Powerful Strategies For Building Your Email List
Email marketing is undoubtedly the most successful method for building a list of customers. It also serves as a great medium for reaching out to your customers simultaneously and converting them into lifetime profits. But if you're just starting up or running an e-commerce business, then chances are you may not have even started your email list management strategies yet.
Email marketing is an incredibly useful way to directly communicate and interact with your customers. As an entrepreneur, you can use email lists to send out information about new products or services, daily deals, special offers, or any other pertinent information that will entice more people to buy from you. You can even use it for customer service purposes—to let customers know about deals on items they have purchased from you or to give them information about a product or service that they might be interested in.
“Email marketing revenue is estimated to reach almost 11 billion by the end of 2023.”
However, your email list isn't going to do you any good if no one is on it, so you'll need to make sure that you're putting some effort into building one. You can't just expect people to sign up for your list—you'll have to work for it! In this blog post, we'll be covering some of the most effective strategies for building your email list.
Building an email list is a vital part of any business's marketing strategy, but it can be difficult to know where to start. Email marketing is a great way to engage with customers and create a lasting connection that continues long after the sale has been made.
Source: Klaviyo
The first step in building an email list is deciding what you want to use it for. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of ways you could utilize an email list but if you start with one goal, it gives you focus. An example of a specific goal would be to drive traffic back to your website through offers via email. This could mean giving away valuable resources like ebooks or white papers or simply offering a discount code in your next newsletter.
Why list building is so important?
List building is a core part of any successful business, so it's important to get your strategy right. If you can accomplish all three of the following, you'll be well on your way to having a list that generates sales for you regularly:
Having an email list helps you scale your business in a sustainable way
Sending out newsletters to your list will help you keep in touch with your customers and maintain transparency about what's happening with your company
If you have difficulty getting people to take action on social media (such as clicking on links or sharing posts), then an email list is a great place for those people to take action and engage with you
The First Thing You Need to Know About Building an Email List
You must understand the basics of email list building before you can expand your efforts. Some aspects of list building are regulated by law, so it’s important to know what you’re allowed to do before you begin.
Here are some basics to consider:
In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act sets out rules for commercial email and gives consumers the right to opt out and unsubscribe from email communications. In Canada, CASL provides similar protections. But since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is the most aggressive privacy and security law in the world, most brands adhere to it.
GDPR Basics:
People have the right to know how their data is collected and why.
When someone asks, you must delete all the data you have about that person.
You’re only allowed to collect personal data from people who have given you explicit consent.
You need to add consent checkboxes to any sign-up forms that don’t clearly state what people are signing up for and why you need their information.
When someone subscribes to your email list, use double opt-in by asking them to confirm their subscription via email before adding them to your list.
All emails need an obvious unsubscribe link, and it needs to be easy to unsubscribe.
Source: Klaviyo
Compliance
A solid compliance program starts with a thorough understanding of the laws and regulations that its organization is subject to, and then builds in policies, procedures, and resources to ensure consistent compliance.
Marketers that don't understand the full scope of their responsibilities can put their organizations at serious risk. In the worst cases, they can face severe penalties or even see their business shut down by regulators. And in far too many cases, digital marketers run afoul of regulators because they have failed to adequately invest in building a compliant organization—one that conducts its operations with a focus on consumer privacy and other regulatory requirements.
Strategies for Email List Building
Create an opt-in offer
Your opt-in offer is the incentive you give to your visitors in exchange for their email address. It can be a free report, ebook, or video series that helps them solve a problem they have.
The more specific your opt-in offer is, the better. If you're selling dog health products, don't just offer a free report on dog health — offer one on how to cure arthritis in dogs. This gives you more options for creating content down the road and helps you target your audience more effectively.
Use pop-ups on your website
Pop-ups are one of the most powerful strategies for building your email list. They’re easy to setup and can have a significant impact on your conversion rate.
Pop-ups come in all shapes and sizes, but they all have one thing in common: they appear on the screen when someone visits your site. They can be triggered by any number of actions, including clicking on a page or scrolling down. The first step to using pop-ups is to make sure you know what type of content you want to promote with them. Are you trying to build an email list? Get people to sign up for a free course? Convince them to buy something? Or are you just looking for more social shares?
Offer freebies on your website
There are plenty of ways to build your email list. One is by giving away free resources on your website that people will want to sign up for in order to get access to. This can include things like e-books, printables, and other downloadable materials.
A bonus of having a robust email list is the fact that if you offer them a freebie in exchange for their contact information, you'll have an opportunity to let them know about upcoming products or services that you might be launching. According to one survey, 72% of consumers prefer getting emails from businesses they're familiar with over signing up for promotional emails from new brands.
Use social media to attract new subscribers
Social media is a great resource for growing your email list. Facebook and Twitter are especially good for this because they're social platforms, meaning that people are already present there to connect with each other—and you get to be a part of that.
Incorporating social media into your marketing plan is a great way to attract new subscribers, but it's also important to remember that the same rules apply online as they do in real life: you can't just shout what you want from people and expect them to give it to you. You have to offer up something valuable in exchange. That doesn't mean that social media has to be an advertisement for your business—you can give people something more like a gift, and build your list at the same time.
One way of doing this is through content curation. In essence, you're creating a resource for other people by collecting articles and posts from elsewhere on the web and sharing them with your audience. What this does is show readers that you're a helpful source of information, but it also gives them something of value: knowledge that they might not have had otherwise.
Add an email signup below every blog post
The most direct way to build your email list is to make it as easy as possible for your readers to subscribe. If you're writing an awesome blog post, and you have a freebie or giveaway at the end of it, don't hide the signup form in a dark corner—put it at the bottom of the post! Maybe even make it big and bold so people can't miss it. Make it clear that by providing an email address, they'll get a copy of the freebie, too. That way, you're building your list while also giving people something they want. In fact, we've found that on our blog our most successful posts are those that give away something valuable in exchange for an email address.
Offer multiple opt-in points
Opt-in boxes aren't just for landing pages, sales copy, and blogs. If you want to get more subscribers, then you want to put opt-in forms in places that your potential fanbase spends time reading.
In an article by startup marketing expert Neil Patel , he breaks down a few different ways to build your email list through various sections of your site.
Here are some brief descriptions and their resulting sections:
Contact Us Box : A contact us box is a good way to start building your list because it's simple. Just make sure it's easy for users to subscribe by adding an email address field with an auto fill feature.
Sidebar : Putting a sidebar opt-in box in the sidebar of each page on your site is a great way to capture emails, but it can be annoying if users have to scroll to see the content of your page.
Content : The most powerful way of all is in the content itself. Adding an opt-in form after every 1,000 words of content is optimal for capturing emails without losing readers' attention to your content.
Create an opt-in quiz
Quizzes are a great way to get people to sign up for your email list. Asking questions that relate to common interests or topics your audience is interested in will help you develop contacts who are truly invested in what you have to say. Once they've taken the quiz, they are more likely to want to receive your emails and newsletters because it's something they've expressed interest in.
It's important that your quiz doesn't just collect information about them, but also provides value of some kind, whether it be entertainment, education or a coupon for a free product/service. Always include a call-to-action at the end of the quiz to encourage sign ups for your newsletter.
Run a contest or promotion
If you're not already familiar with it, running a contest or promotion is one of the most effective ways to grow your email list. Asking for an email address before you send a special offer, freebie, or other premium content will help you build your audience in two ways:
In the short term, control over your marketing campaign means that you can send a single, well-timed message to your target audience rather than having to rely on social media or other platforms to draw people back to your site. In the long term, you'll build up a database of people who have opted in to hear from you. These people may not be ready to buy from you yet, but they are much more likely to do so in the future if they've already been exposed to your brand and trust that you'll deliver something valuable when the time is right.
Conclusion
In the end, building an effective list of subscribers isn't something that simply happens overnight. It requires a lot of time investment, and often includes a hefty monetary investment as well. If it's something you want to do, though, there are steps you can take to get on your way. These strategies should serve as a great starting point for anyone looking to build their lists—whether you're a blogger or someone with another kind of website.