A targeted list of subscribers is the most important ingredient of an email marketing campaign. Unless you know the people who are interested in your service, your campaign will remain futile. Emailing unknown people puts your campaign at risk, as anonymous emails mostly end up in the junk folder. This skyrockets email bounce rates and shrinks the possibilities of recipient engagement.
If you want to expand your audience outreach via email marketing, you need to grow your subscriber list by leaps and bounds. Following are some incredible ways to do it.
Why Email Lists Are So Crucial?
Cleaning up the prospects list simply means weeding out bad email IDs from the list. This is important for many reasons. Post-cleaning, your list ends up with those prospects who could likely be interested in your products.
Another advantage of having a clean email list is the reduced cost that marketers have to pay to email service providers. Most service providers charge based on email list size, it’s unwise to pay for an inflated list containing non-existent and vague email IDs.
Filtered and clean email lists most often curb the unsubscribe requests as your emails barge into those email boxes who already have subscribed to your newsletter.
How to Create an Email List that Converts?
Although no time frame could be established, cleaning an email list depends on many factors including the age of the list and its size. Purchased email lists, however, need maximum attention.
It’s however recommended, to clean your list often.
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A clean and precise email list brings many business advantages. Guaranteed delivery and improved ROI are a few. Following are a few must-to-do tips to get the right people in your email list:
1. Never Purchase, Organically Create
Most marketers opt for purchased email lists by assuming that it will work quickly. This is indeed not true. With a bought email list, you can’t validate the list’s authenticity and source. Since the list is sold to many of the competing marketers, a person who’s already annoyed by tons of service emails like yours simply marks your email as Junk.
Instead of buying a list or adding people to your list without their consent, make your offers compelling so that they want to be on your list. If your offer is irresistible, they’ll give you their email address.
2. Allow a double opt-in
Double opt-in ensures that the people you’re sending the email to are willing to hear from you. With double opt-in, marketers send an email to the subscriber after they opt-in asking them to confirm their subscription. Once the user clicks the link given in the mail, his subscription is confirmed.
3. Present Irresistible Offers
Before sending an opt-in offer, do your homework. Offer them something relevant, something irresistible. Spend some time studying your target market and those buyer segments who could be interested in your products. Once you’ve launched a list-building campaign and list starts growing, it’s time to focus on cleaning the list. Here is how you can do this.
4. Remove Invalid, Stale Email Addresses
Pass your email list under thorough check. Go through it and remove bad emails manually. Weed out emails that are duplicates or improperly formatted. Though it’s time-consuming, it will help you in list cleaning to a greater extent.
5. Separate Qualified Leads
A qualified lead seems interested in your offer but would like to give it a try later on. Maybe a prospect just didn’t like your first offer, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that he doesn’t want to hear from you and may buy something else.
Send them polite reminders to check if they are still interested in hearing from you. Tell them that they once subscribed to your newsletter and this is how they got on your list.
The people who respond to your mail are likely highly qualified prospects. Keep in touch with them more often and offer them other products or services they need.
6. Filter Audience
Unless you know what customers want, your offer can’t add value to them. Your customers stick around as they expect something of value—usually information or some kind of service they need.
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The best method to know their needs is to ask them directly. Set up a survey and try asking what they are expecting. If the majority of your readers raise the same question, create an information product answering around that question in detail.
Only a clean email list can give you a better understanding of your audience. It further helps you garner more engagement, impressive results, and higher profits.
7. Add Easy to Use Sign-up Forms
To engage customers longer and get them back to your website quite frequently, allow them to sign up for your monthly newsletter or subscription without making a transaction. Request them if they would like to sign up for future updates from your website. Hubspot has written an exhaustive article covering the key methods that help grow your email list.
This has been the most preferred method opted by content marketers to have a bigger subscriber list. Put up a big call-to-action button on your website for subscription and ensure it is visible across the website regardless of the page a visitor is at. In addition, you can also consider including a link to subscribe in the signature line of your mail.
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8. Ask Customers to Provide One
A purchase made on your website itself indicates that your buyers have trust in you. That means they will likely come again to buy from you. It will be a great idea to keep them engaged with your subscription. At the bottom of the checkout page, along with asking for the payment details, you can ask for permission to send them email communications. Put the check box in an easily visible area. However, you must convince them that if the permission is granted, they won't be bombarded with spam emails.
9. Don't Forget The Social Touch:
Offer your subscribers special deals exclusive to them. This could be a 10% additional off on their next purchase or an opportunity to purchase a product before it's open for sale for regular customers. In either case, you may make them feel exclusive and special.
Give users options to share the email content with their community and circles. Include big social icons either on the top or at the bottom of the content. A word-of-mouth promotion is the best way to create audience outreach and grow your subscriber base. The more your emails are shared and forwarded, the faster your list will grow.
10. Avoid Blatant Sales Pitch
An email that looks like an ordinary one and merely a sales pitch can be a big turn-off. If a customer receives so many of such emails to his inbox, he can unsubscribe from your newsletter. This could be a jolt to your email marketing campaign. Instead of pitching your sales pitch directly, generate content that contains some value and resonates with your customers.
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Adding links to articles from third parties or sharing references of your expertise can help a lot in building credibility and goodwill. Remember the 4:1 rule that says – For every 4 content-rich emails sent, you've “earned the right” to send a promotion-focused email.
Other Popular Ways To Grow Permission-Based E-Mail List
- Place A 'Subscribe Us' Form:
- When your audience lands to your website, give them a way to connect. Create a great-looking sign-up form, and place it on every page of your website. Limiting it to the home page only may reduce your chances of having that person on your list.
- Make sure that the sign-up box should match the theme and typography of your website. If you run a message board or forum, add a subscription button that navigates to your sign-up form. Make sure it is quick and effortless to sign up.
- Run A Subscription Drive:
- Many times this slogan goes through your eyes: “First 50 subscribers will get complimentary food coupons to XYZ food joint.” This is a kind of subscription drive that fetches more subscribers to your list and grows your permission-based e-mail list. You may also give following methods a try to gain new subscribers for your bulk email marketing campaigns.
- Discount on your goods or services
- Special access to events
- A gift thanking them for signing up
- Holiday packages
- E-books
- In case you're selling products online, ask your guests if they would like to select the check box at the page bottom that puts them into the list. The e-mails you get through this method are almost authentic and reduce investment in data validation to filter out spam. Polite requests lead to acceptance many times. It would certainly increase the number of people in your permission-based e-mail list
- Request Contacts To Forward It Further:
- Don't forget to place social sharing buttons and the 'E-mail to a friend' button on your e-mails. This could help you to access a fresh channel of people, relatives, and colleagues who might sign up for your list.
- Launch An Event And Invite:
May it be a webcast or an offline trade show, present your audience with a brief entry form that has an e-mail address as a mandatory field.
- Learn from your previous experiences with the event that you have organized. Interesting additions to it would certainly bring more crowd and of course a list of genuine subscribers.
- Offer Free Whitepaper Download:
- This has been a USP for technology firms to get more subscribers into their list.
---A company that runs an internet security business may offer a whitepaper showing different ways that compromise online security and methods to address them.
---An e-mail marketing company in India that deals in bulk e-mail marketing campaigns for business promotions, may release a whitepaper showing various data mining techniques that can be used to filter the raw data.
- These whitepapers and educational resources are placed on their respective websites for free download by those who sign up for the same.
- Add Sign Up Button On Facebook Business Page:
- Most businesses own a Facebook business page. It would be a great idea to add a signup CTA on your page. Clicking over it would navigate users to the signup form where they can register using e-mail and other details as well.
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- This method has maximum potential for getting more users added to the permission-based mailing list. It allows to you invite most of your audience to join your business page and sign up for your subscriber list.
- The methods cited above are some of the most popular methods used to develop permission-based e-mail lists by marketers. They are sure-shot ways to generate a genuine email list. Stop waiting any more, it's your turn to grow your e-mail list. Check on some of these and see the difference.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.