Being the most powerful way of marketing, emails are an important part of every successful marketing strategy. That’s why the investing time to build an email list is necessary for a successful promotion. However, for most people, this might seem like a lot of work, and they choose more common, but less effective strategies. For that reason, Link Department wanted to help you learn the basics of listing building and share efficient strategies necessary to build an email list. Continue reading to find out more!
Why building an email list is important?
Having a solid email list to share the news about your blog, services or products is more than just sharing new information. The purpose of this process is to build a trusting relationship with your readers. This way you can convert your readers into customers and gain their trust. As a result, the promotion of your business, and selling services or products will be more successful.
Top techniques to build an email list
Let’s go to the most useful, yet not to difficult ways of building an email list that you can start practicing right away.
Use email subscription popup form
A popup form can be an easy way to get more subscribers. However, setting the time when it will appear should depend on the time visitors spend on a site. Doing some investigation with Google Analytics, you can see how much time your visitors spend on your website. So, if you notice this time is short, set a pop-up form to appear just after a couple of seconds. However, if the time on the page is longer, set the form to appear after a 20-second delay. Also, you can place the popup at the very last place – it can appear the moment a visitor wants to leave the site. Even though it seems desperate, it proves to be very effective.
Create landing pages
Landing pages are pages that stand alone, and can’t be found in your site’s navigation. These serve for various marketing campaigns and can be a great way to add more subscribers. When asking for an email subscription, you can give something in return – some information, video, discount, ebook, etc. that’s not commonly found on your website. This is what landing pages are for. They will help you build an email list by giving away some exclusive content to your subscribers.
Add a smart bar
A smart bar is a way to make some information visible on your website all the time. This way, your visitors will be able to see the “sign up” bar all the time and therefore find it easily even though they scroll up and down a page. Make it simple and effective – apart from the signup box, add a sort, attractive text that will make the reader click on it. This feature is easy to add and proves to be very successful in getting more subscribers. Furthermore, it’s considered to be a much better option than a popup, since it’s less ‘aggressive’ and noticeable. This is always an advantage when you want to improve the user’s experience and make them stay longer on your website.
Use the power of social media
Another way of building an email list is by promoting your website on social media. Particularly, you should use social media profiles to share links to pages with subscription forms. However, this shouldn’t be random sharing of certain pages. You need to focus on the quality of your posts. Therefore, think about the content that a potential subscriber might like, and try to engage them with some interesting posts, online contests, etc.
Don’t forget the blog
Blog posts are another place on your website where people should be able to subscribe. By posting interesting and knowledgeable blog posts, you can interest people to read more. That’s why you should offer sign-up forms on each page of your blog. Readers can subscribe so you can let them know about your future posts and receive emails with additional info and tips, special offers, etc.
Bonus tip: If you’re into long and informative long blog posts, you can use that and try to convert your engaged readers into subscribers. Long blog posts are a great place to use inline subscription forms. Inline forms are a great way to remind an engaged reader to subscribe and get more info on the desired topic.
Host a webinar
Sharing some valuable information with your readers through a webinar is another efficient way to gain more subscriptions. So, if your business is related to some online events like this, ask your clients to share their email and subscribe to more information and offers. The reason why webinars are a great way to build an email list is the viewing time. On average, the audience spends 57 minutes watching a webinar. So why don’t use that time wisely and make it beneficial for your website? To make a webinar that will surely help you gain more subscribers, consider the following tips:
- prepare well – take your time to prepare the webinar, and choose a topic that is interesting to your audience;
- choose a partner – if possible, sharing efforts with a partner brand can be an easier, yet more efficient solution. You’ll have less work to do but broaden your target audience.
- promote well – there’s no point in creating a perfectly good webinar if there aren’t many people to attend it. Invest some time into webinar and blog promotion and make a marketing strategy that will start as early as 30 days before the webinar date.
- use follow up email – as webinars are a great way to build an email list, make sure to prepare a follow-up email in advance. Let it be a way to say thank you by sending materials from the webinar and therefore gaining more emails to your subscription list.
As you can see, there are a couple of very effective ways to build an email list for your website and gain more leads. The key is in being consistent and trying multiple techniques and check what works the best for you.