Simple, effective and valuable - a quality email list is an asset
Email marketing is a highly effective tool for keeping your brand front-of-mind and building those all important relationships with your customers. It's a communication channel that's valued by customers and businesses. One of the main goals for email marketing is to increase engagement. In fact, a recent Ascend2 survey, 54% of marketers say that increasing engagement is their top email marketing priority.
If you're struggling to grow your email list organically and deal with fall out from GDPR don't give up.
Building an email list is still one of the smartest things you can do to grow and defend your business. When used effectively, email marketing can make a huge impact to your communication strategy. Whether that be by increasing website visits, driving customer engagement, boosting online sales or seeking referrals.
Building an email list can be challenging and you won’t do it overnight. But here we’ll share 5 easy ways you can increase your email sign ups, start to build an email marketing campaign and engage with customers and prospects alike.
1. Website Sign-Up Form
Adding a newsletter sign-up form to your website is a perfect way to capture email addresses of people who want to hear from you. If you want people to subscribe consider giving them immediate access to something they are interested in so they get a benefit for opting in.
For example, you could;
#1 Offer discount of a product or service or a coupon to use against purchases
#2 Free content
Give away content that directly attracts your key customer. Popular content is a ‘how to’ video, ebook, article or factual download. It simply needs to be something with perceived value to the customer that will attract them to purchase more from your business in the future.
Remember to make your sign-up form and your terms and clear information about what people are consenting to receive visible across your website. Not just on your home page, but throughout the site and even multiple times on each page. This way any customer landing on your website is sure to see the incentive and sign up option. Avoid pop-up subscription windows. According to Hubspot, in 2017 81% of viewers have exited a webpage or closed a browser because of a pop-up ad.
2. Competitions
One of the fastest ways to grow your email list is to offer customers an incentive for signing up. There’s no better way to do this than to offer customers the chance to win a free product, or experience just for signing up to receive your newsletter. Social media comes into its own here, it's a great platform for developing successful competitions.
The perceived value of the ‘gift’ should be attractive. Check the competition and raffle rules on the social media platform(s) you're using as they all vary. You’ll need to make your data gathering intentions clear and be very specific with your data policy terms.
3. Social media
By advertising your email sign-up link on your Facebook page, Instagram or twitter feed you can encourage your followers to sign up to your newsletter so they can keep up with the latest news and updates. Target your audience; create sign-up content that is discrete to the channel. For example, Pinterest attracts far more women than men, (71% women) so if your sign-up message can be adapted for gender interest, you should get better take-up.
With social media, offer your customers a reason to sign up to your newsletter and make sure you can get the benefit message across visually. Social media users are visually engaged; posts with images get over twice as much engagement as text posts.
Think about what the benefits are. Do you share behind the scenes content that you don’t post anywhere else? Do you offer free tips and advice on caring for your products? If so, tell your audience so they feel as if they would be missing out by not signing up. This would also be a perfect way of advertising a special offer, or promotion that you only share with those that receive your emails.
Extra tip: Take ten minutes to schedule a repeated post once every month or so that simply asks readers to sign up and includes a link to your registration form.
4. Email signature link(s)
Often overlooked but so obvious. Add a signup link to your email signature.
5. Events
If you attend events, trade shows, networking meeting then capturing email addresses of those interested in buying from you is now even easier. With Mailchimp’s handy app, you can easily collect details of customers or interested parties, with just a quick fill of a form. Try offering an incentive for people to sign up, and don’t forget to mention you’ll be sharing highlights of your event or trade show and much more.
One final note; stay up to date with data legislation. Regardless of how you attract sign-ups to your email list, always be watertight with your data policy and opt-in processes.
Remember also that emails don't have an infinite lifespan. As your list grows over time, it's only natural that some inboxes will be turned off or left dormant. In order to stop this from translating into email bounces and a damaged sender reputation, be sure to use an email list cleaning tool to identify and remove any bad data.
Learn more about why email verification is essential for your business.
The effort you put into building your email list is one of the best investments you can make.
