6 Powerful Strategies To Build Your Email List
For any business, large or small, building an email list from which you can directly market your services to a warm, interested audience is definitely a must. This is one of your best opportunities to reach out to your audience and develop long-term relationships with them. In fact, email is one of the core time-proven marketing strategies that, used correctly, can drive as much revenue for your business as the combined efforts of social media and websites. It is undoubtedly one of the smartest things you can do to start and grow your business, so why not start today?
Given these promising features and benefits of creating an email list, the real challenge is on how you are going to make it happen, how you are going to capitalise on it, and build it up to make sure that it effectively serves its purpose of creating revenue, financial growth, and freedom for you and your business. Here are some of the most powerful ways you should consider in building your email list.
- Get to know exactly who your audience is
While you should ideally be aiming to grow your email list to numbers like six to seven digits or even more, you want to remember that not all of those people might share the interest and enthusiasm in what you do. Having just anyone on your list is not going to do you any favours. You need to target a specific kind of audience that would be interested in your services — the ones who your services are designed to help. Imagine you’ve got thousands of subscribers, yet only 5% of them show interest in your business. Your grand number of subscribers here can technically and practically be deemed almost useless. In other words, remember that you are not just building a list for the sake of building a list.
Instead, your build efforts should be focused on getting email sign-ups from a specific kind of audience — your ideal clients. Focus on who you are trying to help and what their traits are. Through this, you will become very closely acquainted with the problems they face, their wants, and their needs. This information should lead your marketing strategy and messaging too, so spend time really getting to know your ideal customer.
2. Make use of free tools and software
Using good software for your email list and CRM can make things easy and ensure success in your email marketing campaigns. This is something that you need to keep in mind especially if you want to automate your email marketing — and you 100% should in many areas! When you promote your email list through your website or on any social media platform, you want to make sure that the process of subscribing is super easy, to the extent that it can only be done a few clicks and inputting the minimum amount of data necessary. Never overwhelm your target audience with a complicated process of getting into your email list, or ask for any info from them that is not 100% essential, because the more you ask, the less likely they are to complete your opt-in process.
With the right platforms, as the business owner, the process of creating and sending information to your audience shouldn’t be taxing. You need to balance the features they offer, such as sign up or landing pages and automations with the ease of use, automation features, and costs when choosing your email marketing service provider. Taking note of this one decision can extremely impact your business.
Personally, I would recommend both Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign as two excellent programmes to use if you’re yet to get set up with a platform for list building and email marketing, and if you have any questions or need any help with this, feel free to book in a free call here and we can go through it together.
3. Create content that sparks engagement
Creating content on a regular basis is one of the best ways to build your email list. But what does viral content mean, and what can that do for you? Viral content means that the information you are creating excites and engages your subscribers, to the extent where they want to share it on your behalf.
To achieve this, not only does it have to be relevant to the people on your list, but it should also sound and appear appealing to them, add value, help them with their problems, or entertain. If this happens, people will share it, making your email list widely exposed to sign-ups outside of your usual reach.
4. Provide email content options
With all the best intentions and content in the world, there is of course always a probability that not all of your emails will be opened and not all of your audience will see an article coming from your business. So by adding alternate options for consuming your content and repurposing it into different formats, you create a contingency plan for if and when this happens within your email list, so your effort isn’t wasted. It’s generally smart to have a few different options along with the main content that you provide to hit important messages home.
This is also the right time to integrate your giveaways, discounts, or free tools and resources. No one wants to give up their data for free, so by offering different freebies (or lead magnets as they’re generally known) that they need to sign up to your list to access, you offer a fair exchange. You get their data, they get a free tool, which also demonstrates the quality of what you do and gets them excited about working with you. Everyone’s a winner!
5. Build your list with a website pop-up
It cannot be denied that using pop-ups the right way gives an excellent conversion rate to help quickly build your list. As it’s shown on your website, it’s already going to people who are interested in what you do, and quickly grabs their attention. But you need to be careful with your use of popups, as they should adhere to Google’s interstitial ad guidelines in order to avoid their penalties. Also, do a little research on what’s working for your competitors, and what carrots they’re dangling, to help you select the type of pop-ups and overlays to substantially grow your email list.
A great email welcome pop-up is your way of greeting your visitors to the website, mostly within the first 15 seconds of them settling on the landing page. That is the most crucial email sign-up opportunity, and one that you certainly do not want to take for granted. You can maximise this time by offering discounts, sales notifications, content upgrades, squeeze pages, and other value exchange forms. You can likewise include gamification forms like quizzes, tests, surveys, spin-to-win, and scratch cards to make things more fun and encourage sign ups.
But more than anything, you need to make it appear as simple as possible. The simplest way is just to ask them to enter an email address, no more, no less. That means that you should minimise the clicks it takes to subscribe. The rule of thumb is that the more simple your opt-in form in terms of the data it collects, the more likely someone is going to subscribe, so don’t ask them for any details that aren’t 100% essential. Similarly, the fewer steps between a consumer being interested and them subscribing helps you grow.
6. Build your tribe with loyalty and referral programmes
If you intend to build your email list, it’s important to remember that your existing subscribers can greatly help you. How do you get them to do this? Give them incentives or rewards. In one way or another, you are assured that your customers will continue to avail of your services, for every day, they will be looking forward to receiving rewards from your business. But it is necessary that when this happens, it is easy to sign up, and the benefits are really noteworthy. These can include sales, gifts, events, content, and more, which are made relative to their personal experience.
Then, utilise the power of word-of-mouth marketing. You provide even more rewards to your consistent subscribers by referring to your products and services. Studies show that people are more inclined to trust recommendations from friends and family than brand communications. Your customers can get rewards by successfully referring new people to sign up to your email list, and becoming part of your growing business.
Following these tips and strategies guarantees significant growth for your list and business, so long as you put in the effort to make it happen. Building a great email list to drive revenue and repeat purchases can be challenging, but with the right intention and focus, coupled with strategic marketing abilities, your business is one step closer to becoming the next big success in your sector.
As always, if you have any questions, or if I can be of help in any way, drop me an email on eve@fantheflames.co.uk or send me a DM.
Best,
Eve Scragg
Fan The Flames Marketing & Design
www.fantheflames.co.uk
