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How to Grow Your Email List Fast
As an email marketer, it’s easy to get caught up focusing all your effort on content. Of course, content is incredibly important, but it can’t pave your way to success alone.
You need to make sure that you have a fruitful email list, otherwise, the content you poured all your energy into won’t find the readers it deserves.
While you want to grow your email list, it’s vital to make sure your subscribers are high quality, meaning they’re likely to engage with your material.
To help you in this effort, here are tips for how to grow your email list fast.
Don’t know how to create an email list? We can help:
Give current subscribers amazing content.
If you’re wondering how to grow your email list, creating fantastic content is the first step.
This might seem obvious, but it can sometimes be overlooked when email marketers get too far in the weeds of tips and tricks. Learning ways around the system is wonderful, but everything needs a strong foundation, and that strong foundation should be reliably engaging content.
Creating memorable content for your subscribers doesn’t just ensure your current mailing list remains strong and engaged, but it encourages your subscribers to share your content with their friends. They’ll also be more likely to engage with your material in the future, which bolsters your open rates.
Keeping your current subscribers satisfied is a vital part of growing your email list because bringing in new subscribers won’t mean much if your current subscribers are falling off at the same rate.
Combine social media with your email marketing efforts.
In the past, the various channels of digital marketing worked within their own platforms.
However, in the modern age of digital marketing, it would be foolish not to utilize all your various channels in a single campaign. When you combine your efforts—especially your list building efforts—across multiple platforms, the results will build on one another and you’ll see better results than either is capable of on their own. This is true regardless of your industry.
And two of your most powerful digital marketing channels are email and social media.
Here are a few of the ways that email marketing and social media can leverage each other to get more done than would otherwise be possible.
Incentivize your subscribers to share your content.
It would be a shame if all the great content in your emails stopped at your subscribers’ inboxes. When you add incentives for readers to share your content on social media, you expand your reach and the content you spent so many hours creating can have an extra life on Facebook or Twitter.
Incentives, it could be as simple as asking the reader to share the content. When the content is good enough, this approach works well.
Aside from social media, you can also add a button for readers to easily forward your email to their contacts, which amplifies your reach and expands your audience. Be sure your emails have a subscribe button at the bottom, so your subscriber’s friends can have an easy way to opt-in.
Another effective way to get subscribers sharing your content is through giveaways. All your subscribers have to do is share your email to their Twitter account and they’re immediately entered into a drawing for a prize.
Use contests that stretch email and social media.
Drawings are definitely effective, but full-blown contests are even more so. Communicated through your emails, these contests are designed to get subscribers voluntarily advertising your brand for you.
For example, your contest could involve people sharing to Instagram a picture of themselves with their favorite item on the menu, writing a short post about a memorable experience they had with your business, or something else more relevant to your industry.
Whatever angle you choose for your contest, it’s best to frame it in a way where people are posting about themselves. That way, they feel involved and not like they’re selling out for a particular brand.
Accompanied by a hashtag, these posts can spread fast and create an entire community of users who act as brand ambassadors.
Source: Really Good Emails
Segment your email list.
Having a single email list that serves for your entire audience will bring in plenty of folks, but you might find it harder to serve all of your subscribers will.
If you segment your mailing lists into more specialized topics, you’re far more likely to bring in a wider net of subscribers because you can send emails that interest a lot of different people. In fact, segmentation has been shown to result in a 760% increase in revenue for email marketing.
For instance, if you have a clothing brand, you may offer a general mailing list that covers a little bit of everything.
A better idea would be to create a segment for women’s apparel, another for men’s, and a list for children. Or you could segment the mailing list based on the type of apparel, such as shirts, pants, and shoes.
Not only will segmenting bring in more subscribers, but you’ll have an easier time keeping those subscribers satisfied since you know they’re going to like your content. As a result, you’ll enjoy an uptick in open rates and click-through rates for all of your emails.
Don’t let an old email list go to waste.
If you have an older email list that’s growing inactive, you’re probably ready to put it down and focus on building an entirely new list. However, that old email list still has a part to play before it takes its final bow.
You can use that old email list to send out a re-engagement campaign. In a re-engagement campaign, you inform your subscribers that you’ve missed them and if they want to keep receiving messages from you, they need to opt-in again. In a way, it’s like you’re recycling a used email list for future use.
While it may be hard to do it, it’s important that you remove any subscribers who remain inactive from your list. This may sound contradictory to your mission, but having a large email list with inactive subscribers misses the point of an email list.
Add a user feedback form to your website.
If there’s one thing the internet has proven, it’s that people love giving their opinions. In the spirit of the internet and in growing your mailing list, you should consider adding a feedback form to your website.
This form can pop up randomly on various pages and ask the user to answer a few short questions regarding the nature of your website or brand. After they participate in this form, you can ask them if they would like to sign up for your mailing list.
Alternatively, you could make entering their email address a requirement to take part in the survey, then ask them if they would like to sign up for your mailing list. That way, the path to signing up is even quicker.
If you’d like, you could also use your website’s chatbot (if you have one) and ask people if they’d like to sign up for your mailing list. Not only does this streamline the question and answer process, but it can be set up to activate when a user has spent a particular amount of time on your site.
This way, you’re not inundating users who have just arrived with annoying questions. You’re also only engaging with the users who have become familiar with your site and brand over time.
Wrap up
Growing your email list is the best way to ensure that your expertly crafted marketing content is seen by as many readers as possible.
When bolstering your email list, there are many routes to take, but the best course of action is to take as many of the routes as possible. That way, you’re maximizing the potential of your mailing list and, therefore, your email marketing.
Here are some of the best ways to grow your email list fast:
- Create the greatest content you can.
- Merge your email marketing with your social media marketing.
- Segment your mailing list into lists with specified interests.
- Recycle an aging email list to be used for a refurbished list.
- Use feedback forms as a Trojan Horse for your email list.
When using just one of the methods listed above, you’re guaranteed to see results come pouring in, and fast.
Growing your email list is vital, but it won’t mean much if your list isn’t engaged. Here’s how to make sure your subscribers remain interested in your emails.
