10 Tried-and-Tested Ways to Grow Your Email List

If you’ve been in business for more than a day, marketers must be already telling you to grow your email list.

Why?

Simply because more email subscribers mean more buyers and more chances of growing your business through email marketing.

How to Build Your List of Email Subscribers?

Do you think email marketing is dead?

It’s a common misunderstanding that social media marketing, chatbots, and other mobile-friendly advertising techniques have taken over the good old email marketing campaigns.

But if you ask digital marketers, they’d say email is not dead, you just need to learn the real metrics.

Truth is, email marketing is still effective and it can be a great strategy for growing your business if you know how to do it right.

According to the recent email marketing statistics, 99% of email users check their emails every single day, and 61% prefer to be contacted by companies and brands via email.

If that’s not proof enough for you, have a look at this:

It could be said that, even today, email marketing beats social media, SEO, and affiliate marketing in terms of ROI.

That’s because almost everyone has an email, including those who’re not using social media or search engines. This provides brands with the opportunity to reach out to potential customers on a platform where the information shared would actually be seen and read in most cases.

So, even if you’re not spending on SEO services in UK (or wherever else you’re situated), growing your email list is a must.

But the question is: How to do it?

Today, we’d share with you our tried-and-tested ways of growing an email list.

1. The Good Old Pop-Up Trick

Pop-ups are attention grabbing and user-friendly, which makes them highly effective as well.

You can either use a single pop-up or install multiple, such as:

One that appears when a visitor comes to your site
One that comes up after the user has scrolled through the web page to a certain point
One that turns up when a visitor performs an action indicating they’re leaving the web page.

But don’t use too many of these. Afterall, an annoyed reader is not what you’re looking for.

Also, try keeping the content on your popups creative, engaging, and short. This helps keeping the reader focused, and if they like your method of asking, they’d most likely act on your CTA.

2. A Widget at the Top or in the Sidebar

A popup comes and disappears, whereas bars and widgets are there to stay, always reminding your visitors to take the action.

Also, widgets and bars are less intrusive. They allow visitors to stay focused on what they came for. Which means, there’s less risk of having a customer leave your site just because they were annoyed by the repeated popups.

Pro Tip: Get creative and customize your headlines. You can add an incentive, such as a freebie or discount for those who subscribe. Offer-driven headlines have a higher conversion rate as compared to simple and descriptive ones.

3. Build Your Network with Business Cards

Start giving away your business cards to the people you meet every day, and don’t forget to ask them to join your email list. Make it clear, and let them know you’d be sending some useful information their way.

This way, they’d be expecting emails from you and won’t be surprised to end up as an unsuspecting email subscriber.

4. Host a Contest or Email Course

You must have come across various email contests and courses before, such as “30 days to better SEO”, “one week to healthy eating”, “10 days to radiant skin”, etc.

A good and informative email course such as this won’t be just helpful in increasing your subscribers, but it can also convert them into customers by gradually building their trust.

If you have the budget, its best to create your own team of content writers. However, you can also get content marketing services from a top-notch agency to get the job done efficiently.

In any case, make sure the email course or challenge is of interest to your target audience. Also, the content must be well-written, engaging, and actually helpful.

5. Provide Subscribers with Bonuses

Discounts, deals, and bonuses are like giving candy to a kid for being good. These little rewards can help increase your email list within a matter of days, because who doesn’t love free things?

If you’re already offering bonuses in pop-ups or sidebar widgets, it’s time to add them in the content and web pages as well.

For example, a company that’s offering e-commerce development services can offer 10% discount to subscribers. Or, an SEO agency that’s willing to provide free site audit and mention this in their blog posts.

Although an old method, offering incentives is still the No. 1 way of adding customers to your email list while increasing your rate of conversions simultaneously. Because those who get a coupon or discount code would likely be using it as well, so it’s a win-win!

6. Try Out a Giveaway

Remember, when it comes to winning free stuff, any customer would be more than happy to become a subscriber and try their luck.

Among all the latest marketing trends and strategies, giveaways are highly effective and popular among big companies, local businesses, and young entrepreneurs alike. Some host these on Instagram, others use Facebook or their own website to get more email subscribers.

Apart from an increased email list, bonuses can also help boost your sales if what you’re offering is directly related to your business.

For example, if you sell scented candles and are giving them for free to whomever wins the giveaway, the winner may actually start buying from you and would probably tell their friends about how great your product really was.

7. Write Engaging Guest Posts

Don’t have enough followers on social media? Try guest posting to reach a larger audience through someone else’s website.

Wondering how this would increase your list of subscribers?

Well, the website you’re posting on would most likely provide a backlink to your site. This backlink can be used as a link to your opt-in form, or you can simply add the opt-in on the homepage of your site.

8. Use Contact Us Forms to Increase Subscribers

If you have a Contact Us form or web page, it’s a great opportunity grow your email list since customers are already providing their email addresses. With a single click, these customers can become your subscribers without even having to fill any other form.

Have a look at this for example:

9. Lead Generation Cards on Twitter

If your target audience is on Twitter, you may already be using Twitter Ads to improve lead generation. While you’re at it, you can make prospects sign up for your email list without even having to leave Twitter.

Moreover, if you want customers to visit your site and fill the email signup forms there, you can do that too by creating special offers for your Twitter followers and having them click on the link you shared.

An agency offering social media marketing services can help you do this, while simultaneously assisting you in building customers’ trust, improving brand awareness, and increasing conversions.

10. Motivate Participation with Gamified Campaigns

Let’s face it, gamification actually helps improve customer engagement.

But are you leveraging the power of games to grow your business?

If not, it’s time to start doing so by simply adding a Spin a Wheel campaign such as this:

If you’re still wondering how much your email list is actually worth, just remember that subscribers spend more money as compared to those who’re not getting regular emails from you.

So, take it as a challenge, and start growing your email list now. You won’t ever regret the efforts, energy, time, or money that goes into your email marketing campaigns.

Want a good deal?

Partner up with a leading digital marketing agency that can do it all for you, from growing your email list to content marketing, SEO, as well as Google Ads.

By VROX Content Team - 18 Sep 2020