Email marketing is one of the ultimate marketing tools. It builds relationships, closes sales, shares news, reveals specials, provides value and acts as an ambassador for your brand. It’s the best way to stay in touch with passive consumers and keep them in the loop, ready to engage with your brand. You need to know how you can maximize your reach by growing your email subscriber base. More email subscribers mean more traffic being driven to your sites and pages, staying at the forefront of more customers’ minds, and keeping them firmly in your sales loop. Here are a few strategic ways you can grow your email database while retaining positive consumer relationships.
Explain Why Consumers Should Care
As a general rule, consumers are not in a rush to hand out their email address and don’t want another thing clogging up their inbox. You need to overcome that initial reticence by communicating to consumers why they should care about your email marketing. Do you send regular emails that feature your latest discounted offers? Will subscribers receive monthly exclusive offers? You’ll need to answer that ‘why should I give you my details?’ question immediately, and provide a good enough reason to overcome the usual hesitation in sharing email addresses.
Your landing page needs to answer the following questions to secure email subscribers:
- What value do I get?
- What makes your emails different?
- What type of content can I expect?
- How often will I receive emails?
- What details do I need to give?
To increase the chances of your landing page converting, choose as few fields as possible for potential subscribers to fill out. If possible, only ask for names and email addresses.
Give Value to Your Subscribers
Seems obvious, but that’s why it works. You can’t expect your prospects to give you their well-protected contact details without offering something of true value. It’s one of the best ways to generate new email subscribers and propel your lead generation numbers. Bear in mind also that you can’t just offer anything, it needs to be something that matters to your target audience. To identify what offers the most value for your target audience you’ll have to create and consult your target audience. You can then choose the giveaway that best solves your audience’s core problems and caters to their core desires.
Content Should Meet Consumer Needs
Free content options you could consider offering include whitepapers, industry reports, online webinars, and presentations. Again, your offer should depend on what appeals to your target audience’s desires. When executed properly, a helpful blog post can become more than just a one-time investment, compounding over time and gaining traffic through organic search results. Put the time in to make sure your blogs and articles resonate, and you’ll see positive results. If you follow the tips above, your next blog post will captivate readers and draw more high-value traffic to your company’s website.
Online Competitions
Another clever way to entice prospects to give you their email details is to create and run an engaging online competition that appeals to your audience’s competitive nature. A great place to create and run your contests is on one, or more, of your most popular social media channels. Whichever one you choose, simply create a competition that requires entrants to submit their email details to win.
Opt-In Forms
To capture the attention of your most engaged readers, set your newsletter sign-up form to pop up when your reader gets halfway through a blog post, for example. Keep your opt-in form subtle, small, and light on content. And ensure it’s easy to exit from on desktop and mobile devices. You will also need to carefully consider where to place your opt-in box. Your blog is a good place to start. Only place it in contextually relevant places on your website – the places your customers would expect to see it and welcome the reminder. It’s best not to place it on any monetary pages of your site as that might override your core objective – to make money.
Calls to Action
Sometimes all your readers need is a gentle nudge and a reminder about your awesome newsletter, upcoming webinar, or whitepaper giveaway to take the action you desire. But make sure that nudge is relevant – for example, feel free to include a call to action (CTA) to subscribe to your newsletter at the end of a blog post or in your bio for your guest posts on external sites. Instead of starkly asking customers to sign up to your newsletter on social media, you could always create calls to action that hold access to gated content or unique offers. And don’t forget the importance of context – to avoid annoying fans and website visitors, only add your CTAs in the places that make sense (and are relevant) to their user journey.
Putting it All Together
Optimizing your email marketing programs is an incredibly impactful step that can grow your business. But you also need to be making sensible changes that work for your business in the long term. Remember to always keep your customers in mind, reading their signals, and having a plan in place for measuring results. Different optimizations can work better for different stages of the customer lifecycle and some are better suited to short-term gains at the expense of long-term results.
Build out your personas and understand the motivation for each persona to engage with your brand, model the customer journey for each persona, and built-in the ability for personas to change over time. This requires effort but it’ll pay dividends in the long-run.
Take time testing things like subject line, send time, content, etc, making sure that you’re using a proper control group. This means that for a particular campaign, you will exclude a group of customers (the control group) who are similar to customers in the rest of your database and are only excluded for this one campaign. When you make your change (to the subject line, send-time, etc), measure the revenue generated by the control group vs. the campaign and you can determine whether the tactic you’ve employed yielded any results.
By making measured, conscientious decisions towards increasing the success and profitability of your email marketing campaigns, you will see a longer-term return on investment.
Get in touch with one of our digital marketing consultants for specific solutions on how to tailor your brand’s email marketing campaigns.
