How eCommerce Brands Should Grow Their Email Lists
You need people who you can email, and you need them quickly. If you could get them pretty cheap, that'd be great, too.
Yes, thousands of contacts are a credit card swipe away, but your email marketing program -- a critical part of a well-rounded inbound marketing strategy -- can seriously suffer. Curious why buying email lists is a legitimate email marketer's kiss of death? Here are 9 reasons to consider.
You'll violate the rules of consent under GDPR.
Reputable email marketing services don't let you send emails to lists you've bought.
Good email address lists aren't for sale.
People on a purchased or rented list don't actually know you.
You'll harm your email deliverability and IP reputation.
You can come across as annoying.
Your can be penalized by your email service provider..
But email list-building is everything to your online business.
Or, it should be.
In fact, if you’re interested in conversions and business growth in general, the number one thing you should be wondering about right now is how to grow your email list.
Why?
Email is almost universally used. It’s more popular than social media for communication, and it gets far more conversions than any other platform. It’s a direct line to your audience that works.
If these assertions surprise you, consider these stats:
Twitter click-through rates (CTR) get drastically worse the more followers you have. As an example, they shared that Mashable, a big name company with millions of followers, gets a CTR of just 0.11% on its tweets.
The CTR for Facebook ads isn’t much better, unless a figure like 0.07% looks promising to you.
Email, on the other hand, is an ace in the deck. Comparatively, it wipes the floor with social media when it comes down to CTR, conversions, social reach, and ROI.
It’s not rocket science. For reach and conversions, email > social media.
Email marketing leads to a bigger, opted-in, targeted audience, which leads to more subscribers, more reach, which leads to more conversions.
Needless to say, you definitely should want a bigger list of email subscribers.
So, how do you gain more subscribers while increasing the attachment of your brand to potential customers. Through your content.
So, how do you leverage your content marketing to gain more subscribers and increase your content’s ROI?
Let’s explore how to grow your email list by tying in some content marketing tactics. That way, you can enjoy the benefits of setting newsletters to invested prospects, while making your content more valuable.
How to Grow Your Email List: 9 Tactics to Try in Your Content Marketing
Now that we have established that you want to grow your email list, draw on your content marketing to reel them in and build trust. Then, hit the ground running with some of these tactics.
1. Use Lead Magnets to Draw in Subscribers
A lead magnet is essentially a piece of content that you offer for free. The catch is the prospect has to give you their email address in order to download it/access it. That content piece could be anything. It might be a guide, an eBook, an email course,checklist, or a white paper.
The point is, you’re offering value in exchange for value.
Here are some top tips for making sure you’re offering lead magnets that people will want to hand over their details for.
Cheat sheets – A cheat sheet gives your audience a list of steps to check off for a certain task. Whatever it is, they won’t have to remember the right steps in the right order. They can just look at your cheat sheet!
Checklists – A checklist is similar to a cheat sheet, but it’s a simpler one that’s generally shorter. Instead of steps, you might list the tools or resources needed for a task.
Comprehensive resource lists – Where do you get all the good stuff that helps you in your business on a daily basis? Think apps, websites, downloads, or lists where you’re compiling information to save the audience research time.
Guides – Guides go deeper than cheat sheets. They’re step-by-step, but they take time to carefully explain those steps in more detail. They provide the how and the why behind the process.
Prompts – Prompts are little snippets that can spark creativity. You can provide these to help your audience with idea generation for any topic.
Short eBooks – If you have an incredible benefit or solution to a problem you can write about with authority, a short eBook is a good format for it.
Tutorials – Show your audience how to do something cool and valuable. Offer them a video tutorial, or create a PDF document with illustrated steps.
Tips for Creating Good Lead Magnets
Be specific. Your lead magnet content needs to address a specific problem that a specific segment of your audience may have.
Provide a solution. Your lead magnet needs to give a valuable solution to the problem.
Forget length. Your lead magnet doesn’t have to be lengthy to be useful. In fact, longer-form content is often least likely to convert. Your eBook, for example, doesn’t have to be a novel – it can be 20 pages or less! The same goes for any other form of content. Think shorter.
Provide quick benefits. Within minutes of opening up your lead magnet and digesting the content, your prospect should immediately benefit. This can mean increased knowledge or insights, or some other gain. It shouldn’t take months, or even weeks. At the very most, it should take a few days.
2. Invest in Evergreen Content
Evergreen content stays fresh, sweet-smelling, and tasty for months or even years after you make it (unlike those leftovers that sat in your fridge for merely a week before going bad).
Your evergreen content can be a wonderful lead-in for growing your email subscribers. But first, you have to create it and promote it.
Ideally, your lead magnets should be evergreen content that has no expiration date. They should be useful not just this instant, but also in six weeks, in six months, and in a couple years.
This is content that keeps working hard for you.
3. Use CTAs on EVERY Relevant Blog Post
This is one of the tips I personally rely on like crazy. Once you have a lead magnet, you need to direct traffic to it. You can do this easily by including a CTA at the end of every related (or relevant) blog post.
Your CTAs should be simple, short, snappy, and make readers want to go do whatever you’re “calling” them to accomplish. Indeed, a commanding CTA is the extra push a reader might need to follow through.
Never write a blog post without including a matching call-to-action. Even if you’re not linking to a lead magnet (you can also link to a service page, for instance), it’s how you add ROI to your content. The authority and trust you’re building, and the value you’re providing with a good blog make it the perfect lead-in to ask the reader to go one step further.
4. Connect Your Lead Magnet and CTAs to a Specific Opt-In Landing Page
So, you created an evergreen lead magnet. You urged readers to go get your content for free through a call-to-action on a related blog. Now it’s time to connect all the dots.
Your lead magnet (and your lead magnet CTA) needs a corresponding landing page with a form. This is what the CTA points to. It sweeps readers away to a magical place where you collect their email addresses in exchange for the content.
5. Try Gated Content to Turn Blog Posts into Lead Magnets
Here’s another idea. Try gating some of your content to get email subscriptions.
This simply means that part of a blog post is hidden. For instance, 1/3 of the post is available to read, but when readers reach that limit, they’re blocked off from reading any further unless they enter their email address to “unlock” the content.
This is an easy tip because you can use content you already have. Just remember that gated content needs to be highly valuable, well-written, and informative in order to give the reader the expected payoff.
In other words, if the blog post is mediocre, your readers won’t be happy. (“I entered my email for this crap?” is the last thing you want them to utter after hitting “submit.”) Don’t gate just any content – gate some of your best, most awesome, in-depth content.
Remember, we’re trading value-for-value, here. The reader’s email is worth a lot to you, so return the favor.
When done right, you’ll give your audience the option to unlock a great blog post with lots of good insights, tips, or information. They’ll be scrambling to give you their details. This is how you turn a blog post into a lead magnet!
6. Create “Hub Pages” for Your Most-Blogged-About Topics
Another way to turn blog posts into lead magnets: Gather them together by topic on “hub pages,” as Help Scout calls them.
A hub page is just what it sounds like. It’s a hub for all of your best blog posts that fall under one topic.
The CTA appeals to those who might be browsing this knowledge base of SEO information.
For your hub page CTA, you might want to include an opt-in form where visitors can enter their email address in return for updates on when you publish that type of content.
Not only are hub pages incredibly useful for your audience, they can also showcase your awesome blog posts that might otherwise be buried in your archives. Win-win!
7. Use CTAs in Your Guest Posts
Do you frequently guest post on different industry sites?
Depending on what the site allows, make sure you’re taking advantage of the extra platform and include a CTA with your post.
This doesn’t mean the actual content: no, rather, your author byline is the sweet spot for your CTA.
It can be as simple as a link back to your main site.:
In fact you might want to take it one step further. Link your CTA in your byline to a custom landing page just for that guest post. This makes a lot of sense if you’re posting somewhere with a higher profile and the potential for plenty of readers. On the landing page, welcome those readers, offer a freebie, and ask for their details in exchange. Done.
You’re already focused on creating high-quality guest posts to draw people back to your brand. Use these posts to intrigue new readers and get them to subscribe. Linking to a few key places that feature you and your services are a great place to start.
8. Make Sure Your CTAs Are Irresistible
There’s a lot of CTA talk in this guide, but what if your CTA-writing skills aren’t so great?
Well, you need to get better.
There’s lots of advice out there on how to write a dynamite CTA. However, to figure out what works best with your audience and your business, testing can help immensely.
Experiment with different types, wording, and graphic elements to see which CTA comes out on top.
9. Bonus: Add Opt-In Forms and CTAs Wherever You Can Get Away With It
Once you optimize your content for gathering email subscriptions and growing your list, remember to stay creative with your asks.
Yes, write engaging CTAs, but don’t forget to give your audience as many chances to opt-in as possible. Don’t stop short of being annoying about it. (Depending on how you look at it, annoying often only means persistent.)
On your site, experiment with CTA placement and opt-in forms.
While it takes much more work, using content as a way to build up your audience is an effective, cumulative way to build up your email list in a way that establishes credibility and allows for an increasingly engaged and ever-growing group of loyal, interested customers to your base.