How to 20x Your Email List Subscribers Today
An email list is an asset that should be treasured by any company. This is an avenue for turning leads to paying clients.
It doesn’t matter whether you have 10, 100, or a million subscribers because you’ll probably want more. This is how marketing works. The more leads you have, the higher your chances are in converting sales.
So how do you build up your email list? Any email marketing tips you need to know? What are the strategies readily available which you can use right away to grow your list of subscribers? These are the things that will be discussed here in this post.
Tips to Increase Conversions
The word ‘conversion’ can mean a lot of things. It can refer to any of the following scenarios:
A successful email subscription
A request for a call or a demo to clarify things about an offer
The successful purchase of a product or a service
For this topic, we’re going to concentrate on email conversions. This refers to the method of gathering leads by inviting them to sign up to your mailing list.
Oftentimes, you’ll be using a lead magnet or some kind of incentive to increase your chances of getting a subscriber. A lead magnet can be anything you can think of that will lure customers to take your offer. It can be a free shipping service, product discounts, a free e-book, a mobile app, or an exclusive promo. Anything that you think will be valuable to your subscribers can be considered a lead magnet. Think about your product, audience, market, and business model to identify the things your visitors will find very enticing.
After thinking about the lead magnet, consider how you should present it. There are tools and methods you can implement to optimize the conversion rate of your website. You must follow a holistic approach in order to successfully convert a simple visitor into a loyal customer.
Things don’t have to be complicated. Even the simplest of strategies can increase your chances of getting an email conversion.
Ways to Grow Your Email List
We’ve come up with a comprehensive guide containing email marketing tips and methods on how to increase your chances of achieving email conversions. Here are very useful tips to grow your email list:
Create a persona for your subscribers
Create personas to represent the character of your email subscribers. Doing this allows you not only to know more about your audience but also to identify the products and services they might be interested in.
For example, your business is selling sports equipment. A teenage customer will have a different preference compared to a middle-aged one who plays basketball on weekends only. Each persona responds to different messaging, offers, and marketing tactics.
The number of personas you can create will depend on the type of subscribers you have. There’s no definite number to this. Some businesses have only 2, while some may have as many as 10.
Study how people navigate your website
You can understand a lot about your customers when you look at how they navigate your site. With the help of tools like Google Analytics, you’ll get a traffic report stating where your visitors are coming from, as well as which portions of the website they often go to.
Using this data, you can include emailing opt-in capture forms and other CTA buttons on the most popular pages. Take advantage of those that get a lot of organic views as they’re widely shared on social media.
For example, if your business is about selling products to shutterbugs, create content that attracts both veteran and aspiring photographers.
There are heat maps which can help you identify the most frequent clicking activity that happens on your website. With this, you’ll be able to identify whether they like scrolling down or staying at the top portion most of the time. You can put your CTA as close to the top as possible so it becomes easily accessible to site visitors.
All these tools help you understand how people interact with your site. Using this wealth of information, you’ll be able to come up with a strategy on where to put in emailing opt-in elements, such as newsletter subscriptions, to grow your email list.
Avoid confusing web forms
Web forms should be straightforward and intuitive. If they’re hard to follow, read, or answer, visitors won’t bother filling them out. Your goal is to get as many visitors to sign up as possible so it’d be best to clear the road of any hindrances that may hinder this target.
It should be clear to the visitors why they should fill out the form. If you’re offering incentives for those who sign-up, be clear about it and avoid teasing them too much. If you have a lead magnet that takes them to another page or gives them a link for download, tell it straight to promote transparency and avoid miscommunication.
There are times, though, when you can’t avoid to display some things or include some tools that can make it slightly confusing for the visitors. Take the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules for example. With this in play, you have to tell your visitors about a subscription option that might be different from your lead magnet.
The use of CAPTCHA is also another example of a confusing add-on to forms but is also somewhat required to deter spam registrations. This can cause harm to your traffic and other problems in your emailing opt-in process, especially if they’re hard to read.
Introduce irresistible lead magnets
Lead magnets should offer incredible value that has a high chance of customers opting in. They shouldn’t be something you want to forcefully promote because they pay high commissions. They should be something relevant and extremely desirable that your viewers would want to get right now.
To determine which lead magnets will work best for your customers, review the personas you created before. What are the related interests of these customers based on their personas? A teenager who’s into basketball will want the latest basketball shoes. A busy middle-aged man who runs during the weekend will want a gadget to monitor their physical activities. Mothers who want to stay fit will want an illustrated guide of quick exercises they can do at home.
Take a look at what your competitors are doing with their lead magnets. Take note of what they offer and how you can best them with something unique and exclusively available only on your website.
Visitors can land on your website from a variety of sources. It can be from a Facebook post, an email link, a blog post, or a paid search ad. Whichever the source is, the important thing is to align the landing page with the source’s design and content. It has to have similar colors, shapes, and themes for easier brand recognition and reassurance that the visitor is on the correct website.
If your Facebook post promises free content, you better redirect your visitor to where they can get the said freebie. The content of the source should be the same as that of the landing page too.
Studies show that organizations with more than 15 landing pages in their websites tend to get 55% more leads converted compared to sites with 10 or less landing pages. Many businesses build only one landing page, thinking it would be enough to cover everything.
You can gauge how your landing pages perform with tools like Google Analytics. They’ll tell you the activity revolving around your CTAs. If you have a long-form type of landing page, you can use a scroll map reporting tool to determine which part of your site visitors focus on.
Confetti and heat maps can help you determine the behavior of visitors when roaming in your site. There’s a demo page which you can tinker with to see how these tools can work to your advantage.
Now that you know how multiple landing pages increase your email converts, you may want to craft several drafts. See which of them works best at improving emailing opt-ins using A/B testing.
Another tip to grow your email list is by including an exit popup on your website. You can put in a CTA asking them to create a free account or sign-up for your newsletter before they leave your site completely. You can also promote a specific product in this popup.
This is your last chance for an email convert so emphasize the benefits you can provide or highlight your lead magnets well. Putting in a tick box to have them agree to receive promotional offers is a good exercise of transparency and improves the CTA as well.
You’re free to design the exit popup whichever way you think will do best to grab the attention of your visitors. Try using rounded buttons, appealing images, color contrasts, and even leading questions that are direct to the point. Include your lead magnets if you can for that final chance for an email convert.
Remember, ninety-eight percent of users will leave your website without any further action. By having an exit popup, you grab the last chance for an email convert before they finally leave your website.
Capitalize on the posts with huge traffic
Blogs can be incredible tools for raking in more email converts. Each new blog post you make is a new opportunity to grow your email list.
Blog posts are highly-optimized for SEO, meaning they can rank high in search results. It’s also the part of your website with the most valuable content and useful information invites organic traffic.
With the help of heat and scroll maps, you can optimize sidebar CTAs to put them in places with the highest possibility of increasing emailing opt-ins. You can study the things we did with Quicksprout and the Crazyegg blog as examples.
If you don’t want to include a web form on every page of your website, optimizing CTAs on your blog posts with the biggest traffic will be enough. Use Google Analytics to determine which post has the most visits and begin working on it.
Social proof has become a vital factor in improving trust, especially now that people are wary of giving out their personal information online. Social proof works by persuading people to do what others are doing or have done. This behavior is a numbers-based game, meaning the more people you get to do an action, the more people you invite to do the same.
Some of the most popular social proofing tools you can use on your website are:
Logos of popular brands you’ve worked with
Number of subscribers, likes, shares, and similar things identified with popularity
Quotes from experts and popular leaders in the industry
Ratings and reviews from customers satisfied with your service
You don’t have to put everything on your website. Pick only those that suit your website and your offers. Adding any of these tools can improve your reputation and make customers feel more secure when doing business with you. Use A/B testing to determine the best types of social proof you can use on your site.
Wrike is a great example of a website that properly utilizes social proofing on their landing page. Marcus Johnson who wrote about the website said that social proof is a powerful tool that can be the key to bringing the best out of your next promotional campaign.
Encourage people to forward your emails
You can further increase your list of subscribers by encouraging those who are already on the list to forward your emails to their friends. By showing how highly valuable and helpful your offer is, you can embolden them to spread the good news to others.
See if your email marketing solution allows the option to forward your emails. If yes, grab the opportunity and if not, look for alternative methods to entice subscribers to spread your offer to others. It’s more likely for a person to try something that a trusted friend has recommended.
QR codes make it easy for mobile users to access your emailing opt-in forms. Apps for reading QR codes are readily available for download so you don’t have to worry about accessibility.
So how do you use it for marketing? For example, you own a coffee shop. You can put QR codes on your coffee cups and ask users to scan it for an exclusive discount on their next order. You can also redirect them to a web form and ask for their mobile numbers or email addresses to gain access to a free drink or a similar offer after they scan the code.
Tell them that they can unsubscribe anytime they want
The idea seems to be in contrast to what you want to achieve, but putting an option for them to unsubscribe can have positive effects on your business. According to studies, the rate people unsubscribe to marketing emails from small businesses is less than 1% only.
The truth is people don’t want to miss out on things. So, if you give them the chance to opt out, they’ll choose to continue receiving your marketing emails. In return, they’ll expect more juicy details and more personalized offers on your next emails.
Invite people to participate in your contest
Contests posted on social media platforms tap into the psycho-social behavior called ‘social proof’ to encourage more participants to join the event. This is a great avenue to expose your brand to prospects you can redirect to your website. From there, you can invite them to join your mailing list or even persuade them to buy products you’re selling.
When creating a contest, offer multiple prizes instead of one grand prize only. Studies show that more people join a contest with multiple prizes since they feel like they have a higher chance of winning. So, instead of giving away $1,000 to the lucky winner, you can break it down to $500, $300, and $200 for the first, second, and third prize winners respectively.
Include LeadBoxes on your website
Oftentimes, people get discouraged to sign up to a subscription list – even if it’s free – because of the way the web form is presented to them. By using a LeadBox, you gently direct your visitor to get into your mailing list by having them appear only when certain triggers are hit. They can be customized to appear when users click a button or an image, when they’re about to leave, or when they navigate the website for a few minutes.
LeadBox opt-ins can significantly increase sign-up rates when used properly. Tools like Crazyegg can generate a visual heat map of your website displaying the spots on your site that gets the most activity. Using this, you can decide where to put the links to access your LeadBoxes.
There are 3 different personalities you have to consider in crafting your LeadBox. There’s the lead, the prospect, and the actual customer. We say that location is important in the placement of your LeadBoxes because the information you put beside the links leading to the LeadBox will determine which type of personality you invite into opting in.
You don’t really need to have a landing page with a LeadBox to use this tool. Facebook Ads have a similar feature which can help you generate more emailing opt-ins right there on the platform.
Always come up with fresh content
What keeps an online business running is fresh content. You should regularly come up with something new that targets a specific group of users. Don’t put up something generic just to come up with something new. It’s important that you keep your focus on a specific market which is why the content has to be customized to increase their relevance to the target audience.
One of the most useful tips to grow your email list is to do a content upgrade. A content upgrade is one of the best ways to convert an occasional visitor into an email subscriber.
In a content upgrade, you don’t have to redo everything from scratch or create a new content every now and then. What you do is strategically place a LeadBox or an emailing opt-in box within any existing content. This ‘upgraded’ version has more to offer like freebies, a link to new content, or a set of new strategies to make things better on your end.
To maximize its effect, consider the following guideline:
Make sure the content you’re using is popular and of high quality.
Do an upgrade by including things that weren’t there before. An example is a PDF version containing the most important points of the post.
Add links to new resources highly-related to the content.
Be honest and keep things simple. Tell people why you want them to join your subscription list and the wonders it can do to their lives.
A Hellobar is a widget you put at the topmost portion of your website. It presents your CTA right away without being intrusive to the view or the overall flow of the page. It helps the sidebar, exit popups, and LeadBoxes present a way for a visitor to opt-in your email subscription list.
Give importance to colors
Colors have the natural ability to catch attention and persuade people to think about a specific thing. Studies reveal that colors can affect the mood of a person and influence their decision-making process.
Choosing the right colors that will fit your branding and theme can be a crucial factor to your marketing success. When choosing the color combination to use for your landing page, the only thing you can do is to experiment until you identify what works and what doesn’t.
Reward first-time commenters
You may have seen people who comment on a blog or social media post just one time and then they’re gone. You can take advantage of this by rewarding those who comment on your post for the first time with some freebies.
There’s this First Comment Redirect plugin which you can add to your website to motivate people to leave a comment before they exit. When they leave a comment, they can be redirected to an emailing opt-in page where they must subscribe to get the freebies.
As of now, only a few websites and blogs use this feature, so you might as well be one of the first few to maximize its efficiency.
Most customers don’t want to see ads or even receive them in their inbox. However, when they see a solution that’s relevant to them, they’ll keep an eye on it until they’re ready to get it.
Pre-selling keeps people hooked to a product you’re about to launch by simply telling them more about the solution you’re offering. The concept behind this is that the more you educate the people about the product, the higher the chance they’re going to buy it.
An idea you can adopt is by creating videos of the product. You can include the problem the product solves, testimonials and case studies about it, and the features the actual product has.
Consumers naturally want to know more about an offer before you can drive them into a successful purchase. With this, it’s best to educate your leads before the product is released to the market. Ask for their subscription to get the latest news and exclusive firsts before everybody else. This saves them time and you get what you want in the process – a lead with their email address.
Use long-form multimedia content
Long-form multimedia content combines visuals, sounds, and texts to increase the retention rate of visitors who read through the information presented to them in a website.
In an era wherein everyone can create content, there’s no room for those that are just good enough. Yours have to be great and memorable to capture the viewer’s attention. Instead of having a blog post made of pure text, a number of videos, sounds, presentations, infographics, and share-worthy quotes are integrated into the post.
There are also various ways to present your content other than text-filled blog posts. You can create a video or a presentation highlighting the important points you tackled on the blog post. Similarly, you can convert the blog post into an ebook and have it published for a new revenue stream.
Content marketing is more than just simple videos, long blog posts, and lengthy podcasts. You can mix and match any of the following to cover the same topic and present it to users as something new and refreshing.
Here’s what you can show your visitors to get more subscribers:
Create an article with more than 2,000 words.
Present a 5-minute video clip.
Show a 15-page slide presentation.
Provide a podcast answering the frequently asked questions.
Convert a popular blog post into an e-book.
Present an infographic that’s easy to understand.
Show an animated video explaining your product.
You can use these to connect better with your potential customers. By doing this, you present a wide array of content which caters to the different preferences of your leads. You’ll get to reach more subscribers this way and keep their interest alive with fresh content released regularly.
Test your emailing opt-in forms
Testing the forms you put on your website is not an optional task, but rather a necessity you must complete if you want to get more subscribers to use it. It’s definitely a boring job but this can greatly impact the efficiency of your emailing opt-in forms, so you really have no choice but to do it.
Check the fields you’re requiring from your visitors. Are all the info there necessary for you to get in touch with them for the first time? How relevant are they to the product you’re selling? Removing or adding a field can change the way users interact with them.
The rule here is to keep it simple, clean, and straightforward. Do an A/B test to identify which works best for your website.
Location is also an important factor. There can be a huge difference in the conversion rate when you put the form on top of the site or below when the visitor has finished reading the page. Test this too to see which works best to your advantage.
Identifying Your Target Number of Subscribers
How many subscribers can be considered enough? The thing is you should never think it’s enough. We’re giving you tips to grow your email list as big as possible because it presents a larger opportunity to convert sales if you have more leads.
Take for example 100,000 subscribers in your email list. If only 5% of them make up your click-through rate, you’ll have 5,000 people who take action on the CTA button you put on your website or email blast. Out of this 5,000, maybe only 2% or 100 people will convert and buy your product. If a hundred people buy your product which sells for $100 each, you’ll earn to a total of $10,000 in gross sales. Now double the number of subscribers to get the idea of what we’re discussing here.
It’s up to you if you want to set a limit on your email subscribers list. But remember that you have to get more if you want a bigger chance of making a sale. Add to that the possibility of removing inactive email accounts from your list, and you’ll surely be looking for ways to continue getting more email opt-ins.
Buying Subscribers is a Bad Idea
Never buy subscribers just for the sake of growing your email list. It’s a total waste of money because you’re like paying a hundred people a dollar each just to come into your store. They don’t add any value to your business and chances are what your selling is irrelevant to them, thus they won’t buy your merchandise.
Your email subscription list will have forced customers who never personally signed up to receive your emails. There will be times when you’ll have a customer from the paid group who will buy your offer, but this rarely happens. Oftentimes, account owners included in the bought addresses will see your email as spam. This is because they didn’t sign up to receive marketing emails from you and yet you keep on sending those invites and reports. In addition to these, the percentage of qualified leads you have will diminish because you inflated the number with bought subscribers.
If you’re looking for a number of tools for optimizing your website, then try Crazyegg. It can help you improve your site for adding CTAs that will get you more email opt-ins.
If you don’t know where to put your web forms and CTAs, try using a heat map. It can help identify portions in your website that receive the most number of clicks. From there, you can determine where the attention of customers go the moment they land on your site. Put your CTAs there for a higher chance of an emailing opt-in.
When you’re done optimizing your page and putting up forms, A/B test it to identify elements that work best with your theme. You’ll eventually come up with a site optimized for collecting email addresses.
For any business to flourish, a good relationship with your customers must be maintained. To do this, you have to find a target audience first – a potential customer that’s hard to get without any form of engagement. This is where email marketing comes into play in the form of initial engagement.
Marketers take emailing opt-in strategies seriously. They know the importance of capturing a lead this early on in the game. As a marketer, you must exhaust every avenue you can to promote your brand, whether it’s through social media, landing page optimization, SEO, content marketing, or other best practices that will get you more emailing opt-ins.
To get more email conversions, you need to have an optimized process for getting visitors to sign-up. By giving them a strong reason or unique offers for signing up, you can entice them to register and receive marketing emails from you. Giving incentives are a great way of getting more subscribers to your business.
Here’s a short summary of what’s been discussed to get more email opt-ins:
Develop personas to characterize your subscribers
Study how visitors navigate your site
Put clear and straightforward web forms
Use exclusive lead magnets
Optimize and build multiple landing pages
Utilize blog post with the highest traffic
Social proof your website to add credibility
Encourage people to forward the emails you send them
Make use of technology like QR codes
Offer an option to unsubscribe
Hold contests to promote your site or a product
Include LeadBoxes on your website
Always have something new to offer to visitors like fresh content
Think of the colors you’ll use on your website and marketing materials
A/B test your emailing opt-in forms
Consider pre-selling a product or a service
Utilize long-form multimedia content
Reward those who comment on your post for the first time
Never buy subscribers. It looks like a shortcut for boosting popularity but it can harm your reputation in the long run. Instead, focus on improving your website. Use Crazyegg tools to optimize your website for emailing opt-ins. Use heat maps and analytics to determine where most of the activities happen on your website.
Simply follow the 20 tips on email marketing we’ve listed here and you’ll start growing your email list in no time.
The post How to 20x Your Email List Subscribers Today appeared first on Convert King.
