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Keeping your company’s email list fresh is more important than you might realize. Without proactive measures on your part, an email list will become stale over time. After all, people change their email addresses, abandon accounts, and unsubscribe from email communications regularly.
By chipping away at growing your email list, you can maximize its potential. Not sure where to begin?
There are all kinds of practical and effective ways to start growing your email list today. Here are the top 10 ways:
1. QR Codes
You’ll agree when we say QR Codes are everywhere. And, rightly so. These days, more marketers are finding success using QR Codes to grow email lists.
Specifically, this is done by adding unique QR Codes to a wide range of marketing materials, such as:
These QR Codes encourage people to scan them with their smartphones. From there, users are prompted to enter their email addresses or any other information marketers wish to collect.
QR Code marketing is especially effective when brands offer consumers something in return for their email address. This can include a special coupon code or discount.
Additionally, using QR Codes to send emails can assist with email marketing, providing an excellent customer experience. Users need not manually enter any email details and can send emails with one click.
2. Social media
Make sure you’re taking full advantage of social media as a tool for growing your email list. One of the easiest things you can do is to add a link or button to your Facebook business page that directs users to your email sign-up page. You can add this same link or call-to-action to your company’s Instagram and LinkedIn pages.
You can also grow your email list with social media posts about email newsletters or other content that requires an email subscription.
By using social media to grow your email list, you’ll be harnessing its power to reach a much larger portion of your audience.
Source: AWeber
3. Sign-up forms
If your company website doesn’t already have an email sign-up form, you could be missing out on hundreds or even thousands of subscribers.
Looking to add a sign-up form to your website? There are a few things to keep in mind.
For starters, ensure that the sign-up form is as simple as possible. Collect as little information as possible to make signing up quick and easy. You can always request more information later on. Invest in an email newsletter software that comes with built-in sign up templates that you can readily use on your website.
Next, make sure your sign-up form is easy to find on your website. Many businesses find success by including a sign-up form at the bottom of every page. You can entice more people to sign up for your email list by offering some kind of incentive. This can include access to a monthly newsletter or even a special discount. Make sure to perform real-time email verification to prevent form spam without CAPTCHA, ensuring you collect only valid submissions. Additionally, when considering different newsletter platforms to manage your email campaigns, it’s important to choose one that integrates seamlessly with your sign-up form and supports your growth strategy.
Source: AWeber
4. Lead magnets
Getting creative with your lead magnets can impact the success of your efforts. There are all kinds of creative ways to get people to sign up for your email list.
Consider, for example, these creative lead magnets:
- free “cheat sheets”
- starter kits
- online course content
- workshops
- customized plans
- eBooks and white papers
Source: AWeber
If you sell online courses, one of the most effective lead magnets you can use is a free course. This could even be a simplified version of one of your premium courses, so you don’t need to create a full course from scratch just to create your lead magnet. You can read more about how to implement this strategy in this post – lead magnets for online courses.
5. Webinars
Depending on the industry you’re in, you probably have a lot of experience and knowledge you could share with your audience. Consider creating an educational webinar that’s free for your existing and every new email subscriber. Utilizing knowledge base software can help you streamline your content and provide valuable resources for attendees, enhancing their experience and understanding.
Running an educational webinar is a great way to encourage new subscribers to sign up. This can be especially effective if you hype up the webinar on your social media and other channels.
A webinar also provides an excellent opportunity for you to establish yourself as a thought leader in the industry. Your attendees can get lots of great information from your webinar.
Don’t forget to include a professional email signature to make the email and webinar look more professional, you can find many professional email signature examples online.
Source: AWeber
6. Quizzes
Quizzes can be a fun and interactive way to engage your audience while growing your email list at the same time. If you’ve ever taken an online quiz, you’ve probably been asked to provide your email address to view the results. This is a pretty common practice and can be a very effective way to get new email subscribers.
When using quizzes to grow your email list, be sure that the quiz you put together is relevant to your audience. This may mean designing a quiz around something related to your industry or even the specific time of year (such as a holiday-themed quiz).
From there, be transparent about what providing an email address will entail. You may even want to offer your users the option to skip the email sign-up and obtain their results without it. Or, you might consider providing partial results with more detailed quiz results available for email subscribers.
7. Content promotion
You might be surprised at how quickly you can grow your email list when you simply encourage people to share your content. If you’re not doing so already, start taking measures that encourage your current subscribers to share your emails. You might even consider adding a “share” button to your emails that will make sharing easier for your current subscribers. This could become one of your email content best practices that you might include in your content style guide for generations to come.
Moreover, you can encourage readers of your blog to share your content on their social media pages. Again, this is where adding “share” buttons can go a long way. Even a few shares on social media can create a snowball effect that brings more people to your website; from there, they will see your email sign-up form and be more likely to subscribe themselves.
8. Chatbots
There are many reasons to consider adding a chatbot to your website or social media page. What you might not have realized, though, is that you can even use chatbots to grow your email list.
Specifically, there are numerous ways that a customer service chatbot can be used to get a new email subscriber. Your chatbot, for example, could offer any of the aforementioned lead magnets (quizzes, newsletter content, eBooks, etc.) as part of the conversation.
Just keep in mind that timing is everything; in general, it’s best to avoid having chatbots request email information at the beginning of the conversation. Instead, program your AI chatbot so this information is requested towards the end of the chat after the user has received all the answers and/or information they needed to begin with. You can easily customize your chatbot’s conversational flow with a trusted chatbot builder.
Source: Tidio
9. Referral contests
There’s nothing like a good contest with a lucrative prize to get your current subscribers excited. If you’re looking to grow your email list, holding a referral contest can be an effective (and fun) way to do it.
There are many ways to carry out a referral contest. However, the most common involves providing each of your email subscribers with a unique link that they can send with their friends and family. This link should direct users to your email sign-up page. From there, each new subscriber can be tracked.
The subscriber who gets the most referrals to sign up for your email list by a certain date wins the contest and receives a prize or reward. This could be anything from recognition on your social media page to a special discount or free product/service.
Source: ReallyGoodEmails
10. Gamification campaigns
These days, gamification has become an extremely popular way to gain new email subscribers. After all, who doesn’t like to have a little fun while browsing the web?
There are many ways to gamify your existing website to encourage new email sign-ups. One of the most popular ways is to create a “discount wheel” that pops up as soon as people visit your site. Users can “spin” the wheel to reveal special savings or incentives, such as 20% off on their order in exchange for their email address.
Some other potential ways to add gamification to your website may include:
- quizzes
- surveys
- interactive games
- points systems
The possibilities are endless when using gamification to grow your email list. If you can imagine it, you can create it.
Source: Redbox
How to get started growing your email list
As you can see, there are many ways to work on constantly growing your email list so it stays fresh and useful as a marketing tool. Having an all-in-one solution that can collect leads on a dedicated landing page and trigger an automated welcome email campaign can take a lot of the time and hassle out of growing and maintaining your email list.
Moreover, this type of solution can take the guesswork out of keeping your new leads engaged, opening up new doors of opportunity for your email list. AWeber offers dedicated landing pages, automated welcome emails, and more to keep your audience engaged while bringing in new leads. From there, you can reach your marketing goals faster while freeing up your own valuable time.
Sean Tinney is an Email Marketing Guru at AWeber, an all-in-one marketing solution specializing in email marketing. Their web-based tools help businesses grow by connecting with customers. With AWeber, you can send emails, create landing pages, and collect payments online all from a single platform.
