If I had to choose ONE marketing activity for any industry, one that you MUST invest time and money in (to launch and grow your online business), my answer would always be the same: list building.
To get people who want to give you their emails (instead of feeling forced to do so), building an email list requires a combination of skills: content marketing, design, copywriting, sales, and paid acquisition.
This page is designed to be your go-to guide on how to build an email list.
5 Prominent Attributes of a Persuasive Lead Magnet
A lead magnet is the biggest and most important element of email marketing. It is the offer that you exchange for an email address. Lead magnets are also called Signup incentives, Signup offers, Freemiums, Content upgrades etc. Offering lead magnets is a vital part of the content marketing formula that builds a more loyal audience, and in turn, effectively builds a loyal audience for you and get you, long-term customers.
If you want to attract high-quality leads or your website, you will need a high-quality lead magnet. Earning an email opt-in requires making an attractive offer and a compelling call-to-action. You must offer your audience something that they need and cannot refuse to subscribe. An attractive lead magnet should comprise these characteristics.
Provide Real Value
Make sure you provide the same thing you have promised before signing up. If your customers don’t get satisfied with your lead magnet, you will fail to maintain trust among them. And, if they are not satisfied, they will simply unsubscribe at that very moment.
Offer Solutions
An effective lead magnet must provide solutions to customers. You should first look at the problem they are facing and search for the solution. Social media is a great place to know about their problems. Then, offer the solution in exchange for their email address. Make sure whatever you are offering solves their problem, instead of aggravating it.
Easy to Understand
If your consumers are not able to understand or consume the lead magnet you are offering, they will never return to you and your value will decrease as your subscribers will not gain any benefit from you.
So, make sure you plan your lead magnet in such a way that it can be quickly understood and useful by your subscribers.
Create Authority
Your lead magnet should build your authority by showcasing your expertise to your audience. Your subscribers should believe that you are the master in your field. For this, you need to help them by solving their problem & build trust and authority. It will help you engage with them in your business.
Reliable
A good lead magnet should relate to your products and services. An unreliable offering can never attract customers. If they find you as the one who can help them accomplish their goals, they will become your lifetime subscribers.
After doing all this research, you now have the right idea for the perfect lead magnet. But before you start planning you must research everything about your potential customers such their likes, dislikes, passion etc. This information will help you shape your products and services to meet your customers’ needs.
How Content Marketing is Vital to Building Your Email List
To increase your website traffic and conversions, you need to grow your email list. It’s a fact that email acquisition and lead generation are the most important aspects of digital marketing. There are a lot of ways you can generate an email database, but Content marketing is one of the best.
Here are the top tips and tricks for content marketing that will help you expand your email list-
Understand Your Audience
This is the very first step you must take in order to create any marketing strategy. The statistics of your audience helps you in deciding the structure of your content based on their tastes and preferences. Discover topics they are interested in. If your audience likes to see videos rather than images of your content, just go ahead and include them. Your content needs to be attractive and worth sharing.
Create Good Content
Your content will only be shared if you create good quality content. If it is, then your audience will like and share it to various sharable channels. Content marketing is the most effective method but it’s also the toughest one because it is very difficult to create good quality content that audiences love to share.
To improve your content value, you can share it to top social platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, and other social channels. You can also convert your content into short videos and post it to YouTube in order to garner more attention.
Analyze Your Subscription
Analyzing the nature of subscription is a must. It’s very important to know after how many clicks or what duration it takes for someone to subscribe to your email list. If it takes more than three clicks or more than 10 seconds to subscribe, you are not on the right track.
Gathering more subscriptions is not that easy. Your audience is not at all interested in providing their email addresses if they don’t find anything valuable. You must take care of a few things. Make sure that there are no unnecessary questions in the subscription process. Your subscription process must be very easy, and your audience must get value from subscribing.
Subscription Gate
Sometimes your content gets clicks but your list doesn’t grow. In such a case, you must add a subscription or email gate to add more emails to your list. You should not put the email-gate in such a way that compels the audience in order to see the content. All you need to do is to push them gently to subscribe, and you’ll see better results.
Marketing is nothing without content. With the above-given tips, you can improve your content marketing strategy that will help you add more emails to your list. Create valuable, attractive and reliable content in which your audience is interested. This will help you drive more leads and sales.
Verified Strategies to Build Your Email List from Scratch
Engaging new customers in your business is a very tricky and difficult job. Developing trust and value among customers is a must. Consumers are very careful regarding their contact information and if they are not loving your product or services, they will never show any interest in your promotional emails. They will simply ignore your emails. If you are new and starting from zero, you must follow the proven strategies given by top online marketers.
With the help of the strategies below, you can use your emails to attract long-term customers to your offers.
Use CTAs in Blogs and Landing Pages
Visitors to your webpage or blog post have some expectations from you. Your CTA should convince them that whatever they are looking for, is available on your website. Make sure everything you are promising in your CTA is available on your web pages. If you offer content as per the needs of your visitors, your email newsletter will not look like an artificial advertisement.
Create Pop-Ups on Your Pages
Create a popup on your web pages. Popups should appear when visitors intend to exit your page. Email subscription popups get positive results. So, you must use exit-intent popups with an appealing invitation to subscribe.
Get Good Email List Building Software
If you want to build an email list fast, you need good email marketing software. It makes list building easy and less time consuming and it’s useful for small businesses, bloggers, online business owners etc.
Announce Discount Coupons
For online stores, announcing discount coupons is common. If you want your audience to join your email list, giving them a discount code or coupon code is a great way to do it.
Provide Free Content
You must give your audience a good and profitable reason to join your email list. Providing free content is the best way to invite them to join your list. You can provide content in the form of videos, eBooks, articles, blogs etc.
CTA on About Us Page
The ‘About Us’ page of any website is the most important one for its visitors. This page is mostly visited by the audience and thus it can easily convert more visitors. All you need to do is add an engaging CTA button on the About Us page. It will help you encourage visitors to opt for your services.
Facebook Offers
You can also promote an offer that requires the email id of your followers. You can share the content on your Facebook timeline. Also, add social sharing buttons to encourage your leads to share your offers with their social networks.
Now you have all the strategies that can increase your business’ email database. You may find some of them quite tricky, but the results are proven. As you grow your email list by adding new leads, you can grow them with middle-of-the-funnel offers and get sales-ready leads.
5 Vital Principles for Building A Flawless List
You know how important email list building for your business growth. It’s one of the most tested and proven ways that motivates your audience to take an interest in your business. You may find several ways to expand your email list. But you must not avoid the basic principles that allow your list to grow continuously. Below are the top 5 crucial principles for perfect list building-
Exchange Something Fruitful
Do you want to grow your email list faster than ever? If yes, then you must think about your readers. If you offer them something fruitful that is useful for them, then only will they become your subscriber. These offers are called lead magnets. So, to offer something useful, you first need to know what kind of problem they are facing and then find a solution for it. Then offer that solution to them in exchange for an email subscription.
These offers can be in the form of an eBook, Workbook, Templates, Checklist, Cheatsheet, Email course, Video course, Extended blog post, Curated newsletter, Infographic, Discount etc.
Relevancy
Whatever you provide after signing up should be relevant to whatever they were reading before signing up. For example, if they are reading a blog on social media marketing, you must offer them guides or an eBook on various topics related to social media itself.
Multiple Ways to Join
Your audience needs various opportunities to become a part of your email list. If you offer limited ways of signing up, they may miss them. For example, sidebar opt-in forms are missed when readers focus on your content. Along with the sidebar opt-in forms, you can use forms like After post, Popovers, Slide-in, Widgets, Ribbons etc.
Split-Test Your Opt-in Forms
Through split testing, you can test multiple versions of your website opt-in forms to check out which ones work the best. Marketers use split tests to get the most out of their marketing efforts. It will tell you about how your audience actually responds. By this, you can maximize your traffic and visitor engagement.
After Subscription Process
After getting your opt-in-form system ready, you need to do a few more things. You should also ask them to whitelist your email address apart from clicking the subscription link in the confirmation email. It’s very important because if your emails don’t reach them, all your efforts in email marketing will go in vain.
Now you have all the important pillars that will keep your list building process on track. If you want to build an audience that will love to get your emails, you have to apply all of the above-given principles to build a flawless email list.
7 Cost-Effective Tools to Help You Grow Your Email List Faster
In online marketing, your list is the database of your contacts that can be used to send marketing messages, information to communicate with your customers.
If you are talking about email marketing, you can’t miss list building. In fact, most marketers focus on how they can build their email list to grow their business. You have a high customer engagement ability and by sending emails regularly, you can build trust, and this will help to build your list. Along with this, here are some valuable tools that can also help you to boost your list building efforts-
OptinMonster
Pop-up forms are helpful to generate leads, so if you want to create attractive pop-up forms for your website, you can use OptinMonster. It is also helpful for improving conversion optimization and to analyze which form is doing the best.
OptinMonster generates more sales, with the most powerful conversion toolkit to grow customer revenue.
Optimizely
Optimizely is a tool which allows you to test the functionalities of your website. By doing a few clicks, you can test any page of your website without making any change to your original website.
It also provides the facility to customize the forms such as the text, images, and color of the call-to-action button.
Bounce Exchange
It allows you to target different segments of traffic. It gives your visitors an opportunity to know and make proposals for them according to their behavior.
It can also help to nurture leads by capturing the email address of users for future use.
LinkedIn pulse
If you want to build your list, and want to build authority in your niche, you can use LinkedIn Pulse. It increases your credibility & builds a relationship with your customers. You can add a call-to-action button with a LinkedIn pulse to promote your services.
This tool allows you to view the information like job title & location that they are using to view your services.
Drip
Drip allows the customer to create their own campaigns without wasting much time. Basically, this is an automated tool that automates the workflows of messages which helps in sending highly targeted messages to the right person and at the right time.
Rafflecopter
This tool is easy to use for newbies because users can use it for free to check if these devices are helpful for their business or not. It is helpful to make it easy to launch & manage a giveaway for any site.
Rafflecopter provides a better solution for developing and following through on giveaways and contests via a company’s website or social media platforms.
Unbounce
Landing pages are helpful to attract customers to your services and to buy your services. Unbounce generates less cost per lead for you with the help of landing pages.
You can decide which text, font, color is best for your page & test which version is more effective.
Building an email list puts you in the right direction to get more customers for your website, and boost sales and profits. No one will be satisfied with slow email list growth, using these tools can help you to achieve your goal as soon as possible and the rest is up to you.
Effective Instagram List Building Tactics to Grow Your Business
Every marketer follows the strategies that speed up and maximize their efforts and the best way of doing this is by marketing through Instagram. Instagram is a very popular channel to promote your services & increase your social media management because it is the best way of connecting with your audience.
For any eCommerce business, list building is an important factor. It will be more effective if you use Instagram tactics to improve your list.
Below are some tips and tactics that you can use to grow your business as well as boost your email list.
Create engaging content
To engage your audience, it is necessary to provide them with content that is more user-generated and engaging. It will help you to generate more leads for your business & to build your email list. If you are trying to grow your business through an Instagram account, you must concentrate on user-generated content as much as possible. This will help you to get user attention and a lot of comments from your audience that is essential to building a list.
Use Proper Hashtags
Talking about Instagram, you can’t ignore the term “Hashtags.” These are helpful to make your content more searchable in the search list. You can build your email list quickly if you are using proper hashtags with your images & text. This is also helpful to connect with your audience directly, with a well-crafted strategy because hashtags can directly relate to your content as well as your brand or services.
Strong Call-To-Action
If you have a call-To-action button at the top of your page, then it can be very helpful to improve your list building efforts. It should be simple, clear and understandable for your customers. This is effective because it is a clear way to appeal from the customers to subscribe to your page. It gives a reason for your customers to buy your services. Thus, a call-To-Action helps you to collect more traffic than you get right now.
Create Instagram Lead Ads
Instagram Lead Ads are helpful to collect valuable information from Instagram prospects without pushing them off the Instagram platform because the creation of an Instagram Lead Ad can be done using the Facebook Ad Manager. Here you can add the ad set. It is helpful to generate leads as well as grow a list in a compelling way for your online business.
Attractive Landing Page
Instagram uses landing pages for marketing purpose. This is the page where your viewers can sign-up for your mailing list. So, landing pages should be very attractive with an eye-catchy headline, persuasive copy, and CTA button. Having an attractive landing page for the ad is the key to turning clicks into conversions.
Today Instagram is the best platform for marketing purposes. Instagram is important for building your email list and make your brand popular. These were some tricks which can prove useful to grow your business.
Top 3 Challenges to Overcome While Building an Email List
For any marketing campaign, list building is crucial as it helps you reach out easily to a widely scattered audience. Nowadays, list building is the topmost priority for every successful marketer. If customers are ready to give their details like their name, email address, etc. it means they are interested in your services or products.
Building an email list is not an easy task as it takes time to build it in an efficient manner. There are many obstacles in achieving the growth of list building. You must avoid making mistakes.
Below, we are describing some challenges that can be easily tackled by giving a little effort.
Providing Valuable Content
Creating attention-grabbing content is a big challenge for marketers. All marketing businesses provide content in the form of blogs, templates, newsletters, sales copies etc., but providing quality content is the most important. If you are not providing strategic content to your audience, there is no sense of doing anything.
Promotion of your content is also an important factor in your list building efforts. By sharing your content or link of the content through social media, you get the opportunity to tell many people about your business.
In order to make your content relevant, valuable, and sharable, you must set an objective to get your content reviewed by an expert copywriter, who can guide you to make extraordinary content for your promotion material like websites, email advertisements, templates etc.
Less Expertise Marketers
If there is no marketing expert in your business who can set predefined goals or strategies for your business, then everything is worthless, and it may be the reason for your business failure. A knowledgeable marketing expert can predefine all the pros and cons related to marketing from start to finish.
For growing list building you need a perfect strategy to create and execute all the functions perfectly. You must employ experienced people, who can work to increase your email list and deal with all the hassles and risk factors that come in the way of building a list.
Qualitative and Accurate Information
You need viewer’s information during list building like first name, last name, email address etc. There is no need to ask for additional information from your visitors. If you try to get extra information, then somewhere it will reduce your list building results.
You should also work on making your list clean by removing the bad email addresses or by removing those emails who have stopped responding and by removing duplicate email addresses. By doing this you can improve your email deliverability rate because it helps to keep your list up to date.
List building is very helpful to get more visibility for your offers. If it is not done perfectly, then it can be destructive for your online campaign. By knowing these challenges, you can try to overcome them. This will help you to take proper action, and to avoid making these mistakes in your business.
Things Marketers Send to Subscribers for Keeping Them Engaged
“Engaging the customer” is a term which is most related to increasing your marketing value. It’s important to obtain feedback from your customers as it is valuable for every marketer. To do this you have to give your audience a reason to listen to you. You must try to make your customers take an interest in your products by providing them something different from your competitors.
Everything you give to your customers helps you to grow your list at every stage and a good email list is a ground for every business. If you want to engage your customers, then you have to do something different. Below are some of the ways that you can make your customer engaged, towards your services.
Send Engaging Information
The most popular and easiest way to attract your customer is through your content.
Whatever you are sending to your customers related to your products or services like newsletters, web forms, emails, etc. must be engaging, so that viewers will take the effort to read them. You can give them updated information from time to time. Try to give them everything in video form, which is more understandable and reliable. You can also share some tutorials and exclusive information with your customers.
Offer Incentives to Your Subscribers
When you offer some incentive to your customers, they will feel special. You can share a coupon that gives them exclusive discounts or a money back guarantee that will help you to increase their trust level towards your services. You can also offer an early bird discount for a limited time. This will help you to develop a strong bond with your audience.
Listen to Your Customers
Your customers may get frustrated if you don’t listen to exactly what they want. But if you listen, you will stand out. Whether you are communicating one-on-one, in a small group, or with a large audience, look for opportunities to hear from people and then truly understand their meaning.
Send Email Newsletters
When you consistently entertain, engage, and delight your customers, you can build your fan following. By sending newsletters to your customers on a monthly basis, you can get more engagement for your services. This improves recognition, creates trust, supports advertising, builds financial value, inspires employees, and generates new customers for marketing.
Send a Re-engagement Campaign
This is helpful for recognizing those customers, who are inactive or who haven’t opened or clicked your emails from a while. You can offer them accurate content or products that they want. This will help you to win their trust again. Email campaigns will also help you to find the highlights of your organizations and reminds those passive customers why they signed up to receive your emails for the first time.
When you are trying to build your email list, you must think from your customers’ perspective. Engage your customers until you get your targeted outcome by giving them an interesting reason.
Top 10 WordPress Opt-In Form Plugins to Boost List Building
For every business, list building is of prime importance. List building is a process to develop the database of those people who are interested in your services or products. You can maintain the details of all your customers and can follow-up with your users through this list.
These are most of the plugins available that help to make work easier for your opt-in –form on your WordPress website. These plugins can also help to get more subscribers.
Below we are describing some plugins for WordPress to improve your list building.
Thrive Leads
Thrive Leads is a powerful list building tool with the latest designing features, which you require to grow your business. It gives you the opportunity to use the tool with a simple drag & drop editor. This gives the feature of integration with all of the popular services. This is also helpful to grow your list and boost conversion by showing targeted offers to your visitors.
Optin forms
Optin forms allow you to create fantastic opt-in forms to attract your customers to your website or blogs and the most important thing is to use that you can use them without HTML or CSS. You can customize OptinForms and can post in your content or blog to promote it.
WP Subscriber
WP subscriber is one of the simplest plugins that needs no customization. By just installing it, you can begin working with it. It provides an integration feature with Mailchimp, Aweber, and FeedBurner. The pro version of WP subscriber gives you the customization options from where you can change your opt-in forms.
Emma WordPress Plugin
This plugin helps you to add a signup form very quickly & effectively. You can send emails to your customers in a very simple way and can easily track the results.
These plugins are easy to install, and setup is also easily understandable.
MailMunch
MailMunch helps to capture leads for your website & convert visitors into leads. It is a popular plugin for list building because it can be used by any platform. It also can integrate with many email services. It gives solutions for all types of opt-in forms like pop-ups, landing pages, top bar, slide box etc.
SUMOme
Is a beginner friendly plugin. It provides a variety of tools to optimize conversions, capture the leads, list building, etc. There are many subscription boxes in the dashboard from which you can pick any design and customize.
LeadPages
LeadPages provides the full features of list building to generate leads. Through this, you can focus on the products you want to sell. You can create an unlimited number of landing pages & access multiple templates. It also provides integration features with other services.
PopUp Domination
This is one of the most popular Pop-Ups on the web. It gives you a 100% cash back guarantee if you are not getting any growth in your email list. It provides A/B testing on your popups, so you can choose the best popup for your website.
Ninja PopUps
Ninja popup is another inexpensive solution to provide the best-designed popups for your page. You can easily drag & drop to the popup builder and add different animated effects. This plugin is also helpful to increase social presence by using the social locker plugin.
Optin Panda
Opt-in Panda introduced a new approach of list building as it provides the feature of the content locker. Content locker is a feature by which you can lock your content until your readers share your blog.
These are the plugins that will be very helpful to get maximum profit for your campaign.
5 Proven Ways to Build Email List for YouTube Channel
YouTube is the second largest search engine channel used for sharing videos. We all know the power of video sharing to make your talent, services, blogs, etc. visible throughout the world.
YouTube is also very useful in list building, such as if you want to create your email list for a YouTube channel, then you need to focus on getting viewers to your channel.
Below we are explaining some methods which are helpful to build your email list for your YouTube channel.
Through Annotations
Annotations are the links & layer texts that you can add to your YouTube videos. Most of the links send you to other videos but only if you set things up right. You can send links to the viewers on your websites & blogs and also link to your websites directly from your YouTube videos. Now, those who take an interest in your videos can find your services by just one click.
These annotations will help you to get more traffic and signups for your form.
Use Lead Magnets
A lead magnet is related to the piece of knowledge such as a pdf, eBook, report etc., which you provide to your customers. People don’t want to put forth the extra effort to read the documents. Videos make things easier, memorable and easy to understand. It works as an incentive which you can offer to your valuable YouTube viewers.
Through a Call-to-action button
You can grow your list by promoting your YouTube videos by adding Call-to-action buttons. Calls to action inspire viewers to take action when they watch your videos. These are also helpful to achieve your goals like traffic generation, selling products, collecting email address etc. through which you want to grow your business.
If users want to know more about your products or services, they can click on that call-to-action button. So, it can generate direct leads for your business.
YouTube Ads
YouTube Ads help in remarketing your online campaign. If you want to maximize your ROI or grow your email list, you can take advantage of advertisements. When people search for keywords that match your ad title, your YouTube ad will appear directly below the YouTube search field.
Target your ads according to your customer’s interests. These are more beneficial for those customers who viewed your videos or website but did not take any action.
Through Commenting below YouTube videos
If you want to increase your email list through YouTube, you have to start commenting below YouTube videos. By commenting below the latest videos gives you a better lead as it remains in customers minds for a long time. You can also read the comments and see what is interesting to them, or if they want to learn the skill, which may help you to gear a certain product or idea their way.
You can definitely create an email list through YouTube. These are the top 5 ways you can use YouTube to create an email list for yourself.
I hope you enjoyed these tips. Please let me know what you think by commenting below or contacting me via email.
