Email is an incredibly powerful marketing tool. It is inexpensive, it is easy to automate, and it has the ability to draw a large amount of traffic to your website. Even though it is sometimes dismissed as an outdated form of digital marketing, especially when compared to recent additions such as social media marketing, email marketing has never failed to deliver results. That is why it is still one of the favorite tools marketers use.
Still, email marketing is only as effective as are your abilities to create a good email list. You can create an impressive newsletter with strong calls to action and still have little results because you are sending it only to a handful of people. So, your approach to email marketing should be split in two: you should ensure that the content you deliver in your email is top-notch, and you should always grow the number of people who see your emails. Here are a couple of ways you can do the latter.
Take Advantage of Walk-Ins
The people who visit your physical place of businesses are a large pool of potential email list sign-ups. Businesses often miss the opportunity to offer their in-store visitors to sign up for the email list. And they should because it is as simple as printing out an email sheet and explaining to people why they would sign up.
Sign Up Your Website Visitors
The most common way of gathering emails for your list is to include a sign-up form on your website. This will work, but there are also ways to make it work better.
For one, you should consider including a sign-up form on every page on your website. You should be careful how you place it because you do not want your pages to appear as if they were only about the sign-ups. But you also don’t want the form to be invisible.
You can also use pop-ups by programming them to appear under certain conditions. For example, if a visitor stays on a page for a certain amount of time, that would signal they are interested in what they are seeing. That would make them more likely to sign up for more. You can also include a pop-up that appears as people are about to leave your website. These give you one last shot at grabbing their email.
Give Them an Offer
One thing you should always keep in mind is that simply asking people for their email is not the best tactic possible. In some cases, it might be the only applicable tactic. But whenever you have a choice, like when trying to get sign-ups on your website, you should adopt a different approach.
Instead of asking people for something, try offering them something. It can be an interesting piece of content, a time-limited offer, or anything you deem will be valuable to the visitors. Then, make signing up for your email list a condition to accessing your offer.
Use Networking Events
Most industries today have industry-specific events. They can be oriented inwards, towards the industry, or they can be organized display of the industry towards the public. Either way, these events are a great opportunity to interact with people and get their email addresses.
Offer a Bonus
Your website probably gives out some things for free. It is usually content — unless you are producing large and important research papers, your content will be free to use. That is great because it helps with everything from search engine optimization to improving your conversion rates.
But your content can also serve as a powerful tool for growing an email list. Everything you need to do is to determine the best-performing pieces of content and find a way to upgrade them. Add something that complements that content and makes it even more valuable. Then, put it behind a subscription wall — only those who are willing to give you their email are able to see the extra bits you added.
It might take some time to see the number of email lists grow. Having a website with many visitors will help, as will having more in-store customers. If you want to grow your email list faster, you will also have to increase the number of people that see your invitation to subscribe.
