You are exceedingly proud of your weekly enewsletter. You’ve brainstormed with your team, refined it — and truly believe that it’s snappy, it’s informative and, most importantly, it provides your followers or customers with curated content they just can’t get anywhere else.
But none of that matters if nobody is reading it.
So how do you get people to happily turn over their email addresses so that you can build your email list and get your great content out to the masses? There’s lots of competition out there, but happily, there are also many simple strategies that can quickly and efficiently help you grow your email list.
Traditionally, marketers bought email lists. In recent years, this practice has sometimes been considered “spam” in some circles and is discouraged. But many business owners understand that purchasing targeted email lists is still a cost-effective way to generate new leads.
#1 Segment your email list.
According to a study by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), 77% of email marketing ROI came from targeted and segmented campaigns. This makes perfect sense: people are more likely likely to click through emails that target their specific interests. Here’s another statistic that may motivate you to segment: marketers who used segmented campaigns claimed to have achieved up to a 760% increase in revenue!
There are many different ways you can segment. You can choose to segment by geography, age, gender, industry, education, buying frequency—and more.
#2 Use an opt-in campaign.
Do you suspect that much of your list is no longer active? Create an engaging opt-in message and send it to your old list; encourage contacts to re-opt in if they’d like to. Then, promise to remove all contacts who don’t respond—and do it! “Though it may seem counterintuitive to remove folks from your email list to grow them, emailing contacts that you know are engaged can improve your deliverability and increase the odds of your email being shared with those outside your current database,” writes Andy Pitri in a Hubspot blog.
#3 Hyperlink employees' signatures.
You can set hyperlinked email signatures to lead people to a landing page where they can sign up for your mailing list. At this point, you are likely already in a growing email relationship with them, so subscribing to even more emails can be a natural next step.
#4 Collect email addresses at Events/Trade Shows/In Person
This method may sound old-fashioned—almost like using a rotary phone—but good old in-person networking still works. Trade shows, award ceremonies, or community events can provide excellent opportunities to grow your email list. You can use a paper sign-up sheet—just remember to transfer the emails to your computer when you return to the office. You can also use an iPad or another digital method to collect email addresses while out and about in the community.
#5 Redesign your Opt-in Form.
Sometimes, you lose a potential customer or follower simply because your opt-in form didn’t grab their attention. Perhaps you haven’t redesigned your basic opt-in form in years and the dated look means people are going to pass right over it without a second glance.
There are lots of ways you can freshen up your design; many email programs will provide you with templates to get started. Adding directional cues—think arrows—which tell your visitor where to focus are highly effective.
When it comes to converting visitors to customers, nothing produces the same result as pop-ups. “While a generic pop-up can be intrusive and annoying for your audience, exit intent pop-ups avoid this pitfall by detecting the moment a visitor is about to leave your site. Studies show that 70 percent of people who leave your site will never return. By using an exit intent pop-up, you can convert those abandoning visitors into subscribers,” writes Syed Balkhi in a 2020 KEAP blog.
After you redesign your opt-in form you will also want to experiment with where you place it. You can try putting it in the middle of a blog post, after a blog post, in your website footer or sidebar or in various specific pages throughout your site.
#6 Capture their attention with a 'Lead Magnet.'
With all the clutter out there, you need to offer some value to your potential customers. Take advantage of lead magnets. This is a basic term for a product or service that you give away for free to get an email sign up. These freebies can take many different forms: a video, several eBook chapters, an exclusive blog post, an email course, a planner or specialized calendar or a guide.
Lead magnets connect you directly with potential customers. This is because the calls to action attached to lead magnets ask people to provide their information and give you permission to reach out to them for relevant offers in the future. One study found that 50% of content creators who use lead magnets to encourage email signups report higher conversion rates. After all, a free product is hard to resist.
#7 Use Social Media.
Promoting your email list on your various social media channels is an important part of capturing new email addresses.
There are multiple ways you can do this. You can add a CTA (Call-to-Action) button on your Facebook page that links users to your sign-up landing page. Or you can tease your newsletter—share a snippet of it—right in a Facebook post. This may entice readers to sign up right then and there. You can also add a CTA to your Instagram bio; that way it is easy to access and doesn’t require extra work on the part of the user.
Hosting a ‘Twitter chat’ “can bring like-minded individuals together to ask questions and discuss particular topics. A Twitter chat about how to use a particular product, for example, may bring quite a few would-be customers looking for answers or support. When you host a Twitter chat, you’ll not only start a conversation that can build your social clout, but you’ll also be interacting with new Twitter users every time. Naturally, this leads to a dedicated, interested group of potential email leads,” writes Uttoran Sen in a blog on Optinmonster. “To learn how to host a Twitter chat, first attend a few chats in your industry to get a feel for how they work.”
Creating a contest remains one of the best ways to convert website visitors to customers. Try hosting a free giveaway that requires contact information to enter. Create excitement by creating a fun and catchy hashtag just or the contest; include enticing quality photos whether you are promoting a product, a trip or a service. And don’t forget to use countdown to encourage signups and remind people that there is only one day left to get in on this exciting offer.
Sometimes, you lose a potential customer or follower simply because your opt-in form didn’t grab their attention. Perhaps you haven’t redesigned your basic opt-in form in years and the dated look means people are going to pass right over it without a second glance.
There are lots of ways you can freshen up your design; many email programs will provide you with templates to get started. Adding directional cues—think arrows—which tell your visitor where to focus are highly effective.
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