You’ll know by now that email marketing is both a hugely effective and hugely profitable method of growing your client base and bagging more sales.
However…
You need a list. A good one.
‘But…how do I get people to hand over their details?’ you might ask. ‘I hate doing that!’
I’ve spoken before on a previous blog about built vs bought lists – if you haven’t read it yet I suggest you check it out – Spoiler; the absolute best way to bolster your email list is through enticing organic subscribers and NOT through purchasing a couple of hundred freezing cold leads.
A long, unresponsive and disengaged subscriber list is a waste of time and can even damage your deliverability.
People who want and expect to hear from you are the way to go.
Here are 7 easy ways to ramp up your list-building momentum.
1: Add A Pop-Up
Pop-ups are a little bit Marmite.
They can work brilliantly, and a cheerful link to opt-in to your mailing list might just reel in some more fish, but timing is vital.
Scheduling a pop-up to appear as soon as a visitor lands on the homepage is officially death by marketing. Playing with the timings, however, to trigger the pop-up for when the visitor scrolls or clicks to exit your website is far more effective and has been proven to yield impressive results.
The number one rule when making any big changes like this is TEST. Check your bounce rate and compare it to your pre-pop-up numbers. Note any differences. Change your tack appropriately and test again. See what happens!
2: Offer Multiple Reasons To Opt In
Lead bait is what you offer your prospects in order to incentivise them to share their contact details with you. Freebies. And it really works.
You can read more about how to leverage lead bait in this previous blog post.
But… Readers aren’t one and the same.
Personalities, values, likes, wants and business needs mean what we perceive to be valuable to us is completely relative.
Making clearly available a variety of different lead bait opportunities throughout your site speaks to this variety of customer personas, appeals to leads at different stages of their buying journey and even boosts your SEO.
3: Promote Your List On Social Platforms
Your social spaces encourage you to put a human face to your business.
Promote your lead bait. Talk openly about your list, your efforts to grow it with the right people and what subscribers will receive if they sign up. Promote yourself and what you have to offer.
Create buttons on your Facebook business page linking through to your opt-in page.
All of this is about making it easy for prospects to make the jump and commit that little bit further.
4: Split Test Your Forms
A split test, also referred to as an A/B test, pits elements of online experience against each other and analyses the results of ‘usability’. It’s a really helpful way of developing your whole website, and even marketing material, to sit best with your intended audience.
Keep the offering on your form the same, (your lead bait), but trial other variations.
Design, language, placement, tone… These elements of your form, and more, can all be tested, one change at a time.
Choosing the ‘winning’ changes improves user engagement, bounce rates and conversions.
5: Add an Opt-In On Your Blog
I’ve seen massive success from clients optimising this technique.
You’ll see one on the right hand side of this page for that very reason.
Add an opt-in form to EVERY SINGLE BLOG.
As mentioned above, having multiple reasons to opt-in is important, but so is positioning the opportunity to opt-in in multiple places.
The journey through a website needs to be easy, and fluid. There should always be a next click available to the visitor. You can provide them with their next action.
What better to offer a potential customer, one who’s reached the end of a brilliantly written blog, than a freebie-laced opt-in form?
6: Add A Check Box To Your Enquiry Form
This is a really simple one, that can be ticked off the list and left to work its magic.
Adding a GDPR friendly checkbox to the ‘contact us’ form on your website enables you to move anyone who contacts you straight onto your mailing list.
7: Create A Quiz
Quizzes are big at the moment.
It’s no surprise when you consider that interactive content is twice as engaging as static content.
Quizzes can engage your target audience, generate leads (by asking readers to opt in to your mailing list in exchange for participation, or their quiz results) AND come brilliantly full circle…
The data collected by the quiz can be used to market to the leads it generates.
Don’t you love it when a plan comes together?
Increasing your list doesn’t have to be a chore.
Trust me.
Organic list-building might feel slower, but growing your list without buying data WORKS. It’s clever, it builds SEO and authenticity with your readers, and it can even provide its own useful prompts for future marketing strategies.
Book a call with me and I can get your list where it needs to be. Let’s get this moving!
