Growing Your Email List

Written by Franco Varriano.

1. Overview

Over the last few weeks, we talked quite a lot about sending great emails.

Last week’s piece, 10 Steps to a Successful Email Campaign, summarized the series with actionable tips you can implement today to improve your results. While we all agree that email marketing has great benefits, we also realized that growing an email list can be quite challenging.

This week we’re exploring actionable strategies that help you grow your email list. As the saying goes, you don’t have to be a marketing pro to achieve great results with email marketing, but you do have to start off with a very good list. The following are some key strategies that helps build a quality email list:

2. Visible Email Forms

Many online stores are already leveraging the power of popup to capture customers’ emails. In short, visitors should not have to work hard to find your sign up form.

By clearly displaying your sign up form and stating why customers will benefit from it, you are not only making sure that every visitor sees the email form, but also positively present your newsletter so your customers create a positive association with your newsletter.

3. Gather Emails In-Person

If you have a storefront or you regularly interact with customers in an office setting or events, you can solicit emails directly from the customer. By simply having a sign-up sheet or a tablet where people can write down their emails, you can easily grow your email list at every event, expo, trade show or any other occasions where you are in front of customers.

4. Leverage Social Media

Customers following you on social media are interested to hear from you. Twitter enables you to create Twitter lead-generation cards that enables you to embed your sign up link so customers can subscribe using their Twitter credentials, no need to leave the application. On your Facebook page, you can embed your newsletter sign up form in the page menu so that customers can see it and sign up as easy as Twitter lead-generation cards.

5. Incentivize

Most customers are more willing to share their email address if they perceive some form of tangible benefit. Offering access to special discounts, free points in your loyalty program or early access to new products are all powerful way to incentivize customers. Most importantly, clearly state the benefits of giving the email address in the signup form. You want to create the right expectation from the beginning, and your open rate will benefit from it.

6. Leverage All Touch Points

Among digital channels, email marketing remains the best performing medium in terms of return on investment. Yes, it’s an increasingly digitized world and you’re trying to build an email list, but don’t miss out on the opportunity offered by unavoidable pieces of paper, like customer receipts and invoices, direct mail pieces, and even your company business cards and letterhead. Include a brief call to action on everything in order to encourage people to sign up for your email list.

7. Give Bounced Emails Another Try

No matter how good you think your email list is, inevitably you’ll send to some email addresses that aren’t valid — and you’ll get a bounceback notice from your email server. If those incorrect emails are tied to an actual customer account, send a postcard asking them to update their email address with you and offer a reward for doing so.

8. Email Pop-ups

This requires some extra programming but when a user is navigating away from your online store without having signed up for the email list, you can have a popup window that asks them to enroll and receive a special offer for doing so.

9. Gamify Email Collection

We talked about using gamification to level up the customer retention strategy, gamification can also be employed to grow your email list. Turn the collection of emails into a game where customers get caught up in the competition. Of course, the winner gets announced via emails. Contest works well with email marketing as it requires very little investment from the customer and provide great rewards if they win.

10. Offer An Ebook

Giving away free quality content for download in exchange for an email signup is a great way to build both your email list and your brand’s reputation. In every niche, there is always best practices and the latter usually tends to evolve every year or season. Use it as an opportunity to position yourself as an industry expert and grow your email list.

11. Survey Your List

This is becoming a common theme in most Rare University articles, but the ability to get feedback from your current activities and improve is the key to success in many aspect of life. Like we said last week, there is no magic formula for creating the perfect email marketing campaign. A lot of it is going to come down to the knowledge you gain from each campaign you send. A simple survey asking for subscribers’ feedback might be all you need to take get insight on how you can improve your email campaign. You can also gamify the rewards, in something like: Answer this survey for a chance to win a pair of free shoes.

12. Conclusion

If you’re an ecommerce merchant and don’t have automated email marketing campaigns setup for your store, you’re losing money. Right now.

Rare.io makes it easy to start using automated email campaigns for common challenges like: Welcome Series, Abandoned Carts, Order Follow-up emails and more! You can learn more about our powerful email marketing automation features here or go ahead and get started right away by using Rare.io for FREE.

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And if you’re one of the thousands of merchants who are already using Rare’s Smart Email Marketing software and want to see how our Customer Success Team can work with your brand to grow your revenue – feel free to book a call at your convenience here.