4 Tips to Build Your Email List
Ready for 2024? There’s something exciting about the promise of a new year and another opportunity to realize your business goals. If you’re like me, you've been working on your marketing plan for the year ahead. As part of this, you may be looking at new ways to promote your business and optimizing your marketing approach.
One of the things you might be looking at is how to improve your email marketing. With social media changing so much and organic reach dwindling, email marketing will be key this year and growing your email list will be at the top of your agenda.
Are you ready for the challenge? Skip ahead to learn about 4 ways to get started. If you’re not yet convinced of email marketing, read on.
Why Email Marketing?
In contrast to social media, email marketing enables businesses to nurture their own audiences independent of never-ending algorithm changes and increased competition. Beyond this, email marketing also offers you the opportunity to share visually captivating, custom branded, in-depth content specifically tailored to unique audience segments.
This allows you to really engage different audiences by offering them something they will truly value as it’s relevant to their thoughts, concerns and needs. Ultimately this drives awareness, brand love and brings people into your brand universe where you can convert them.
This doesn’t mean that social media marketing has become redundant and that you should only focus on email marketing. Rather the two complement and enhance each other. Overall, they should be part of a comprehensive marketing approach to promote your business.
Now that we have that covered, let’s get those creative juices flowing with 4 ideas to build your email marketing list:
#1 Offer a Quiz on Your Website
If you offer a range of different products designed to meet different needs, a quiz can be a fun way to capture leads. Create a popup or a landing page on your website that allows customers to answer a few questions in order to get customized recommendations.
For example, herbal tea company Pukka uses a quiz to allow people to find out their mind-body type (dosha) according to ayurvedic principles. This offers immediate value to customers by giving them knowledge about their dosha type. Pukka then gives customers the opportunity to subscribe to their email list to get personalized recommendations based on their dosha.
Your email platform may offer a built-in tool for creating quizzes hosted on your website, or you can use a free or paid quiz making tool to create a quiz feature.
It’s a great way to build your list - and it’s fun and useful for your audience too!
#2 Provide a Compelling Signup Offer
Hopefully, you already have an email signup button on your website (if you don’t, drop everything and go add one!), but have you ever experimented with different offers to encourage people to sign up?
Here are a few ideas to try:
10-20% off your first purchase - test this out to see whether the higher percentage really moves the needle!
Free shipping on your first order
Gift with purchase for subscribers
Access to a limited edition product or collection
Early access to a sale or product launch
Exclusive subscriber-only discounts that are too good to resist!
What works best for one company may not work for another. Try testing out different strategies over time and see if you notice a difference in signup rates.
#3 Use Social Media to Encourage Email Signups
If you have already put the work into building a following on social media, why not use that existing audience to drive email signups and bring your audience closer?
One effective strategy is to host a contest or giveaway. Ask your followers to enter your contest for a chance to win a prize by sharing their email address. As a bonus, encourage them to comment on the original social media post once they’ve entered to benefit from increased reach and engagement.
In this way, you could capture lots of emails in a quick burst. Want to keep it simple?
You could also just add a direct link to your email signup form from your Instagram bio to encourage people to subscribe on an ongoing basis.
#4 Offer Something of Value for Free
When you’re asking someone to give you their email, you’re asking them to do something for you. In the spirit of reciprocity, consider what you could do for them!
A highly useful and original digital download, a free mini course, or an online workshop are a few ideas that you could try. Here are a few examples for you to consider:
A flower company could offer a free downloadable guide to flowers including their names, colors and seasonal availability
A clothing brand could offer a free online styling workshop to help people style products from the brand with accessories in their own closet
A cookbook author could offer a one-week mini course delivered by email with recipes, techniques and pro tips centered around a popular theme
So many ideas! What could you create?
Whatever it is, always make sure it actually adds value! There’s nothing worse than entering your email only to find that the reward is completely worthless. Also, don’t forget to think about how your downloadable will appear on different devices to make sure it’s a great experience. Make sure it’s not an A4 PDF!
Focus on Building Lasting Relationships
Any of these strategies and incentives could offer you an effective way to build your email list, but this is only the first step in what we hope will be a long-lasting relationship with your new subscribers.
Remember what we said about reciprocity? By subscribing to your email list, people are taking a leap of faith that you won’t just spam them with uninteresting promotions (or worse, sell their information). The ball is in your court to offer inspiring, relevant, engaging content, so that your new followers will continue to open your emails… instead of hitting unsubscribe.
Are you up for the challenge? Whether you’ve got exactly zero subscribers or several thousand, we hope you’ll be inspired to try something new this year to build your email list.
