of leads and extra revenue if you do it right. They are sent to customers that have subscribed to a free report. Knowing what kind of emails to send and coming up with possible campaign ideas is not enough. What matters is mastering the basics and building on a strong foundation.
Follow these tips to create your very first automated campaign: You can bombard all your subscribers with the same message but that does not mean that you should. Every email-marketing platform has segmentation options to allow you to divide customers using specific criteria like industry, location, what they purchased, etc.
This increases your click-through rates. Lack of real personalization in your emails will increase your unsubscribe notifications. Personalizing your emails with things like location or name goes a long way. Do not send your subscribers to a dull landing page. Tailor your landing page to the email marketing campaign and have a smooth transition between them; making them match in content, design and CTA. Split testing your emails helps you know which one is responsible for a bigger number of conversions and number of clicks. When split testing, look for specific key performance indicators (KPIs) to know how successful an email was.
They include:
- Email delivery rate
- View rate
- Open rate
- Click-through rate
- Conversion rate
There are many email automation services, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Find the one that suits your needs best.