10 Tips For Building Email Marketing Lists That Actually Work

It’s easy to market to those who already know about your brand, which is why email marketing is such a powerful tool. Building your list will give you the opportunity to increase subscribers and engage with customers regularly. In this post, I shared with you 10 tips for building email marketing lists that actually work.

If you’ve given your email address in exchange for something in return, you’ve probably received an email newsletter at some point. Well, email marketing is more popular than ever before because of the outstanding results it provides businesses. Email marketing is one of the most powerful channels for nurturing leads through a sales funnel to convert them into customers eventually.

According to a survey done a few years ago, out of the 1,000 web—based businesses, that were involved, these companies reported email marketing to have the highest marketing ROI for them in comparison to other mediums. Based on the surveyed companies, 23% of the total sales were attributed from this single channel. Email marketing has been one of the most profitable channels for businesses in all types of industries.

However, it’s really hard to do email marketing unless you have an email list. The days of buying email addresses of random people for pennies on the dollar are over because they don’t convert. Consumers don’t purchase things from a random email because there is no relationship or trust. Building an email list is extremely important if you want to be successful with your email marketing efforts.

When it comes to building an email marketing list, there is no super quick trick to collect a bunch. There are however a number of strategies, tactics and tips you can utilize to convert at a higher rate and build your email rate faster.

In this post, I share 10 tips for building email marketing lists that actually work:

1. Make It Easy For People To Sign Up

There are companies that miss out on email sign ups by not making it easy for people to register. In order to collect more email addresses, it is best to make it easy for your website traffic to locate and sign up for your email list. Don’t place it on just the home page or one part of your website, make it easily available on all areas of your website pages.

One of the more popular and successful methods that have worked for my businesses has been creating a pop-up. Having a pop-up box is something that the user cannot avoid and it makes it really seamless and easy for them to receive their ‘free gift’ in exchange for their email address.

2. Constantly Update Your Content

When you update the content on your website, there is more opportunity for you to collect emails. The more times a user comes back to your website, the more opportunities you have to increase the number of subscribers you have.

Here’s how you update your content:

– Write blog posts.
– Unveil new products/services on an ongoing basis.
– Release new episodes of a vlog, podcast or interview series that is shared frequently.

This strategy is simple, but can work brilliantly well. This approach was used by Bryan Harris of Video Fruit and it increased his subscription rate to 30% per upgrade offer. One of his best offers generated him an insane 62% increase in subscription rate.

You want to collect email addresses of your most loyal users. These are the people who come back and check out the latest content on your website as it comes out. This strategy gets solid results that can rapidly grow your list of subscribers over a long period of time.

3. Create A Powerful Call To Action 

Any time you want to collect emails, you have to CAPTURE the users attention. Especially on a website that has a ton of things going on, your email capture form can easily get lost amongst the crowd. You have to find a powerful call to action that is placed in an area within your website that will be easily visible.

You know your audience best so figure out what means the most to them. Capture their attention by addressing a problem that you know they may have and show them how you solve that problem.

For example, if you know your audience is having trouble parenting their toddlers. You’re going to want to create a call to action such as “Don’t Let Your Toddlers Run You!”

That’s a problem that parents are having when they come to your website. You know this so you’re looking to provide them a free pamphlet or ebook to show them how to solve this problem. For example, your next statement underneath that may say “Sign up to get 20 tips for controlling your toddlers and disciplining them!”

4. Give Incentives or Giveaways

At the end of the day, nothing is free. Why would someone give you their private contact information? You have to think about ways to incentivize your audience. People will always want something in exchange and the best way to capture someone’s attention is by giving them something “FREE”. This strategy can be very beneficial for email marketers.

The marketing team at WWRD ran a sweepstakes and increased their emails subscribers by 11%. Another example is Josh Earl who managed to acquire over 60,000 emails with a giveaway in just 10 days.

Running a giveaway is fairly easy as long as you structure it in a way that is interesting to users. Here’s how you can do it:

– Prepare a prize that your audience would want.
– Give bonus entries for every referral that they can have.
– Give something to the people who don’t win, a participation gift.
– See if you can partner up with a brand that wants exposure who’s willing to provide gifts to your audience.

Byran Harris offered a prize of a 10-year subscription to Leadpages, an industry-leading landing page service. This gave him additional 2,239 emails in 10 days. He decided to pick a gift that would attract the right type of audience (marketers) and he’s offering something that has a value of around $3,000 which makes it extremely worthwhile.

Research has shown that freebies such as ebooks skyrocket email sign-ups by more than 200%. Giveaways are a lightning fast, guaranteed way to boost your email list. In addition to the direct benefit of increasing your list of subscribers, it also increases goodwill with existing subscribers as they are more likely to pay attention to your emails in the future.

5. Convert Non-Confirmers Into Subscribers

How many people do you think to fill out your email forms each day? Whatever the number is, 20%+ of those people are not making it onto your email list.

Often times, entrepreneurs want to validate their email list by making sure every user confirms their email address before they are added to their list. However, whether you realize it or not, there are tons of emails that don’t get sent to the inbox. As a result, the user never receives the confirmation email and you end up losing a ton of potential subscribers.

Utilize a tool that shows you the non-confirmed subscribers as well so that you can re-send them an email and reach out to them later on down the line if they don’t confirm immediately. There are apps and software that you can use to search all the contacts that have signed up, and you can filter who are the non-confirmers to the subscribers. This is a great way to continue increasing your list of subscribers.

6. Leverage Social Proof

Social proof is very powerful as 63% of the consumers say that they are more likely to purchase from a site that has product ratings or reviews. A series of peer-reviewed studies were conducted in 2008 and the researchers found that social proof is consistently more influential for people when they are making important choices.

One of the keys to leveraging social proof is volume. The bigger the number, the better. If you quantify your subscriber by social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn) the numbers won’t be impressive. But quantifying them all as one will give you a volume, and people will be impressed, and your subscribers will believe in this proof. It doesn’t hurt to show a statistic that says, “250,000+ people have subscribed already!”

An example of this is Michael Hyatt’s numbers, which you can see below.

When you see his total number of subscribers showing 512,944. Now that is impressive and anyone who sees this feels a lot more comfortable to also give their email address to Michael.

But does that mean that they are all subscribed to his email list? No, it could be a combination of all the followers he has from social media all the way across to his email list. The point here is that when visitors see this massive number, they’d are impressed and they feel far more relaxed in sharing their private information with you.

7. Test And Optimize
When you venture into email marketing, testing is very important. It is the only possible way to know what works and what doesn’t. Every audience and industry is different so you really have to see what methods work best for your operation. You can test various distribution channels, the placement of different signup links, widgets on your website and the types of giveaways and gated content you offer.

It is always a good idea to ask users or readers for feedback. If you want ways to improve your website and how you convert users, the opinion of your existing users will matter. See how people react with your website and make changes to your design and layout accordingly.

Most email services offer analytics that makes it easier to find out how readers respond to your A/B tests. Then, you can refine and optimize your strategy based on your learnings. Don’t ever be satisfied with your numbers, always be looking to optimize and increase your conversions.

8. Provide True Value With Opt-in Incentives

Today, it is rare to find a website that doesn’t have some sort of featured opt-in incentive. Almost everyone is using this method for acquiring subscribers. However, users are also turned off by these free incentives because some people offer some real CRAP in exchange for their information.

Make sure you provide some real value and you actually give the users what you promise them. People will be disappointed and have trust issues with your website if you make false promises. The more you give, the more opportunities to monetize your audience you will have later on down the line.

9. Set Expectations And Be Transparent

As we mentioned and discussed in the last section, don’t try to deceive people. Instead, be transparent and honest with what users can expect by signing up for your email list. One of the biggest reasons why people don’t convert their leads is because people create distrust with them long before they ever get the chance to sell them. Tricking people into handing over their email address may be effective for growing the list, but they will provide you no value later on down the line.

Your subscribers must know what they’re in for, whether it’s great deals and promotions or information and education. Not only that, but tell them how often you plan to email them and communicate with them. I’ve signed up for some email lists that email me 3x a day. I’m unsubscribing from those email lists within 24 hours because they’re just spamming my email box and wasting my time.

10. Convert With Landing Pages

If you create a marketing campaign outside of your website, you can build a landing or squeeze page and convert with that. Offer a free giveaway, incentive or piece of content in exchange for your email list on a squeeze page. Make it clean and simple so that users can get what they came for immediately.

In order to generate traffic to your website, you can create a Facebook ads campaign and focus on a targeted niche to lower your cost per click. From there, try to figure out how much each email subscriber is worth to you. That’s the easiest way to set up a profitable marketing campaign.

Conclusion

It’s easy to market to those who already know about your brand, which is why email marketing is such a powerful tool. Building your list will give you the opportunity to increase subscribers and engage with customers regularly. In this post, I shared with you 10 tips for building email marketing lists that actually work.