Amid the rise of social media marketing, some marketers are overlooking email marketing, a proven method for nurturing leads, engaging with existing customers, and driving sales. A high-quality email list is essential for maximizing ROI in digital marketing campaigns. However, sending emails to disinterested recipients can lead to annoyance, legal issues, or bans from email providers.
This article will share 25 Proven Strategies to Grow Your Email List. It takes time and care but will pay off in higher sales revenue and stronger customer relationships. In addition, The Zulfis delivers exceptional value and strategic insights to optimize your digital marketing efforts. It takes time and care but will pay off in higher sales revenue and stronger customer relationships. Now, let's get started with how to grow your email list correctly.
What is an Email List?
An email list, also called a mailing list or subscribers list, is a collection of email addresses from visitors and customers who have consented to receive communications from a business. Moreover, these communications can include information, updates, or discounts. Your email list may grow and shrink as followers unsubscribe or new ones join over time.
Additionally, email marketing is a significant business asset and a highly effective digital marketing strategy. Nearly every customer has an email address, providing a vast audience for your messages. According to Litmus data, email marketing has the highest ROI of all digital marketing channels, including social media, returning $36 for every $1 spent. This highlights the immense potential of a well-managed email list.
In brief, understanding an email list is important and is the first step in leveraging this powerful marketing tool to build lasting customer relationships and drive sales.
Why Growing Your Email List is Important
Growing your email list is essential for several reasons. Such as:
1. Higher Engagement Rates
Emails allow you to connect directly with your audience. Unlike social media posts that might get lost in a feed, emails land directly in your subscribers' inboxes, leading to higher engagement rates.
2. Increased Sales and Revenue
A well-targeted email list can lead to higher conversion rates. Conversely, when you send personalized and relevant content to subscribers interested in your products or services, you will likely see increased sales and revenue.
3. Better Customer Relationships
Email marketing helps you build and maintain strong relationships with your customers. By regularly providing valuable content, updates, and exclusive offers, you can keep your audience engaged and loyal to your brand.
4. High ROI
Email marketing offers an excellent return on investment. As mentioned, it returns $36 for every $1 spent, making it one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies.
5. Ownership and Control
Unlike social media platforms, where algorithms and policies can change, you own your email list. Additionally, this means you have direct access to your subscribers without relying on third-party platforms.
6. Targeted Marketing
You can segment your audience with an email list based on their preferences, behavior, and demographics. However, this allows you to send highly targeted campaigns that are more likely to resonate with different segments of your audience.
7. Staying Top of Mind
Regular email communication keeps your brand at the forefront of your customers' minds. Whether it’s a monthly newsletter or a special promotion, consistent emails ensure your audience remembers your brand when they are ready to purchase.
Ultimately, growing your email list is vital for improving engagement, increasing sales, building better customer relationships, and achieving a high ROI. Understanding and leveraging the importance of a strong email list can significantly enhance your digital marketing efforts.
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25 Ways to Grow Your Email List
Building a high-quality email list requires a combination of strategies. Here are 25 effective tips to help you grow your list and engage your subscribers efficiently. For instance:
1. Create Valuable Content
Your followers signed up to receive emails from you for a reason. Your job is to make that signup worth their while by providing relevant content. Also, you will quickly lose subscribers if your content is boring or not applicable to your followers.
2. Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience will help you create content they like. Besides, you can track email analytics or information you’ve collected to inform your content. Consider demographics, customer behavior, and clicks to understand your audience better and give them more of the content they like.
3. Make Sharing Easy
Include buttons that link to your social media and “email a friend” links in all your emails to make your content easily shareable. Therefore, you don’t want your subscribers to work hard to send your content to another potential customer.
4. Segment Your List
Once you understand your audience, you can put them into groups via market segmentation. For example, segment them by age, location, or buyer behavior and send emails based on those groups. This makes your messages more targeted to each audience segment and more likely to be effective.
Tip: When gaining new subscribers, add relevant tags for segmentation purposes. For example, use tags like "Valentine's Day promo" or the event where you met the subscriber. This personalization helps tailor your emails to specific interests.
5. Opt-In Email Campaigns
If you have an old email list that doesn’t yield much engagement, send an email campaign with an opt-in message and a promise to remove any email addresses that don’t respond. Therefore, while removing contacts from your list might seem counterintuitive, it can give you better results by ensuring you only send emails to people who want to receive them.
FYI: Complying with email marketing data privacy laws is crucial. Violating regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act can result in significant fines.
6. Employee Email Signatures
Adding a link to a landing page where people can sign up for emails in all your employees’ email signatures is a quick and easy way to help build your email list.
7. Gated Offers
Say you have valuable content to offer, like whitepapers or business e-books. In other words, host this content on your website with a pop-up requiring visitors to enter their email addresses and opt-in to receive your emails to download it.
8. Quote and Resource Access
Similarly, you can require a customer to provide their email address if they want to contact you for a quote or access a unique resource your business offers on its website.
9. Contests and Giveaways
You could create a contest and require an email address to enter. Also, post about the contest on your social media pages to drum up interest and awareness. Include a link directing viewers to where they can sign up on your website.
10. Website Pop-Ups
Website pop-ups can be effective for gaining subscribers. “The single best method I’ve used to grow email lists rapidly is via website pop-ups,” said Kent Lewis, president and founder of Anvil Media. “Add a pop-up to your site to request an email address to send updates. Notably, the strategy still works, especially if you cookie the visitor and only prompt them once instead of every time they refresh or visit a new page. Ensure the incentive is articulated and relevant to your brand to maximize conversions.
11. Social Media CTAs
On your social media pages, add a CTA to sign up for your email list to make it easy for interested customers to sign up to receive your emails.
12. Feedback Forms
Visitors enjoy providing customer feedback on a topic they’re interested in, or that pertains to them. Provide a form on your website that asks them to leave their feedback on your business or website, and make their email address a required field.
13. Short Forms
When you ask customers to provide information, you don’t want to overwhelm them with lengthy forms that request extensive data upfront. Only ask for the basics, like their name and email address.
14. Facebook Groups
Facebook groups can yield engaged email recipients. “Over the years, I’ve added thousands to my email list by using Facebook groups,” said Rick Orford, author of The Financially Independent Millennial. “As part of the joining process, I ask for users’ email addresses in exchange for free information, such as a PDF. Facebook groups can be an invaluable way to increase engagement with your audience while allowing you the opportunity to keep in touch with everyone by email.”
15. Easy Subscription on Website
Customers wanting to subscribe to your emails shouldn’t have to search your website to find the subscribe button. Furthermore, make sure your email subscription process is straightforward and easy to find on multiple pages of your website.
FYI: Ensure your email subscriber forms clearly communicate what subscribers can expect, including content type, frequency, and any incentives they'll receive.
16. A/B Testing
When you start with email marketing, you still determine what content will perform best. To find out (or at least better predict) what works, send out different versions of the same email — with various subject lines or images, for example — to sample groups to see which performs better with your audience.
17. Setting Expectations
Let your subscribers know precisely what to expect. “Set expectations so that a subscriber knows exactly what [they are] signing up for and how often [they] will receive email from you, and immediately send a welcome email upon sign-up that matches the expectations you just set,” advised Katie Bonadies, content and social media strategist at Berxi.
Bottom Line: To improve your email marketing campaign, create a content calendar so you’ll plan in advance most of what you'll include in your emails.Furthermore, this will make creating your email campaigns faster and more focused.
18. Blogging
Starting a blog is a great way to boost your online presence. Blogs can increase your ranking on search engines and go a long way toward increasing brand awareness and establishing brand credibility.In addition, you can also collect email addresses via blog subscriptions and deliver quality content to subscribers’ inboxes.
19. Customer Reviews
Alongside a blog, providing a place for customers to leave reviews on your website can boost your image as a reputable business while giving you another opportunity to gather email addresses. An email address is required for users to leave reviews. Good customer reviews are a valuable form of user-generated content that brings credibility to your brand.
20. Patience in List Building
Excellent email lists aren’t built in a day. For example, “Don’t expect to have a massive email list overnight,” said Shmuel Fogel, project manager at Talmudico." In fact, it takes time to build email lists, but they can be extremely effective in marketing to your customers. By maintaining in-store signage, website banners, and campaigns to grow your email addresses year-round, you will ultimately build up a large list that continues to grow over time.
21. Trade Shows
There is always the old-fashioned way to collect emails: in person. Firstly, you must make a sign-up sheet readily available for anyone who stops by your booth or table and create a welcome email ready to go once you add the email addresses into your system.
22. QR Codes
Another quick and easy way to collect email addresses and maximize your advertising materials is to add a QR code to your printed advertisements and direct mail pieces. Moreover, this way, you can collect email addresses from posters or brochures and integrate direct mail with email marketing.
23. Incentives for Subscribers
Free content can be a strong enticement to join your email list. For example, “The best way to grow an email list is to offer some incentive for being on it,” advised Rex Freiberger, Co-CEO of Gadget Review." Sometimes, if customers want to know about an upcoming product or possible promotions, this is enough. Usually, they need enticement through free content, trial services, or large discounts.”
24. Timed Pop-Up Surveys
You can create surveys that pop up only after a customer has spent a certain amount of time on your website. This works because the customer is interested in your content and is a bit more likely to sign up to receive emails if you make it quick and easy.
25. Social Media Leverage
Lastly, your social presence is another tool for building an email list. “You can set up Twitter and Facebook campaigns to boost your lead generation efforts,” said Anthony Mixides, managing director of The London Vape Company. “By giving links to your various offerings and resources on social media, you allow more users to find you, and this helps you tap into a newer sect of people. This is also useful for growing your target audience base.”
Tip: The best email marketing services guide you on your campaigns, offering email marketing templates and advice on where to place elements like headers and CTAs.
Overall, these 25 strategies will help you grow your email list effectively, ensuring your subscribers are engaged and interested in your content. Let's move on to what you should avoid when building your email list.
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What to Avoid When Building an Email List
Building a solid email list is about knowing what to do and understanding what to avoid. Here are ten things you should steer clear of when growing your email list. Such as:
1. Don’t Buy Email Lists
Buying email lists is the #1 mistake marketers and business owners make when attempting to do so. While buying a list is the fastest way to reach users, it generally comes back to bite you because there’s no way to guarantee that the purchased email addresses are real or associated with users interested in your content. Also, you could purchase a list with 1,000 addresses but discover that only a few engage with your content.
FYI - You can create your own email list or hire a dedicated source or agency to build one based on your specific requirements. This ensures you have the most up-to-date and accurate email list for your marketing campaign. That's where The Zulfis® comes in to assist you. Learn more about our exceptional services today.
2. Don’t Add Email Addresses Without Permission
Adding email addresses without permission is a huge mistake many marketers make — and could even get you in legal trouble. Besides, you should only send marketing emails to people who have given you permission in some form.
FYI: There are two primary types of permission for email marketing:
- Implied Permission: This covers recipients with whom you have an existing business relationship, like current customers, donors, or website members.
- Express Permission: This is when someone gives you explicit permission to send them emails, such as by entering their information in a subscription form.
3. Don’t Ask for Too Much Information
When asking someone to provide personal information for your email campaign, you don’t want to ask for too much and risk becoming a spammer. Therefore, make subscribing quick and easy and make the customer feel comfortable providing you with their contact information. Also, give the customer plenty of time to learn about your business and establish that you are a credible organization.
4. Don’t Offer a Nonvaluable Incentive
Offering an incentive is a common way to get people to sign up for a targeted email list. However, it can backfire if the incentive isn’t valuable to the customer. For example, you don’t want to offer a coupon that expires the next day or a discount that can only be applied at one store at a specific time. Make your incentive valuable to — and usable by — as many customers as possible.
5. Don’t Use Stolen Email Addresses
Obtaining email addresses fraudulently is a huge mistake. “There are bots that can search the web and aggregate a list of found emails,” explained Steffa Mantilla, founder of Money Tamer. “If you add these emails to your list, you’ll likely get reported as spam, and your deliverability will decrease drastically.”
6. Don’t Skip the Welcome Email
When a new subscriber signs up, send a welcome email immediately. Besides, this greeting makes the new subscriber feel valued and encourages them to become a repeat customer. On the other hand, your welcome email should have a clear subject line, engaging visuals and content, and a link to whatever incentive you promised when they signed up.
7. Don’t Use Paid Advertising Too Soon
You don’t want to grow your email list with paid advertising until it’s proven,” according to Kelan and Brittany Kline, founders of The Savvy Couple. “You always want to focus on organic growth to find what works, and then you can scale things up by running paid ads.
8. Don’t Send Emails Without a Goal
A clear goal for your email marketing campaign and each email you send will go a long way in making your emails worth your subscribers’ while. Also, if you don’t want to send out emails for the sake of sending emails, subscribers will likely be put off by content that isn’t valuable to them.
In addition, you should know what you want to accomplish with your emails before you send them. Before sending your emails, determine your objectives. Are you planning to distribute an email newsletter with company updates? Perhaps you aim to decrease shopping cart abandonment. Or are you sending out a discount code? Maybe your goal is to implement an email re-engagement strategy to encourage inactive subscribers to return.
"Whatever your intention, shape your email marketing content around that goal!"
9. Don’t Be Disingenuous in Your Emails
I’d stay away from anything disingenuous to the reader,” said Jakub Rudnik, head of content marketing at Scribe. “Ultimately, any bait-and-switch tactics will lead to the sign-ups you earned unsubscribing more often than not. People are protective of their inboxes, so tell them exactly what content they’ll get and how often they’ll get it. You’ll gain their trust far better that way.
10. Don’t Send Too Many (or Not Enough) Emails
With email marketing, the best way to retain your customers is to be consistent in your sending habits and let subscribers know what to expect. If you send a burst of five emails every few months or three emails every day, your subscribers could get annoyed and unsubscribe.
Finally, set and stick to a regular posting schedule. Many email marketing services have scheduling features to make this effortless, even allowing you to schedule emails months in advance.
By avoiding these common mistakes, you can build a stronger, more engaged email list that supports your marketing goals and fosters better relationships with your subscribers.
Conclusion
In conclusion, growing a high-quality email list is crucial to successful email marketing. It requires a blend of strategic actions, valuable content, and an audience understanding. By implementing the 25 tips in this article, you can build an email list that grows in size, engagement, and effectiveness.
Avoid common pitfalls such as buying email lists or sending emails without permission. Also, focus on providing value to your subscribers and maintaining a consistent and genuine communication strategy.
Building an excellent email list takes time and effort, but the payoff is substantial. With a robust email list, you can achieve higher sales revenue, stronger customer relationships, and an impressive ROI. Start implementing these strategies today, and watch your email list and business grow.
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