21 awesome tips to grow your mailing list

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In collaboration with: João Alexandre - DesignPT TIPS TO GROW YOUR EMAIL LISTS 21 AWESOME

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In collaboration with: João Alexandre - DesignPT

TIPS TO GROW YOUREMAIL LISTS

21 AWESOME

221 awesome tips to grow your email lists

Content:

Preface .............................................................................................. 3

1. Divide articles in “Sections” ........................................................ 4

2. Write content that attracts influential people ......................... 5

3. Invite your fans to subscribe ..................................................... 6

4. Offer a lead magnet .................................................................... 7

5. Create lead magnets for each theme ....................................... 8

6. Experiment with Content Upgrades ......................................... 9

7. Create tools for them ................................................................. 10

8. Use incentive programs to reach more people ....................... 11

9. Give things to people .................................................................. 12

10. Prize draws are also a good way to attract people ............... 13

11. Include share options by email ............................................... 14

12. Experiment with pop-ups and similar features ..................... 15

13. Use full-width drop-downs for more conversions ................ 16

14. Use social proof to your advantage ........................................ 17

15. Be a guest poster ....................................................................... 18

16. Carry out cross promotion ....................................................... 19

17. Publish case studies .................................................................. 20

18. Hold webinars ............................................................................. 21

19. Paid advertising .......................................................................... 22

20. Offer discounts by email ........................................................... 23

21. In off-line events ......................................................................... 24

Conclusion ......................................................................................... 25

321 awesome tips to grow your email lists

Preface

One of the main reasons that creating email lists is so important, is that you are nurturing a list of people who could become brand advocates.

If you write a good article which then turns viral and gets 3000 views, that’s fantastic, but what happens the week after when you write your next article?

Hmmm, right...

If you have an email capture system, you could have between 2 and 10% of your list reading your articles, sharing, commenting, buying, etc.

Conversion by source

What’s more, with a list of emails you have a valuable asset, you have a list of people who have raised their hand and said that they wanted to receive your information. If you master email mar-keting, you can raise your business to spectacular heights

Indeed, your subscribers are the ones who will most likely to convert into sales, or in other words, will buy more, make more contact.But if you don’t have an email list, the hypothetical article that you wrote in the previous para-graph, only achieved successful at that moment, and now you’re back to zero.

You work hard for your business, or to attract people to your site: make the most of this traffic. It’s time to grow your list, and to help you do this, here are 21 tips.

421 awesome tips to grow your email lists

1. Divide articles in “Parts”

Most methods of catching leads involve a little box at the end of the article which states “sub-scribe to our newsletter for more articles and tips like this” or “enter your email to download this resource”.

This type of lead capture can work well, especially if the reader is offered a good incentive (which is what we do), but the e-book/guide/kickback offered isn´t always relevant to the article pre-sented.

If you create spectacular content, most people will read until the end (see your Google Analytics).

This means that if the article was longer, the reader would probably read until the end. This rep-resents an opportunity to have a “Part 2“of this article, which they would read as well.

When you write an article, if it is quite long, it can be divided into parts. At the end of the first part of the article, announced that Part 2 will be published next week, inviting readers to enter their email if they would like to be notified when it goes online.

This type of strategy is different to the typical offers readers receive (asked to subscribe to a newsletter, offer a guide), and for this reason usually has a good success rate, with the result that more people subscribe to your list.

Observe how this zero requires effort on your part Similar to a Content Upgrade (I’ll explain what this is shortly), but it deliberately doesn’t involve creating a digital “bribe” just for this article.

521 awesome tips to grow your email lists

2. Write content that attracts influential people

Many people don’t realise, but opinion leaders and influential people, whilst it is true that they got where they are because they are experts in their field, often it´s also because they’ve re-ceived little help.

One way of reaching a new audience is to join forces with other experts and share resources that can be useful to both target audiences.

These influential people want to share good content with their target audiences (to stay in fa-vour), and for this reason they normally open to ideas.

The first to get them to share your content is to create something which raises their interest and that they feel will add value for their audience. To achieve this, you will need to create good, unique content.

The secret is to create content that is so amazing that it will appeal more to the opinion leaders of your market segment than the target audience itself.

But in order to do this you have to get this content in front of the influential people. To achieve this, I suggest the following:

• Answer their comments and questions on social media networks• Write well thought out comments on their blogs• Send them an email and mention that you like their content• Informing them about broken links or bugs on their website, if there are any• Approach them with your content only after you have already added value for them.

An influential person that shares your content can make the difference between an amazing blog that nobody notices, to making it well-known. If you can make the connection with such people in influential positions, you will reach a new audience that may have otherwise been difficult to reach.

621 awesome tips to grow your email lists

3. Invite your fans to subscribe

Email marketing is one of the channels with the highest conversion rates, especially when com-pared with social media, which makes an email subscriber more valuable to you than a social media fan.

Even so, if you have followers on social media, invite them to subscribe to your email list. It’s easy, it’s free and is a great way of rapidly growing your list.

But invite infrequently: it’s not enough to publish a post on your Facebook page and ask people to sign up, and then when nobody does, you give up. Invite them frequently, because only a few fans see your posts, so it makes sense to invite them several times. It´s also a bonus if you offer some kind of incentive (checklist, guide, other).

721 awesome tips to grow your email lists

4. Offer a lead magnet

Offering a lead magnet to the reader is nothing new, but there are many sites that simply request the email and give nothing in return. If the content in your article is excellent, that’s great, you´ll get away with it, though normally that’s not the case.

Note: Lead magnet refers to an incentive (guide, e-book, etc.) that we offer the reader in return for his email.

Creating a lead magnet doesn’t have to be difficult or demand a great deal of your time. It can be as simple as copying your most popular blog post and formatting it in an attractive PDF. Or transform and expand this article into a mini-course, sent in seven emails over the course of a few weeks (e.g. an email every two days).

The most important factor in a lead magnet which results in a conversion is one which solves a problem for the reader If you can offer them a solution to a problem, you will easily be able to grow your email subscriber list.

A lead magnet can be one of a variety of things:

• E-book, cheat sheet or guide• Market report or analysis• A toolkit or a list of useful resources• A mini-series of emails or videos (mini-course)• Automatic diagnostic tool (website grader)

Ideally you should create several lead magnets according to the content the reader finds on your website, though having one lead magnet is better than nothing.

See the ultimate guide to lead magnets for inspiration.

821 awesome tips to grow your email lists

5. Create lead magnets for each theme

If you cover a series of themes in your blog, having only one lead magnet isn’t enough. A visitor that’s reading about web design may not be interested in a guide to content marketing.

Even though this does involve some work, you should ideally create a lead magnet for each category. For example, an article that comes within the “email” category could offer the reader “4 Tips for Email Marketing Success”, and so forth for each successive category.

• 3 Things you Should Know before Building your Website• A Beginners Guide to Inbound Marketing• 10 Steps to Succeed on Facebook

And so on.

HubSpot is a good example of this, because there are a range of guides and e-books according to the themes covered in the blog.

Every article you publish as a different resource (lead magnet) according to the theme of the article. This does require some work, but by having a lead magnet for each theme, when read-ing your article, the visitor is offered with an additional relevant resource. This will help you to convert more visitors into leads.

921 awesome tips to grow your email lists

6. Experiment with Content Upgrades

We know the importance of having lead magnets, especially the magnets that are specifically related to the theme of the article being read by the visitor (ex: E-book “How to be successful in E-commerce” if the article was about E-Commerce

No we can take one step further.

We can have a Content Upgrade. This is also a lead magnet, but instead of presenting it at the end of the article, it’s a specific type of lead magnet just for that article.

A content upgrade is specific to the article; a lead magnet is specific for a particular category of articles. An article about “How to launch your website” could be a content upgrade about “Web-site launch checklist”, and a category of articles related to web design could have a lead magnet “7 Tips to Redesign your Website”.

A content upgrade is more specific than a lead magnet.

Example of content upgrade

1021 awesome tips to grow your email lists

7. Create tools for them

A lead magnet can be a guide, a checklist, an e-book, etc.

The lead magnets are “bribes” based on content, and even though it’s better to have an e-book than not having one, many people don’t have the patience to read additional content.

The majority of Internet users is used to being offered lead magnets in the form of guidance, checklists, blueprints, and so forth. But not all are used to seeing programs and software.

Therefore, why not offer a lead magnet that is a program/software/tool?

Creating a free tool, as a lead magnet, could be highly effective and increase your conversions substantially. Sites such as Gmetrix, Buzzsumo and Website Grader are far more appealing because they allow users to obtain automatic results about any given subject.

• Gmetrix allows you to analyse your website speed• Buzzsumo shows the most shared content and spies on the competition• Website Grader analyses and awards points to your site (based on several factors)

Gmetrix, Buzzsumo and Website Grader are tools. They are also lead magnets, but they are more elaborate. Everything that is automated and gives instant results is enticing because we are lazy.

This could be a great way to present people with a tool/program, that may afterwards opt for a paid plan.

For example, SumoMe is a collection of tools based on this business model, offering a range of three tools, through which they have attracted almost 300,000 users (a large email list).

Users can use these apps for free, with some limited functions, though can choose to upgrade to premium. Many will upgrade because they recognise the value of the free tool, and that the paid functionality offered is even better, just like the success stories that they are presented with (social proof) every time they login.

Creating an online tool gives people something different to what is usually offered as lead magnets (e-books, guides). This does involve however, considerable effort (economically and timewise).

1121 awesome tips to grow your email lists

8. Use incentive programs to reach more people

Bribe (or encourage) visitors to your website to spread your brand message within their social circles, as this can result in increasing virility.

People like to share nice content, especially if they gain something by doing it.

This can be done through incentive programs, where the users gain points the more friends they invite or the more they share on social media.

Let’s look at the example of UBER, that awarded points to users the more they shared and the more friends they invited, and for which both parties earned points. These kind of incentives are very appealing to gain traction and growth.

Uber also used the “gamification” concept by adding a progress bar. People tend to want to conclude their tasks and complete until the very end of a progress bar. This reminds me of the stickers in the Panini booklets, when I wanted to collect all of the stickers featuring balls.

With this program, Uber managed to spread its brand to more than 50 countries in three years.

To create this type of incentive program, you can use the services of an agency or developer, or employ services which allow you to create incentive programs, like these.

1221 awesome tips to grow your email lists

9. Give things to people

Giving things to people is a good opportunity to obtain more leads and engage people with your brand.

Normally the companies that carry out these “giveaways” managed to grow their email lists ef-fectively, but they need to be well implemented.

For a successful giveaway:

• Give an appealing prize to your target market• Give bonus points to those who recommend friends for a prize draw• Give some kind of incentive to those who participated but didn’t win

Don’t start giving iPads, because this may attract all kinds of people, and not necessarily the ones you want The prize must be specific to your target market.

For example, let’s imagine you have a vegetarian snack shop. You can offer vegan sweets to all participants, because this will attract the type of people that you want - vegetarians. If you offer an iPad, you’ll have more people in your prize draw, but few will be interested in your brand or in your restaurant.

Even though you offer a specific prize, there is a danger that some people, even though they are not vegetarians, would like to enter this kind of giveaway, because everyone likes to receive something for nothing, and winning sweets better than winning nothing. This may result in ob-taining leads that may not be entirely interested in your products or services.

To perform these giveaways, you can use services such as KingSumo Giveaways and Rafflecopter.

1321 awesome tips to grow your email lists

10. Prize draws are also a good way to attract peopleGiving things away to people can be a good way of growing your email lists, but they may not necessarily be the kind of people you want.

However, for some segments of the market, prize draws and contests are ideal, because they are a good way of engaging directly with your target market and capturing hot leads for your email list.

This may not grow your email list to the same elevated extent as giveaways, such as those men-tioned previously in point 9, but you at least know that these subscribers are more engaged with you.

To run a good contest, the prize must be specific and attainable. How do you make people want to participate? Dove involved their users by asking them to upload photos, and where the winner (and a friend) could appear in the brands advertising campaign.

This prize draw makes the participant work a little, because they have to appear in the video with a friend.

Dove captured fewer leads than if they were to give away a product without the necessary video appearance, though the leads they did capture were at least from people engaged with the brand, and fewer, though quality leads, are better.

Apart from the obvious result, that was to capture more leads, Dove also gained content (video and photo) that it could use in other brand promotions, on their website and on social media, as testimonials to generate further social proof.

1421 awesome tips to grow your email lists

11. Include share options by email

Providing a share option for email is something that should be done and it´s not difficult, be-cause it can be chosen almost instantly with a simple click in email services like Egoi, GetRe-sponse, MailChimp, Aweber or any other email service.

According to a study by GetResponse, emails with social share options have 6.2% more clicks than those that don’t have a share option.

1521 awesome tips to grow your email lists

12. Experiment with pop-ups and similar featuresPop-ups can be annoying but the truth is, they work. And it’s not only pop-ups, but all varieties of this type of subscription box. These are the most common methods of subscription:

• pop-ups• slide-ins/fly-ins• opt-ins in the middle of the article• opt-ins at the end of the article• opt-ins like widget/sidebar• opt-ins for allowing blocked content

Depending on the type of opt-in (subscription box) chosen, this can be more or less effective, or more or less aggressive. But as a general rule, they work, because such pop-ups helped Entrepre-neur.com to grow their subscriptions by 86%.

Pop-ups are easy to implement and there are various types of service, free and paid, but allow you to do this. Some of the most popular include the SumoMe List Builder, Bloom eMail, among other plug-ins for use on your WordPress website.

1621 awesome tips to grow your email lists

13. Use full-width drop-downs for more conversions

One type of opt-in which I didn’t mention is the full width drop-down. You´ve probably already seen this in action.

When you visit a website or blog, a subscription form appears that fills the whole screen. The ad-vantage of this type of opt in is that there is no immediate escape, because it takes up the whole page. The user is obliged to choose “No thank you, I don’t want to subscribe” (or whatever the message that appears states).

The previous image is an example of the website Pic Jumbo (photo website), where a few sec-onds after entering the website, you are presented with this form takes up the whole page. The user can subscribe or choose ”No, thank you”, and will be taken to the website.

These types of opt-ins significantly increase the number of subscriptions, but depend on the way they are used.

Invite people to subscribe soon as they’ve entered the site is annoying and presumptuous on our part, to think that the person will be interested without us knowing anything about them.

The purpose of capturing leads through this kind of opt-in is to invite people that like what we do or the content that we produce. It is for this reason that pop-ups and similar features should be shown around 30 seconds after the user enters your website.

In this way, the visitor has time to see some of your content, and when the pop-up appears, if the person likes the content, they will probably subscribe.

1721 awesome tips to grow your email lists

14. Use social proof to your advantage

Social proof is a psychological factor which increases conversions.

People like to be part of the tribe (as Seth Gordon says), and like to take part in popular activities, so as not to feel excluded.

Social proof is influential in such a way, that it started a new style of e-commerce called social commerce.

Most people feel more comfortable buying on a website that has product (and store) reviews and rankings. Social proof carries more weight than giving users reasons and justifications that “this product is good for the environment”, or saves money, or whatever it may be.

Social proof can be as simple as having a Facebook box on the sidebar of your website. This only works if you have high number of fans.

Or you can show testemonials from satisfied clients or a social plug-in on the product page.

1821 awesome tips to grow your email lists

15. Be a guest poster

Guest blogging is a convenient way of getting your content in front of another type of target market. But in doing so one needs to be realistic, because many people think that writing as a guest blogger will bring more traffic to their website. But that’s not the way it is.

I can say from experience having written various articles as a guest poster, that the time invested is not worth the amount of traffic received by website, even when the article appears in websites or blogs that have a lot of readers (high traffic). Guest blogging is good for:

• Getting your name recognised• Display quality links for your website• For networking with webmasters/bloggers/influential people• Attract some traffic to your best landing pages

Many people believe that you only have to write guest posts in popular websites and the traffic starts to flow via the author’s biography link. But things don’t work that way.

Guest blogs can help you grow your email list, but it must be done properly.

If you want your guest article to generate email subscribers, you have to offer lead magnet in the same article Mention the lead magnet beginning of the article (to create expectation) and then offer a link to your need magnet at the end of the article.

Don’t expect the reader to click on your bio link: instead, offer a lead magnet at the end of the article, as well as mentioning this a few times during the article itself.

If you want to capture more subscribers through your guest posts, you will have to write on sites that allow you to use a CTA (call to action) within the article (link to one of your landing pages, or to your need magnet).

1921 awesome tips to grow your email lists

16. Do cross promotion

Cross promotions are similar to guest articles, but in contrast, the objective is to make partner-ship with the website of the same size (or slightly larger) than yours.

For example, if your list has 1000 people, it makes sense to do a cross promotion with another site that has a list of between 1000 to 3000 subscribers.

When approaching these websites for the purposes of cross promotion, aim for a target market that´s a slightly larger than your own.

Some ideas for cross promotions:

• Exchange articles with the sites as described previously in point 15• Mention each other´s sites on social media and in emails• Form partnerships for product launches, courses, or offers• Share each other´s content on social media• Offer special promotions to each other’s target market

2021 awesome tips to grow your email lists

17. Publish case studies

Case studies are a great way of promoting a project or a company, though at the same time at-tracting people’s attention, comments and shares.

People like to see results of real events. Anyone can write an article about theories, but in reality the proof is in the litmus test. The advantage of this is that it positions you as an expert.

Most companies that publish case studies are not doing things correctly, by representing confus-ing statistics, or that have no relation to practical results, and most of the article appears as a blatant promotion.

This is not the way to present a case study.

If you want to grow your email lists through case studies, you should do this:

• Explain the problem, the process and the solution applied• Summarise the observations and conclusions taken• Present the content in educational way, not promotional

Don’t feel obliged to promote your service in a case study, because the case study itself will do this for you.

A case study undertaken by our agency could be about someone started seeing better results after having begun consultation with us, and now has more traffic and conversions in their online store, or it could be someone who captured the list of subscribers after starting to use the services of Email Marketing Company X.

2121 awesome tips to grow your email lists

18. Hold webinars

Webinars are a form of educational and informative content, and have several advantages such as:

• People provide their email address before seeing content• It’s the way of educating first, and selling second• The group of people that are able to speak better than they can write

Webinars allow you to capture emails, the theme has to be interesting and useful so that they will want to sign and attend the webinar.

They have advantages for the many entrepreneurs and marketers who are not good writers, but are good at speaking and explaining concepts orally. They can take several laborious hours to write an article which, orally in a webinar, can be done more quickly and efficiently.

Webinars have become more and more popular and used as a promotional tool in recent years, and not without good reason: it’s a great way to educate and sell to people.

For example, a web design agency can offer a webinar about the precautions to take when developing a website, and finish the webinar by promoting its services to spectators.

2221 awesome tips to grow your email lists

19. Paid advertising

Incurring higher costs may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you want to capture more leads and subscribers for your list, but the reality is that nothing is achieved without effort, whether financial or timewise.

Producing good articles and content costs money, planning and hosting webinars costs money, making an optimised landing page costs money.

Wanting to save pennies and having less than the potential number of people on your list can be compared to waiting in a queue for two hours to save a few pence on a litre of petrol. How much is your time worth?

Advertising can be one of the best ways to obtain more subscribers than any other method.

You can advertise in Facebook, Google Adwords or by banners in a variety of media buy sites.

With online (paid) advertising, the trick is to start slowly and then reproduce to scale in propor-tion to the success achieved, or in other words, as you manage to capture more leads for the landing pages containing the lead magnets, which in turn hopefully convert visitors into sales.

See the Complete Guide to Generating Leads through Facebook

By clicking on the advert the user “lands” on a landing page that offers the e-book.

2321 awesome tips to grow your email lists

20. Offer discounts by email

Giving discounts or free samples is a type of lead magnet (digital bait) which is used by e-com-merce stores. Visitors land on one of the store´s pages with the intention to buy, and by offering them a discount (or free delivery), you are encouraging them to make the first purchase.

This Add-Ons website offers a cash incentive to the visitor to encourage them to make a pur-chase.

This store offers a 10% discount voucher which is sent to the user via email after they have sub-scribed to the store´s newsletter.

Whilst several companies offer discounts, very few think of using them as a way of growing their email lists.

2421 awesome tips to grow your email lists

21. Collect emails at off-line events

Don’t try to do everything online.

There are several opportunities for growing an email list (and a company) in the real world, in off-line activities. Industry events, seminars, training, conferences or even specialised networking events are good places to get to know other people and companies.

These events can turn out to be a good opportunity to create a list, especially if it means engag-ing with people who represent your ideal target market. Think about it, if a person has made the effort to travel to this event, they’re going to be more receptive to your company, because it’s within their area of interest.

The principles of online email capture can also be applied off-line. Present something to offer in exchange for the person’s email address, or even ask for their email at the end, after having had a follow-up conversation and explanation of your product or service.

Events such as conferences good due to their highly educational characteristic, so you should prepare case studies to take with you, along with reports or mini guides to offer people as print-ed material, and requested a details afterwards. People want to learn therefore you just need to position yourself as a source of learning.

2521 awesome tips to grow your email lists

Conclusion

E-book developed by:

Capturing emails and growing your list isn’t necessarily difficult. Use the tips in this article to start capturing more emails and gain a target market that is interested in receptive to your product.

Getting subscribers isn’t difficult, and what you do with the subscribers from now on (follow-up) that will dictate your results. Maintaining the same level of consistency and quality with your sub-scribers, from the moment that they click on the lead magnet, to when you contact them, when they buy and when they engage with you.

Your email list is one of the most valuable assets that you can have if you know how to use it properly.

In partnership with: João AlexandreAgency Manager - DesignPT