Easy Tactics to Grow Your Email List

2020 has been a rough year for everyone, including businesses. With everyone spending more time at home, it is important to find ways to reach buyers online. Sending out emails has been and will continue to be a valuable form of marketing. Although if you don’t already have an online audience it can feel overwhelming to get started.

In our previous article, we discussed why email marketing is important and how you can use it to grow your audience. Today we will cover how to grow your contact list and specific terms you need to be aware of before you launch your first campaign. All it takes is a few easy steps to get started and to see customers start visiting your website and making purchases.

How To Increase Your Email Subscribers

Run Opt-In Ads to Target New Customers

An easy way to begin to fill your email list is to run opt-in ads. By opt-in ads, we mean someone who voluntarily chooses to be added to your email list through an ad shown on a third-party site. This is typically done through a registration form to make it easy for the user.

By running ads you can target places you think your customers are on. Social media sites, blogs, and retail store websites are all places that you can proactively reach customers through. With an opt-in ad, you can receive something tangible (email address) from those who view your ad instead of it just being something they scroll past.

Another great advantage is that they give you the opportunity to win back unsubscribers. You can target those who have unsubscribed with new and updated content. Users then have the opportunity to come back and reengage.

Gather Email Addresses From Your Website

If you already have a good amount of traffic coming to your website, there are several ways you can gather email addresses. Don’t let customers leave your website without giving you something and without you providing them with a promise of valuable content.

1. Popups: Although they are often criticized, email popups work! When customers visit your website they most likely will never scroll to the bottom where most people place their email subscription form. With a popup, you can make signing up for your email list unmissable. You can also vary the number of times a user sees a popup and choose which pages to activate it on – try a popup on your website and see if your email numbers rise!
2. Subscription Forms: The easiest way to gather email addresses is by embedding a subscription form into your website. This is simply a form that lets the user give you their name, address, and any other information you think is relevant to your business. These can be added anywhere on your website multiple times!
3. Gated Content: When a user visits your website, providing them with a form of downloadable content is an efficient way to gather email addresses. Gated content could be a worksheet, interactive guide, or a list of resources. People are more willing to give you their email address if they are sure that they are going to receive something valuable!

Use Social Media to Promote Your Email Subscription

Social media is a formidable marketing tool and you can use it to gather email addresses. Posting on your business page isn’t seen as a personal message because you have to target everyone who sees your posts. If you can get a user’s email address by using social media strategies, you are able to add a personal touch to your marketing by sending a targeted message.

Promoting your email subscription is the most straightforward approach. Make it clear what problem you are going to solve with the content you are sending. You can also promote your gated content alongside articles you have written. When the user clicks on the link a form to gather email addresses will be the first thing they see. Try blocking off some time each week to grow your email list and the value of the contacts you obtain will far surpass the time it took.

What We Don’t Suggest

Gathering email addresses isn’t hard, but it can be a long process. You might be tempted to take an easier route to speed up the process. Companies will suggest that you can buy email lists for quicker results, but these email addresses won’t be from people who wanted to read your content and are excited to see your emails in their inbox.

Email Terms You Need to Know

Before you send your first email, you should be familiar with a few of the email terms that will help you understand how well your campaign is doing.

Spam Score

After your hard work on crafting your email and sending it out to your list, the last thing you want is for it to end up in the spam folder. Spam Score is what determines where the message will end up. The higher the positive spam score, the higher the probability that the message is spam. The lower the score, the more likely your email will be received in your subscriber’s main inbox.

You also want to make sure that your email subscribers won’t mark your email as spam. Make sure the email looks professional, includes credible links, and includes a personal touch. A high spam score can derail a campaign. You can check your score on sites like Sender Score or Mail Tester.

Open Rate

Your email open rate is one of the most important metrics to measure the success of your email campaign. None of your tactics will matter if your emails aren’t getting opened in the first place.

Your average email open rate should be around 15-25%. You can see these results by using services like Mailchimp which give you a full report on each email sent. Try improving your open rate by making your subject lines more engaging or sending from a member of your staff instead of your main business email.

Click-Through Rate

After your subscriber has opened your email, your next goal is to get them to visit your website or the other external links provided in the email. The measurement of this is your click-through rate. Your average click-through rate should be around 2.5%.

To improve your click-through rate, try adding large buttons and hyperlinks to resources that can urge the reader to click. A higher click-through rate can mean more visits to your website which is also something you should be working to improve!

Start Building Your List

Now that you know how to build your email list, get started today! Make a goal for 2021 to grow your list by a certain percentage or number of subscribers. More subscribers equal more sales!

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