Building an email list should be a top priority if you’re looking to increase your online reach, grow your brand, and boost sales. Your email list is a powerful tool that allows you to connect with your audience on a more personal level, provide them with value, and ultimately convert them into loyal customers.
However, the question remains: how do you grow your email list? In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore proven strategies and techniques that will help you increase your subscribers, improve engagement, and achieve your business goals. So, let’s get started and unlock the full potential of your email marketing efforts.
What is an Email List?
An email list is a collection of email addresses that a business or organization has gathered from individuals who have voluntarily provided their contact information to receive email communications.
These email addresses are typically stored in an email marketing platform or software that allows businesses to send targeted and personalized messages to their subscribers.
Building and maintaining an email list is an essential aspect of email marketing, as it enables businesses to connect with their audience, build relationships, and promote their products or services.
How to Grow Your Email List
There are different ways to grow your email list; we will discuss some proven steps.
Create unique email content.
Want to keep your existing subscribers and enlist their assistance in expanding your list? Make original email content. Your email recipients will always look forward to getting them and be more likely to forward them to their networks if they are entertaining, educational, and valuable.
Your subscribers chose to subscribe to your email list. Make it worthwhile for them; that’s your responsibility. You can increase visibility and subscriber count. On the other hand, you will lose subscribers if your content is uninteresting or irrelevant to your followers.
Encourage Email Sharing and Forwarding
Add social sharing buttons and an “Email to a Friend” option to your marketing emails. You’ll be able to grow your contact list by accessing the recipients’ peers, coworkers, and networks.
Include a “Subscribe” CTA as a straightforward text-based link at the foot of your emails to make it simple for the recipients of forwarded emails to join. Your subscribers shouldn’t exert much effort to forward your content to a different prospective customer.
Sort your email lists according to customer personas.
Once you know your audience, you can group them according to factors like age, region, or purchasing patterns and send emails to each group, making your messages more specifically targeted to each audience segment for a more effective result.
Emails tailored to the recipients’ likes are more likely to be clicked through. In addition, the likelihood that visitors will sign up for one of your targeted subscriber categories will rise if you create several of them. In reality, segmented campaign users reported revenue increases of up to 760%.
Use an opt-in effort to revitalize a stale email list.
Do you possess an older record that you believe has largely deteriorated? Create a compelling opt-in message, send it to your old list, and invite contacts to opt back in if they choose while also pledging to delete any contacts who don’t reply.
Adding people to your email list may seem counterintuitive if you’re trying to expand it. However, sending emails to people you know are interested can improve your deliverability and the likelihood that your message will be forwarded to people outside of your current database. An opt-in link should be included in each employee’s name.
People can subscribe to your mailing list by visiting a landing website linked in their email signatures. Additionally, adding them to more email subscription lists can be a logical next move if you’re already in a natural email conversation with them.
Promote an online contest.
Create a free giveaway that needs contact information to enter using your social media accounts. Your followers can be urged to visit your website and join up with their email addresses.
Promote gated visual material using Pinterest.
Visual material on Pinterest entices users to sign up for access to more content. Utilize this to your benefit by promoting your gated visual content on the platform to entice users to learn more from you and provide their email addresses in exchange for more in-depth knowledge.
Make the subject of your profile cover picture your email newsletter.
Your email newsletter and Facebook profile cover photos are beautiful places to draw attention to something specific. You can persuade users to enter their email addresses to receive more value from your content by producing a high-quality graphic that draws attention to and emphasizes its value.
Use YouTube
End screens, also called video outros, are a tool provided by YouTube to creators to encourage viewers to take further action after viewing a video, such as visiting your website or watching another video on your channel. Your end cards should include links to your sign-up landing page because they encourage viewer engagement and help you grow your email list.
This suggestion is helpful if your instructional film contains mainly superficial information. A gated deal or your email newsletter offers a more in-depth perspective.
For viewers to understand what they’re about to watch, your YouTube video descriptions should discuss the substance of your videos. Although each description will probably have some distinctive components, including a link to your email sign-up landing page is still important.
It is beneficial if you produce how-to-style videos because you can persuade viewers to subscribe by clicking the link in your description in exchange for additional educational materials and guidance.
Incorporate a call to action into guest blogs for other websites.
Some numerous websites and publishers target your community, as well as more significant segments of it. You can increase the size of your contact list by increasing your visibility to new audiences by guest blogging for these websites.
Include a call to action (CTA) encouraging readers to sign up for your site’s blog or email newsletter when you produce guest blogging content.
Utilize Facebook
You should use your email newsletter as one of your Facebook profile’s cover pictures to attract attention. You can persuade users to enter their email addresses to receive more value from your content by producing a high-quality graphic that draws attention to and emphasizes its value.
Adding a CTA button to your Facebook page that directs users to your sign-up landing page or a gated featured resource that needs email access is the best way to maximize the value of this list-building strategy.
Users will find it more straightforward if you include a sign-up CTA button in your profile because they won’t need to abandon Facebook to visit your website; instead, they can click the link and be directed there.
Your landing sites for signups should contain customer testimonials.
One thing is for you to encourage people to join up for a campaign; it is quite another for your happiest clients to do the same. Customer testimonials serve as social proof that entices people to participate in an activity. You should post these testimonials on your website, notably landing sites with sign-up forms. When readers aren’t sure whether to give their contact information, reviews will give your content worth.
What to Avoid when Building an Email List
Because building strong email lists is essential to the email marketing process, so there are some rules to follow and blunders to prevent. Here are ten things you should never do when creating an email group.
Purchasing email list
It is the most prominent error marketers and company owners make when creating email lists. Purchasing a list is the easiest and fastest way to build one.
Although this is the quickest method, it usually backfires because there is no way to ensure that the purchased email addresses belong to users who are interested in your content or are genuine. As a result, you might buy a list of 1,000 addresses only to find that few read your material.
Addition of email addresses without authorization
Another significant error many marketers make is this one, which might even land you in legal problems. Only email addresses that have given you an approval in some way should receive marketing emails from you. The two primary forms of consent for email marketing are as follows:
- Implied includes people with whom you already have a business connection, such as present clients, donors, or website users.
- Express is when a person expressly agrees to receive texts from you, as when they fill out a subscription form.
Asking for too much data
You don’t want to ask for too much information and risk coming across as a spammer when you ask someone to provide confidential information for your email campaign. You want to make signing up quick and straightforward, and you want the client to feel comfortable giving you their contact details. Give the client enough time to research your company and determine your credibility.
Emailing without a purpose
Making your emails worthwhile for your subscribers will require setting clear goals for your email marketing strategy and each email you send. Subscribers will notice if you send emails just for the sake of sending emails, and they might unsubscribe if the material isn’t relevant to them.
Before sending an email, you should know what you hope to achieve. Is it disseminating business news? Providing a coupon code? Letting your clients know about a new product? Create your email marketing material with that objective in mind.
Sending too few or too many letters
The best way to keep clients with email marketing is to be consistent with your sending patterns and tell subscribers what to anticipate. Your readers might become irritated and unsubscribe from your emails if you send a burst of five emails every few months or three emails daily.
Decide on a regular posting plan and follow it. Many email marketing services provide scheduling choices that even let you plan emails for months, which makes this process easier.
Providing an insignificant reward
Ensure that many of your clients can benefit from and use your incentive. It’s standard practice to offer incentives to entice people to join a targeted email list, but doing so can backfire if the incentive isn’t helpful for the customer. You shouldn’t, for instance, offer a discount that can only be used at one shop at a specific time or a coupon that runs out the next day.
Growing your email list is crucial for the success of your online business. Applying the strategies and techniques outlined in this guide can attract new subscribers, engage with your audience, and ultimately increase conversions and sales.
Remember to focus on providing value, optimizing your opt-in forms, and delivering personalized content that resonates with your subscribers. Start implementing these tips today and watch your email list grow! With a strong email list and a solid email marketing strategy, you’ll be well on your way to achieving your business goals and building long-term relationships with your audience.
