For those who don’t have much familiarity with running a business or handling digital marketing, an email list may seem like just another time-consuming task that takes resources away from other strategic objectives. But when you study the role of email lists in modern marketing, it becomes clear that they aren’t really optional. They’re actually integral to maximizing success.
In a piece for Campaign Monitor, internet marketing guru Neil Patel says, “Out of all the channels I tested as a marketer, email continually outperforms most of them.” Corey Dilley, marketing manager at Unbounce, says, “Email marketing consistently generates 80-90% of our landing page traffic when we launch a new campaign, piece of content or product feature. Email allows us to engage our audience in a creative, personalized way that blog posts or tweets can’t.”
Thousands of other marketing experts, gurus, and seasoned entrepreneurs would highlight email in a similar light. Each person or business may have a unique use for email, but it all starts with building and growing a powerful list.
Try These 5 Tips and Tricks
Okay, email sounds great, but how do you actually build your list? Where do you even start? While there’s no secret formula or hack that’s going to take you from zero to 100,000 subscribers, there are some tried and true principles that you can use to increase the size of your email list. Let’s check out a few of them:
- Offer Something in Return
Most businesses start with their websites and landing pages, since this is where they get the most exposure and interaction with people in their target market. But it’s not enough to plop a sleek looking opt-in form into the sidebar. In order to encourage people to provide their information, you must offer something of value in return.
Sometimes this is something tangible. (At one point, business performance coach Brendon Burchard was offering a free book in return for signing up.) Sometimes it’s something practical. (The law firm of Davis, Saperstein & Salomon, P.C. provides people with a free consultation.) Find an option that’s effective for your audience.
- Integrate Opt-In Link to Your Email Signature
Your website is just a starting point. Think about how many people you interact with via email every week. By integrating an unobtrusive opt-in link into your email signature, you can pick up a few subscribers here and there.
- Include Link in Social Media Bios
Social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn give you an opportunity to put yourself and your brand in front of thousands of people per day. Including an opt-in link in your social media bio – along with some sort of offer – will usually produce some good results.
- Use Exit-Intent Pop-Ups
Love them or hate them, exit-intent pop-ups work. Research has shown this to be the case repeatedly. The only question is, are you using them?
You can integrate exit-intent pop-ups into your site in a number of ways, but the key is to reach people when they’re leaving and redirect their attention back to your brand, sale, value proposition, etc. In doing so, you can get more out of your traffic.
To ensure you collect valid email addresses, add an email verification API to your pop-ups and signup forms. The API checks every new contact in real time and helps you build a healthy email list.
- Do-it-yourself
Enlarging the list of clients by means of the landing page won’t bring the results you can achieve by yourself. You can search for the future clients and customers anywhere on the web. For this, you need a special tool, an email finder, that will surf any webpage, find the email addresses, and add them to the list of prospects for the future use.
Never Stop Building Your Email List
You’ll never reach a point where you can stop growing your email list. While there will certainly come a time where it starts to experience some natural and organic growth as a result of word of mouth marketing and increased exposure, this isn’t the time to let off the gas. In fact, you should dig your heels in even deeper and use this opportunity to scale. Whether it’s for this business or the next, your email list is a powerful asset you can’t afford to ignore.