Growing an email list has become a top priority for an organization that knows its relevance. However, it is not so easy to build an email list in a particular niche or to maintain an email list. The email database degrades about 22.5% yearly.
This is because your contact email addresses move from one organization to another, people take up new careers, and some would opt-out of your email communication over time.
Therefore, finding creative ways of adding fresh and relevant email contact should be of utmost priority if you want to grow your business. This is why we have come up with the top 5 ways to grow your email list. This list is compiled from strategies that you can ask our email marketing services team to train you on, or provide outsourced as a turnkey service to take the heavy lifting off your plate.
What is Email Marketing Automation?
Email marketing automation offers businesses the opportunity to drive sales through online channels and mediums. Email marketing automation is also used in building a relationship between customers, clients, and businesses. And in other forms, email marketing can be used to keep clients and customers informed and updated.
With Email marketing automation, customized emails are sent electronically to potential customers without much lift required from individual users, outside of ensuring that the automations are programmed properly
Personalized Email Marketing
Particular groups of customers or a niche can be targeted, and sometimes individuals can also be targeted through email marketing. For instance, some organizations use email marketing to send birthday wishes while at other times, email campaigns are used to send seasonal messages to a particular group of people or customer segments.
When sending campaigns, it is important to note that personalized emails provide for a better experience. Personalized email marketing helps a business maintain or develop a relationship with their customers over time. This can result in increased sales, ensure customer loyalty, and increase profitability.
Best Practices
Developing your email list is one of the best practices in email marketing. It is important not to buy an email list for the following reason.
- When you buy an email list, the contact would not know who you are and would most likely classify your campaign as spam. It is important for contact to permit you to send email campaigns to them.
- When you buy an email list, most of the contact would not be in your business niche, so your campaign effort and money may be wasted.
- Strictly adhere to the rules of the CAN-SPAM act. These rules state that you should not use deceptive subjects in your emails. You should also make provisions for un-subscription at the bottom of your email.
- For those doing newsletters you should endeavor to stick to schedules
- It is vital to optimize your email to be mobile-friendly. This is because over 70% of emails are accessed through mobile devices.
Advantages of Email Marketing
Email marketing offers unique advantages to other forms of marketing. Email marketing is cost-effective, easy to deploy, and fast to implement. Email marketing is traditionally less expensive than other forms of marketing. It is very easy to set up, and most emails can be reused with little or no modification.
Tracking is very easy, and it's also very accessible. Almost every internet user has a functional email address meaning a good campaign mechanism can significantly boost your business. Let’s see a few statistics to prove this:
- 95% of Internet users have a functional email address.
- 80% of online users agree that email marketing is their preferred marketing system.
- The "opt-in" feature allows for consent, and the "Opt-out'' feature is also loved by most people.
- Email marketing offers more analytics and reporting functionality, such as open rates, bounce rates, conversion, and click-through rates.
It is a fact that email marketing is much more efficient than social media marketing. Customers and prospects are more likely to see and read your email than social media adverts.
When you post on social media, it does not necessarily mean that everyone would see your post, but when you send an email message, it delivers right into the mailbox of the prospects and stays there for as long as it does not get deleted.
The Best Five Ways of Building Your Email List
1. Creating a Pop-Up Lightbox on Your Website
Using a pop-up light-box in some important segments of your website or article has proved to be an effective way of growing your email list. This is a technique where you present your messages directly to your website visitors and encourage them to sign up for more.
When you use a light-box correctly, it can help you improve the user experience. It is important to program your light-box not to pop up immediately; the visitor lands on the page. A good strategy is allowing ample visitor time on the page or at the end of the article before your light-box appears. It can also be used when the user is about to exit the page.
2. Content Upgrades
A content upgrade is another effective means of growing your email list. In this method, you give away free materials to your website visitors but request their email addresses for it to be delivered. It could be training materials, news, information, or any other. At the end of an article, you can add a link text that read, "To get volume two of this material, please click on the link." When your website visitors click it would request for their emails to get the volume 2 of the material
3. Encourage Your Visitors and Subscribers to Share Your Email
You should include social sharing buttons on your post and other website content. That way, people can share their content with their friends and colleagues, and they would be able to see your mail or navigate to your website. Once you can expand your network and your website traffic, you would get more email subscriptions. At the bottom of your emails, you can also place a subscription link. It will also benefit you if you add a link to your employee signature.
4. Use Social Media to Promote Your Email List
Promoting your email list through social media can significantly enhance your email list database. There are millions of active Facebook users, and you would get some people to opt-in with good social media content. You can carry out the following on your social media pages to help promote your email list
- You can promote an offer through your Facebook timeline
- Add the call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook company or business page
- Publish links gated offers through your social media profiles
- Use Pinterest to promote visual content
- Add good engagement features to your YouTube channels
- Add hyperlinked end cards to your videos on YouTube and lots more
To learn more about growing your email list, check out this resource on creating email lists for marketing campaigns.
Blogging on Your Website and Guest Blogging on Other Websites
Creating blogs that users can subscribe to is an effective way of growing your email campaign database. If you don't blog, you should start blogging. Blogging does not only increase your search engine ranking, but it can enable you to collect a large email list over time.
At the end of each blog post or the center, you can place a link that visitors can use in opting in to your email list. Ensure you develop rich content for your blogs. Everyone cannot land on your page, and this is why you have to leverage other websites and blogs to promote your email campaign list.
There are a lot of websites and publishers that can let your guest blog on their site. When you guest blog, ensure to drop inline text that tracks back to your website. Also, drop a call to action button for an email subscription and link your author's byline.
Effective E-Mail Marketing Tips
Adopting the above five strategies can significantly grow your email database. However, you should be aware of good email marketing tips to give in other to boost productivity.
Some of the tips include:
- Understand your market audience
- Keep your emails short and precise
- Personalize your email
- Your emails should be consistent but not too frequent
- Use white spaces to improve readability
- Repeat successful emails
Get The Exposure You Deserve
Email marketing can substantially expose your business, ensure customer or brand loyalty, and increase your income if you do it correctly. Getting people to visit your website and subscribing to your email list is a great way to scale up your business The five ways mentioned are effective ways to get people to sign up for your email list and grow your database of 1st party data.
You can also adopt more than one technique at the same time to improve your email list subscription. When you get a good email list, ensure to employ an efficient marketing strategy to keep your customers engaged and happy.
