How To Build Your Email List
One of the oldest yet most relevant feature today that will help you be a successful email marketing is having a targeted email list. The truth is, since the advent of email, many marketers have used it as a powerful tool when marketing their products and services. It is the tool that plays a key role in covering a large customer base without necessarily having a one-on-one encounter with the prospective client.
The mere fact that you are here reading this article means that you have a product or service you are marketing or are looking to start such a business. Well, you are in the right place! Selling a product is not something easy. It takes a ‘big balls’ to get yourself out there fishing for clients you have never met before! With the use of email marketing, your work is made a little easier but you still have to stretch yourself to achieve those goals you have set. I want you to imagine having 100,000 people accessing your website/online store where you are promoting a certain product or service. Isn’t that cool? Well, what if only 10% of these people are actually interested in your product? What do you do to get the other 90%? Even for the 10%, you are not guaranteed that they will all make a purchase. You start wondering, why are these guys not buying? Is there something am doing wrong?
Let me start by saying that, you market your product to targeted customers. This means that, if you are selling baby clothes, unless these 100,000 people are all parents to kids who use this product, you really will not make a sale!
An email list simply refers to a list of targeted prospective clients that want to, are interested or are highly likely to buy your product and service. The truth is, if they have subscribed to your list, then they are obviously interested. In this article, we will see various ways in which you can build and grow your email list from scratch. With an email list, you are sure to make sales and have success.
Recommended reading: 10 Best Free Email Marketing Software and Tools
How do you build your email list?
Learning to first build an email list can be intimidating because it is usually challenging to most people where to start. But not to worry, because we’ve got you covered. With these strategies, the process will proof to be seamless and you will be happy accelerating your email list building campaign.
Step 1: What are your email-list building expectations?
The first thing you need to ask yourself is why you want to build an email list. You have to understand that consumers are quite careful with their contact information and do not go around sharing with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. You have to ensure that you are offering something of value that will draw prospective clients to opt-in. Be straight up with your customers why they should subscribe to your email list and what they will get in return. People do not just sign up because you asked them to. Nah, they do if they get special offers, insider information or get to grow their expertise.
One way to achieve this is designing a lead capture form that tells your prospective customers what you want and what they get. It is a win-win situation. You need to know how often you intend to send them information or what each email will contain. In short, what is your value proposition? Get that right and you can be sure to attract a bunch of clients.
Step 2: Understand your target audience:
The second thing is who are your target customers? Who are these people that would be interested in your product and qualify to be on your email list? The best strategy that has worked for me and many other marketers around me is creating a marketing persona. This is simply someone that you just make up to represent your ideal client. Have a description of how they should look like or the qualities they possess. Where does your target audience hang out? If it is on social media, then you can easily fetch their email addresses using a couple of tools such as Crazy Egg’s numerous tools available online.
Step 3: Have a website:
This should probably be the first thing to help you build your email list. This is the 21st century and you will not go door-to-door marketing your product. Well, you can but how tedious is that! I mean literally tedious. Having a website the best and most efficient way to get to your target client and yet cover a large customer base. It is through your website that your prospective clients get to know more about you, your products and services and what you have to offer. This is the way they get convinced to opt in!
So, you are thinking, how can I create a website? You do not need to be tech-savvy to create a website. With the advent of several services such as HubSpot, Wix, and Bluehost (You could also put a link to the eBook we wrote on how to get started on Bluehost) among others, you can create it within 15 minutes. In fact, all you need is a brilliant landing page and you are ready to go. Your landing page must then have an opt-in form where you ask your visitors to subscribe by entering their email address. Tip: always ensure that your website complies with all GDPR regulations.
Step 4: Include promotions and offers:
What do you have to offer your clients? Whatever product or service you have, it is important to note that people will always need a justification to be on your email list. Think about for a second, how many emails have you received or web pages have you stumbled upon that asked for your contact details? Certainly many, right? Did you key in your contact address in all? No, right? Why? Well, it is natural, we always want something in exchange.
In the same way, when you are looking to get your customers’ email addresses, you have to ensure that you have something to offer. But then how do you know what they want? This is all in the first step, understanding your audience! If you know your audience, then you know what each wants and you can offer them just that. These can be promotions, offers or even discounts. You can also look for one of your resources that you can offer them at no cost at all. This can be access to your software, free eBook or any other real thing that has real value.
Step 5: Give as much value as you possibly can:
Did you know that value is the engine that drives an email marketing campaign? The true value of an email list is getting a new client that will stick with you and not unsubscribe. Therefore, if you thought to build an email list is just getting new followers, then think again! Once you have a new subscriber, you have to keep them. The best way to keep them happy is for you to follow through with the promises that made them sign up with you in the first place- provide enormous value. This can be in the form of free samples, free books, discounts or even free shipping on purchases, but ultimately, the quality of that offer is what really counts. Understand that, when you are generous with the value you offer your clients, they will be loyal enough and always anticipate your emails as a way of them interacting with you and your products. From time to time, try to understand what problems your target audience experience and offer to help them achieve their goals through your products. In short, figure out what they want and deliver just that-what they want!
Step 6: Stay away from irrelevant offers:
I know that I have just mentioned in step 5 above the importance of offering your clients value through such things as offers and discounts among other things. Well, not all offers are relevant. The last thing you want is losing your credibility because of your untimely offers. You do not want to keep interrupting your clients with irrelevant offers every time they land on your website. You have to learn to perfect your user experience as a key strategy in optimizing on conversion. Your goals should be to inspire them to take the action you want them to. Some of the most distracting things are too many popups on your website. You may think that without popups, you will be missing out on many subscribers, but trust you me, this will benefit your brand while keeping visitors’ bounce rate down. With so many irrelevant offers and popups, you are interrupting user experience and hence risking a higher bounce rate. Clients who are not patient enough will get bored and exit so fast it will make your head spin.
However, don’t get me wrong, this does not mean that you cannot use other tools to capture as many emails in the process. In place of popups, you can opt for persistent bars both the top and bottom of your page for such offers. This has proven to be less disruptive. You can use such tools as Hello Bar among others for this purpose.
Now that you have built your email list, how can you grow it your email list? This is one of the most important questions that many email marketers ask. The answer is summarized in the four tips below;
Use an ideal email marketing software solution:
One of the best ways in which you can grow your email list is using a program that permits you to not only capture and store the email addresses of your prospective clients but also allows you to obtain a rich contact profile. This is through targeted segmenting of clients along with relevant messages or comments they might have left on your website.
“But there are so many email marketing solutions out there, how do I narrow down to the ones that are right for me?” You ask. Well, there are several factors that you can consider such as scalability, a quality you are looking for, the price you are comfortable with as well as the breadth of marketing activities you plan to conduct.
One of the leading service providers in this niche is Salesforce, which offers both email marketing and CRM. If you desire a much broader solution, you can opt to use MailChimp, HubSpot among others that are absolutely free (link to the article we wrote on 10 best free email marketing software). You may also opt to use other automated marketing tools such as HubSpot that allows you to build email campaigns based on your target audience’s online activities.
Place your subscription form everywhere on your website:
Sometimes, someone just stumbled on your website and realized that you offer a product they want or are interested in. The best way to prompt such visitors to opt in by subscribing is placing subscription forms everywhere they can easily see. To make these subscription forms readily available for your target audience is having a dedicated subscription page or a sidebar placement. If you have blog posts, you can also place these subscription forms below the posts along with a CTA to intrigue your visitors to subscribe.
See the benefit:
In the same manner, as selling your products and services, selling benefits for everyone that subscribes is a very important strategy to help you build your email list. This will definitely get people to take action. In addition to this, always be sure to let your target audience what to expect in terms of content, the value that has to them and the time when you will be sending them out. When you tailor your content in such a manner that convinces your target audience of the benefit and relevance each has, as well as the pace of delivery, you can be sure to get as many subscribers as possible.
Acquisition:
To grow your list even quicker, you can physically go to places where your target audience hangs out. The true fact here though is that not all providers are the same. This means that you can use email providers that offer such services as deep, targeted and rich contact profiles. This is because, you do not just want email addresses for the sake of having a long list, but you want to have email addresses of your targeted prospective clients. These are the people that have a particular interest in your product and services. Also, ensure that your service provider is able to verify and validate these email addresses so that when you send out your messages to the email list you have built, the recipients actually get your messages.
Conclusion:
As evident from the information presented in this article, it is clear that there are so many ways you can use to build your email list as well as grow it. You do not have to resort to using tricks on your clients to coerce them into giving up their email contacts. Yes, you may have built an email list from using trickery, but you may not be able to make a sale when all decide to unsubscribe because what you promised is not what they get! My advice if for you to put this article on your bookmarks and you can return any day and time for a refresher.
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