Start Off with Targeted Lists
Every successful campaign must start with a list. However, it shouldn’t be a list of every email you can find. Rather, it should be targeted and segmented. Some of the most important priorities for building email lists are:
- Focusing on quality by getting real information from people. Never purchase your list.
- Target those who have a genuine interest in your service.
- It’s about quality, not quantity. Focus on volume once you have achieved the first two.
The Five Ways to Start Building a List
When you want to start building your list, your online store is one of the best places to turn towards. After all, some of the most valuable subscribers will be interested shoppers yet haven’t committed to purchasing on their first site visit. So, what can you do to gather more emails?
Add pop-up offers to your homepage – it’s one section in the customer journey where discounts can prove to be useful and have a high conversion rate. Research has shown that pop-ups can drastically increase email signups with the right offer catered to the right audience.
Add an email signup form within the footer of your website or your navbar. These are great locations where shoppers are inclined to look around. They are also a brilliant way to test out small offers. Although conversion rates aren’t going to be as high as the homepage, shoppers can still be enticed in.
Collecting email addresses at your next pop-up event is a fantastic way for emerging brands to build some much-needed awareness. It will give customers a chance to have hands-on experience with the product and receive product feedback. It’s simple to bring along a clipboard and ask people to write down their email addresses and names or an iPad if you want to be slick and tech-savvy. You could even go further and include a special offer to entice audience members to sign up, for instance, 25% of your first online purchase with an email provision.
Incorporate signup buttons on all of your social media channels. People use social media for many reasons. However, did you know that one of the prevailing reasons is staying up-to-date on new products and releases? If you can provide an option for an email list that may help users stay up-to-date, it can be a real winner. Check what platform you’re using because not all of them are as link-friendly as you might think, but there are usually workarounds. Use a really strong call to action, with no ambiguity as to what you’d like the user to do.
Now that we’ve gone through ways of building lists, how can you accelerate their growth? Let’s find out more.
Accelerating Email List Growth
So, you’ve laid down a solid foundation and have some new subscribers – how can you keep your list growing strong? Let’s go through some more advanced tactics and some somewhat unorthodox solutions that really work.
Chatbots provide fun ways of engaging your audience and save you valuable time. It’s a technology that uses automation to its full potential, and you should use it to promote special offers and calls to action for users to sign up via email.
Investigate a number of email list apps because you will find that many of them are easy to use and have some clever features. They can even integrate with other third-party extensions and online platforms such as Shopify. Failsafe favorites such as SignalHire can find real-time verified contact emails. Some really quirky apps such as Spin to Win collect email addresses and offer out prizes and discounts that you set. Another fun one, Personizely, has a host of features that helps you, alert visitors, with just-in-time popups.
Landing pages are often useful places for building email lists, primarily because you can create specific offers on them without too many distractions. People are very engaged when they hit the landing page.
People love a good questionnaire. They provide easy ways of engaging with your target audience, collecting valuable email addresses in the process. Forms can easily be created using third-party tools such as Google Forms or Typeform. Moreover, you can also carry out much-needed market research in the process. Let everybody see your questionnaire – friends, family, posted on Facebook groups, and of course mention it on all social channels. Ensure that you also include special offers for people who fill out such questionnaires, thereby making it a more enticing prospect. It’s the failsafe way of getting an email address from a user who is highly interested in what you do.
Offering free items in exchange for providing an email address increases the incentive and the likelihood that someone will subscribe. Freebies are used to swing people in the right direction, providing a more immediate reward. Bread and butter type approaches include how-to guides and free offers, but feel free to shake things up a little. You can get creative and offer partnerships with complementary brands, mixing up your offers and getting promotional partners to sweeten the deal. As an example, if you sell flowers online, you could entice email subscribers to $30 of free chocolates at a partner website.
Holding giveaways and contests on social media channels can really help turbocharge growth. One of the best things about this method of gaining great email contacts is that you can turn a subscribing act into a sharable event. It’s a great route to go down when you’re still in your early days of marketing, and you don’t have a lot of existing traffic to leverage. If you can partner up with other companies that sell to similar types of customers, this can boost the whole strategy. If you get the right partner on board, you’ll find that products will naturally complement one another, which makes your offer much more compelling than if you were to run a contest alone.
Last but not least, if you can leverage the power of an influencer. This is a great way to reach your ideal customers because influencers often give away things for their own gain. By offering your product in exchange to be publicized, you can get a lot of quality emails. It increases trust, as people generally trust their favorite influencers.
It’s not an exact science
We hope to have shown you some great ways to get started and grow an email list of reliable leads. Not every business is the same, so not every tip will work as well as the other, but that’s to be expected. Test out the market yourself to see what works best for you and your business. Now that you’ve got an arsenal of ideas at hand, go out there, get creative and build a solid email list. Once you’ve got emails at your hand, the sky’s the limit. Good luck!
