Growing an email list is one of the best ways to grow a business. But how do you do it? I’m Matt Walsh from Style Factory, one of the web’s leading sources of advice on digital marketing and ecommerce. And today I’m going to answer that question. Stay tuned to this video, and I’ll give you a list of the best ways to turbo-charge the growth of your mailing list.
But before I begin, please do click the like button, subscribe to our channel and hit the notifications bell. This helps us out and gives you access to all our essential marketing and ecommerce advice. OK, so let’s dive in. One — start offline. When people think about building a mailing list, they often assume that this is best done online — by adding ‘join our mailing list’ forms to websites, creating landing pages for online ad campaigns and so on.
However, a lot of businesses operate not just online but offline too, and there are plenty of ‘real world’ opportunities for capturing data that can be overlooked. For example, you can invite people to join a mailing list via paper application forms, business card collection, competitions, phone calls and face to face encounters.
So, make a list of any point of contact you have with potential subscribers in the real world, and ensure that each one provides people with an opportunity to join your mailing list offline. Two — incentivize data capture. A lot of business owners think that putting a ‘join our mailing list’ form on the side of a website is all they need to do to generate email subscribers.
This sort of call to action is boring though, and rarely results in a particularly good sign-up rate. Instead, it’s better to incentivize data capture, by spelling out the key benefits of joining your mailing list.
These benefits can include access to exclusive content, a free trial of an app or receiving discount codes. Turn your call to action into a compelling offer, and you’ll end up with a lead magnet rather than an empty form. Three — audit your website for data capture opportunities.
A website is obviously a great place to add sign up forms for your mailing list, particularly if it gets a lot of traffic. Now, a lot of website owners put a sign-up form on their home page and leave it at that. But this ignores the fact that in a lot of cases, the most visited page on a website isn’t the home page. Blog posts or video pages regularly get more organic traffic than home pages, and if you don’t have a sign-up form beside your most popular content, you are missing a big trick — and lots of subscribers too. So, check your website statistics carefully to see what your most popular pages are, and make sure you have a sign up form on each one of them.
If in doubt, make a sign-up form visible on every page of your site — for example, you can add them to sidebars and at the bottom of blog posts, or link to them in your site navigation.
Four — consider using popups on your website. Popups can be really effective for driving sign-ups to a mailing list — particularly when they’re tied to a great offer. They are typically set up so that they appear a certain number of seconds after a user starts reading an article, after they’ve scrolled through a certain percentage of a page, or when they’re about to leave the site. The only thing to watch out for with popups is that search engines are not always keen on them and can penalize sites that use them too aggressively.
So, if you rely on organic search traffic as your main source of visitors, you may need to tread carefully here. Google has a resource about how to avoid using popups in a way that damages your search rankings — there’s a link to this in the video description. Five — create fantastic blog content. The more traffic you have on your website, the more potential there is for people to see your sign up forms.
And one of the best ways to generate traffic is through high-quality blogging about topics that are related to your business area.
We have a free resource on how to create really great blog content that generates a lot of traffic — you’ll find a link to this in the video description, or in the top right corner of the screen. Six — add sign-up opportunities to all your online assets (not just your website). So far I’ve talked a lot about the ways you can generate email leads on your website. But it’s important not to neglect the data capture opportunities that your other online assets can offer you. Make sure that in addition to your website, you add a mailing list sign up link to your company’s email signatures, YouTube videos, webinars, social media profiles and any content you produce for other websites.
Seven — leverage other people’s lists to grow yours. If you have particularly good relationships with other business owners, you can use these to increase the size of your mailing list. If the price or the opportunity is right, a business associate may be willing to use their mailing list to encourage people to join yours. They may also be willing to promote your mailing list sign-up link on their website. Eight — use online ads and squeeze pages.
Online ads are a great way to drive signups. However, it’s important to use them in the right way. A lot of people use online ads to push consumers to a product page or the home page of a website. But in a lot of cases, particularly when you’re dealing with a ‘cold’ audience, this is a very ineffective use of ad spend. It can be better to send people to what’s known as a ‘squeeze page.’ A squeeze page only contains an offer and a form — there’s no navigation or other content to distract users from signing up to your list.
Because of this, squeeze pages tend to be highly effective at capturing email addresses that can then be used to develop business relationships with. Nine — use shorter forms. When building sign up-forms, it’s tempting to add lots of fields to them in a bid to get as much user data as possible. However, you’ll probably find that shorter forms convert better — a lot of the time, one-field forms that only capture email addresses work best.
The best way to judge what form length is right for your business is via A/B testing, which involves creating different versions of forms and monitoring the effectiveness of each.
You can also use this process to see which aesthetics convert best too. Ten — send engaging content to your list. So far, we’ve looked at how you can grow your mailing list. But it’s important to consider how you can stop it shrinking too, via unsubscribes (or messages being flagged as spam).
The best way to do this is by sending consistently great e-newsletters to your list.
Strong content that is of interest to your subscribers will keep them engaged, reduce your unsubscribe rate and make visitors more receptive to your offers. Additionally, if your newsletters are really interesting, they are more likely to be forwarded to other people, who may then end up joining your list too. A great way to send out engaging content is via autoresponders — a series of emails that your subscribers automatically receive after signing up to your mailing list.
Check out our video about autoresponders for more information about them — there’s a link to this in the video description and at the top right corner of the screen too.
And that’s it — our top tips on how to grow an email list! If you’d like to get more digital marketing advice from Style Factory, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and hit the notifications bell. And if you have any questions about email marketing, do leave them in the comments section.
We read them all and will do our best to help.
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