List Building - How to Build an Email List?
If you have a blog or a website or a business, then you need to have an email list of people to send information to.
Once you have this list in place, you will have an easy way to communicate with people who want to know more about what you have to say. Of course, this list can be used for much more, although it is usually the way that you will grow your sales more than ever before.
Here are a couple of facts about email lists and how wonderful they can be:
- More than seventy per cent of consumers prefer to communicate with companies via email. Almost all of them believe that promotional emails should be sent weekly, although a few are more than willing to see them in their inbox more often.
- Most shoppers will either go to the store or shop online after they receive a promotional email from a company.
If you have not set up an email list yet, or you have one and it hasn’t grown as you have wanted, then you need to read this step by step guide on list building.
As soon as you are done, you will find that you will be more than excited to get started on building the email list of your dreams.
Here are the 10 steps that you must take if you want to build an amazing email list:
- Find an Email List Building Software
You may think that you can handle sending out emails on your own, but once you have a list that numbers in the thousands, there is no way that you are going to be able to keep track of everyone without a little help.
This is where email list building software can come in handy. There are a few options that you can choose from, but most people prefer Constant Contact.
The reason for that is that Constant Contact makes the entire process easy and you will never need to worry about your emails once you set up the automation process. The good news is that you can try this email list building software before you completely commit to anything.
- Steps to Take to Grow Your Email List
As soon as you have your email software up and running, you will want to find a way to encourage people to sign up for your email list. Most of the time, all it takes is a giveaway and people will sign up by the thousands.
A few things that you can choose to give away include a discount code, a coupon, or free content. Discount codes and coupon codes are perfect if you have an online store, as anyone that signs up for your email will most likely automatically go and see what they can order and have delivered right away.
The other option of giving away free content is a little more time-consuming on your end, simply because you need to create it first. However, once you create the content that you want to offer for free, there is nothing more that you need to do later on except make sure that you have it automatically sent when a person subscribes to your list.
The only thing that you need to remember is that you need to create content that you know that your readers and those who try to find your website will want. This content can be an article, a list, a video, or a short ebook, but make sure that it filled with content that pertains to your website.
- Utilize an Email List Form on Your Website
When you realize that you need an email list, you can’t just go and place a sign-up section just anywhere on your website. No, instead, you need to make sure that it is in a convenient place that everyone who visits your site can see right away!
One of the best ways to get people to see your email sign up option is to have a pop up appear a minute after they arrive on your website or right when they appear to be clicking away to go somewhere else.
This pop-up box can include a spot for their name and email, as well as what they will receive in return.
While that box will disappear when they click out of it, don’t worry, you can still make it easy for them to sign up if they decide to after looking around your site some more. An email sign up option can be included as a link in your menu and you can even have a link in your contact section as a backup.
- Create a Long-Term Strategy Using Content to Grow Your Email List
While there is no better way to grow email lists, there are a few that always have promising and extraordinary results.
The first thing that you should always do with your email lists is make sure that you have a long-term strategy in place when it comes to the content that you will be sending out.
After all, people will get bored easily when they start to see the same thing week after week and they will simply stop opening your emails.
You should begin by choosing to always create content that will go viral within your business niche. The reason for this is that the more shares that your email gets from your readers, the more other people will choose to sign up to be on your email list.
Eventually things will snowball until you have more email subscribers than you ever imagined! When you have phenomenal content, you will need to create a spectacular title that will make everyone click on the link and want to read every word that you wrote.
Then they will want to think of who they know that could use the information within the email and send it to them.
By the end of the day that you send an email out, you never know, it could be shared one hundred times or a thousand times. And by the end of the week, you could have grown your subscribers by a couple thousand or more!
- Use LinkedIn to Your Advantage
You may think that you are generating a few leads on LinkedIn, but you can have so many more if you create a group on there.
Simply create a group that focuses on what you do and what you are an expert on and once a person asks to join your group, send them a welcome email. Within that email, you can include a link that asks them to confirm their email.
As soon as they click on that link, they are taken directly to your landing page, where they can then sign up for your emails as well.
Hundreds of thousands of people are on LinkedIn each day, so you have an excellent chance of growing your email list quickly with this one easy step.
- Focus on Your Monthly Visitors and Feature Them Instead of How Many Email Subscribers You Have
Currently, you may have one hundred subscribers on your email list, but you most likely have more people visiting your website each month.
For that reason, you should automatically focus on the number of people who visit your site each month and highlight that for all those who are reading what you write.
This is usually best done on your About Me page, as you can state that you currently have forty thousand readers each month and that you send out a popular newsletter as well. It is recommended to use this number as long as you have more than five thousand people visiting your website each month. If your monthly visitors are less than that, you should stick to subscriber testimonials and reader testimonials until your numbers increase.
- Utilize Twitter
Twitter is in its own little world, which is why you should never assume that everyone who follows you on Twitter has subscribed to your emails. However, at the same time, you know that these people already like what you have to say and share, so it will be easy to get them to sign up! All you need to do is send out a tweet that states that you share exclusive information with those who are subscribed to your email and then you can watch your email list grow instantly as your Twitter followers sign up.
- Turn All Those Blog Comments into Subscribers to Your Email List
Every time you have a person comment on any of your blog posts, you are turning away subscribers to your email list, unless you have a handy feature included! Simply add a line that states that the commenter does not want to miss out on exclusive information and that they can easily subscribe to your emails by checking the included box. The fact that these people are commenting on your site means that they are interested in what you are saying and that they are going to want to hear more. Obviously, there will be some who do not like what you say, but hopefully those will be few and far between.
- Utilize Your About Me Page to Its Fullest Potential
Anyone who takes the time to read your About Me page is most likely going to be interested in signing up for your emails, so you need to make it easy for them to do it! Place one opt-in box right in the middle of the page where everyone can see it clearly and another one towards the bottom that is strategically placed with all your social media buttons. This ensures that they will see your opt-in forms and that they will click on at least one of them.
- Use Qualaroo to Build Your Email List Fast
Qualaroo is a survey tool that you can easily use to grow your email list quickly! While it is perfect for asking your readers questions in the form of a survey, your best bet is to use it to entice people to subscribe to your email list. Simply state that the reader must be interested in your website and ask if they would like to sign up for your email. Their answers can then be as follows:
- Yes, and have them enter their email
- Already a subscriber
- No thanks
Those who answer yes will be automatically subscribed and you will get a good idea of how many of your readers are already subscribed or have no interest. If you find that you have quite a few that do not want to subscribe, you may want to try to find out why, so you can make changes to entice them to join you on your website via your emails.
There are other ways that you can easily build your email list quickly, but these are the ten steps that you will need to take to get it moving in the right direction, faster than ever before. Give these a try and you will be amazed at how many more subscribers you have in just a few short days!