Email marketing is a great way to build your customer base and revenue online. It is a low-cost, high-impact method to engage and deliver your message to both existing customers and prospective ones. Building an email list ensures that you’re constantly increasing your presence online.
It’s been proven that e-mails are the way forward, with numbers backing them up. 87% of marketers depend on emails to nurture their audiences. Building an active email list will ensure you have a steady revenue of income as well as an audience that reacts positively to your timely messages in their inbox. Your email list will ensure that you, as a marketer, can differentiate your customers based on their behavioral patterns and purchasing capabilities.
We’ve compiled a neat list of email building methods for you to use. If you feel that you’ve better suggestions on other techniques, feel free to drop it in the comments, and we’ll take a look!
What is List Building?
Email list building is not a one-stop solution. It is a continuous process of analyzing, comparing and editing to get the best return on investment possible. In simpler words, email list building is nurturing an audience online to get them to subscribe to your emails. Over time, you can send them marketing emails, product launches, company updates, birthday wishes and more.
List building is a process where you increase your audience and/or customers online and segregate them into different lists. Once you answer the question what is email marketing, the next step is working on your email list. These lists can be differentiated based on parameters such as “frequent buyers,” “new customers,” “offer customers” and more. You can then hyper-target your emails to these separate audience lists and get them to visit your website and explore or link them to the online store to browse or purchase from your catalog.
Why Should You Own Your Audience?
Email marketing is one way with which you can connect with your audience and also understand how they interact with their favorite brands. 49% of consumers revealed that they would love to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands weekly. Consumers love feeling special, and emails are one way you can do that for them. Today’s hyper-digital world means that mobile phones play a significant role even when it comes to email marketing.
Adding videos to your emails increases their chances of being opened by 300%! While social media is a great way to market your brand online, it isn’t conclusive as these media trends keep changing over time. Audiences and preferences, along with the ever-changing algorithm, meaning that you’re never fully in control over who sees your posts and daily content. It can be hard to keep track of engagement rates and a lot of the other parameters.
With email marketing, however, you’ll be able to access your contact’s details and not depend on any particular channel to communicate anything with them. It’s all in your hands, and the only dependency from your end is choosing a great email service provider. Thankfully, there are some awesome email marketing software like Mailchimp available to make your job easier.
Basic Pre Requisites for Building an Engaging Email List:
To build an email list requires a bit of groundwork to help you get started. If you’re building from scratch, you can keep track of a few of the prerequisites that will help you understand how you can improve with this method:
1. Relevant traffic:
A target audience that allows you to send relevant emails is important. You need to do the research and understand who your target audience is before you begin the process of designing an email. Once you attract the relevant audience with your marketing efforts, your emails will get a better response rate from them.
2. Optimized website:
Your audience that’s visiting the site must begin to take action over time. Whether that’s in the form of placing an order, clicking on a blog link or adding an item to a wish-list, all of these forms a significant part of the CRO or Conversion Rate Optimization. Find an excellent bait to attract your customers onto your website via your email strategy to make the most of your strategy.
By getting your audience to browse your website, you’re increasing traffic which is directly related to the chances of a purchase. Revenue has to be the ultimate goal and delightful customer experience on your site will ensure you get a good chunk in the bank.
3. Lead capturing tool:
Since you’re getting traffic onto your website, you need a good tool to capture email addresses and details as well. There are plenty of methods to do so, with landing pages, pop-up forms and online forms as well. The best way to go about this is to try out different methods until you find one that works effectively.
Capturing your audience’s emails will make it easier to market your company’s products and services and also find space in their inboxes. This increases the chances of a purchase over time, giving your business it’s a much-needed boost in revenue.
Actionable Techniques To Start Owning Your Audience:
So, without further ado, here’s what you need to do to begin nurturing your audience and building a solid email list
1. The Right Pop-Ups Make A Big Difference:
Pop-ups allow your users to quickly subscribe to your website and receive regular communication from your company. They’re also a great way to help them download upgrades to your content and grab their attention just before they exit the page.
A great way to use your pop-up is by posting a certain piece of content and then inviting people to come over and sign up to the mailing list. This way, you know that they’re interested in seeing this particular topic and can keep them in a separate list for articles or content related to the same.
The people from this list can be placed in the general newsletter list of your brand as well and help digital managers communicate more about your company towards them.
2. Give Them Premium Infographics:
If you’re a company that’s into analytics, then you have got a gold mine of data that you’re sitting on! A lot of companies generally have access to premium data about the industry they’re working in. If you have the budget, hire an excellent graphic designer and create some awesome infographics for your customers.
This will give your customers more insight into your industry and also interest them in knowing more about your company in general. Once you’re able to provide them with such premium information, they’re going to look forward to your newsletters and infographics, and you can leverage the same to sell as well.
3. Allow Them To Opt-In And Out:
Customers don’t enjoy being hoarded with multiple emails and newsletters, especially if they don’t remember signing up for them. It’s important that you specify what you’re providing them. If they’re okay with being sent regular emails, then you know for sure that they’re interested in your brand and will more likely return to interact.
Giving them this option is the best thing you could do because it is ethical and also a legal requirement in some countries. The least you could do is add a “No thanks” option for readers to choose when your lead-gen form appears on their screen.
4. Wish Them On Special Occasions:
If your users have entered their birthdays or anniversaries on your forms, then you can leverage that information to your advantage. Send out exclusive emails to subscribers on these select dates along with a gift card or some reward. You’ll be able to increase the chance of purchase as well as stay fresh in their minds as a brand that cares.
Of course, you shouldn’t go overboard and demand their important dates from them. Leave it as an option to choose so that they can opt for it if they want to. Also, specify why you’re taking this information so they can trust you with it.
5. Share Real Testimonials On Email:
Social proof plays a substantial role in getting more visitors to your website and highlights the best qualities of your brand. If you’ve 10,000 people reading your blog, that’s certainly something worth letting everyone know.
You can promote these numbers with the help of a sidebar that’s located on your website and also include testimonials and visitor figures every month. These pieces of information will give your site the credibility it needs to stand apart and also gain the trust of any new visitor or potential customer. Ultimately, it increases social proof, and that plays a big role in gaining new followers for your emails.
Conclusion:
So, we’ve shared a list of what we think are some of the best techniques to help you nurture your audience and build a tremendous online audience. Remember to always give your customers the space they need to consume your content and yourself the same to create unique content.
Get yourself a great email service provider by comparing a few and you’ll be well on your way to building effective lists that get you the revenue you deserve.
