In today’s fast-paced world, marketing directly to potential customers ensures that your promotional content reaches the audience it is intended for. The best way to make this happen is through email marketing.
Digital marketing is evolving every single day and if you don’t adapt to these changes, you’ll lose out on customers. With email marketing, you can advertise to customers directly and increase the chances of them buying from you.
For an effective email marketing strategy, you need an extensive email list. This blog post outlines the most important strategies for growing your email list and running a successful email campaign.
1. Post videos online
More than 80% of businesses use video on some platform or another to tell people more about themselves and what they do. Videos have a huge reach and are far more likely to be consumed than text based articles.
Use videos to reel in new customers. Familiarize them with your product or service and make them want to buy it. End the video with an option for an email sign up, either within the video or in the description of it (both would be ideal).
Because videos get more engagement than simple posts, more people will see your sign-up sheet, and as a result, more people will fill it, thereby growing your email list.
Videos should be short and snappy yet informative. Tik Tok is a brilliant app for this kind of strategy, given that it has more than a billion users worldwide. Make a short video and share it and watch your email list grow substantially. Alternatively, use YouTube and add the sign up link in the description.
Wistia is a really cool website that pauses your video mid way to show a pop up to the viewer so that they may add their email. Link to your Wistia video through your socials and watch your subscriber count go up.
Your videos should promote a new product, or explain how to use one. Apart from this, you should also make other short videos featuring customers using your product and behind the scenes footage from campaign shoots.
2. Add striking visuals to emails
Subscriber retention is very important, which is why you need to be careful to keep your email list from dwindling after people sign up. You do this by sending nice, visually appealing emails that don’t feel like a chore to read.
Always add more graphics and images to your emails than text because people love pictures. If you’re advertising a discount, write it on a poster in big, colorful letters and add high-quality visuals to match it.
Making these visuals doesn’t have to take up significant time and energy. For instance, PosterMyWall has an incredible poster maker that you can use. It’s easy, takes very little time, and best of all, it’ll keep people from unsubscribing to your email list.
3. Start a referral program
People are 75% more likely to buy from a business if it has been referred to them by a friend or family member. To that end, people will be far more likely to give their information to a friend than to a faceless corporation.
Start a referral program that provides perks to an existing customer if they get a friend to sign up. All they would have to do to avail the perk is get their friend to provide their email address. You take over from there and add the friend to your list, thereby increasing the likelihood of getting a new customer.
This is a foolproof method to build your email list. People enjoy free things more than anything, and they’ll very likely get their friend to sign up for, say, a free cupcake or a T-shirt.
4. Host a giveaway
Speaking of offering people free things, there is nothing that works better in that regard than a giveaway. Grow your email list by getting people to sign up with you to get a chance to win a gift hamper or a voucher.
Create hype around your giveaway by getting more people involved. For instance, Hydro Flask conducted a highly successful Instagram giveaway by asking people to sign up and tag two friends to enter. This not only got them emails, but it also brought in some new potential customers who could enter the giveaway themselves by providing their email. Truly a win win for everyone.
The ultimate goal is to get as many email addresses as you possibly can. And the best part about this strategy is that you can host a small scale giveaway every other week and it would bring in hundreds of new emails every time.
5. Add a CTA to your Facebook page
When people go to your page on Facebook, they should be able to see an option to sign up right at the very top. The idea is to make it as accessible to them as possible to give you their email address. After all, they’re the ones doing you the favor here.
A call to action button on Facebook makes it incredibly convenient to get people’s emails. And if your Facebook page does a good job of advertising your products, people will definitely want to sign up. Adding a CTA button to your Facebook is an incredibly simple process and one that is highly encouraged if you want to grow your email list.
6. Create a blog or a newsletter
Share snippets from your blog or newsletter on your social media, and add a form that people can fill to subscribe to it. Tell them that it would add them to an exclusive mailing list, and that they’d get fresh, engaging written content from your team every week.
People like being added to an exclusive club, because it provides a sense of belonging. Share sneak peaks, then coax people to sign up to read more.
Your blog or newsletter itself could be about anything that you know would be of interest to your target audience – latest news and events, how-tos on different products, customer stories, you name it.
7. Host a Zoom webinar
Depending on the kind of business you’re running, bring in some experts and have a Zoom chat with them about your products, services and industry in general. Make sure the webinar is exciting, focused around the main topic, and caters to your audience because that’s how you’re going to get your sign ups.
If you ensure your webinar is engaging, you will get a ton of sign ups once it is over. Make sure to send a sign up sheet as soon as the webinar is about to end, so people can fill it immediately.
Also provide the form before the webinar starts and let people know that the key points of the meeting will be shared with them through email after the webinar is over. This way, people who show up but don’t stay till the end will add their names to the list as well.
And there you have it. These are some of the most crucial strategies to employ to grow your email list. They’re also incredibly simple and straightforward, so small businesses should have no trouble implementing them.
