Email Marketing is an effective strategy to promote business awareness and growth because of its familiarity, flexibility, and universality. Mobile Smartphone and tablet users are embracing anywhere, anytime email delivery.
Many business owners understand the benefits of using email marketing as an effective loyalty and retention tool; however when it comes to acquiring customers for a solid email marketing list, some businesses can often struggle.
Typical examples of data collection issues include lack of sign-up forms on websites or overly complicated sign-up forms, not using multiple channels to collect customer data and attracting the wrong type of customers, through lack of or poor targeting. Make sure you are compliant with the rules about email marketing and if in doubt check.
In addition to this, while you may already have a strong database of customer details, email marketing lists degrade by 22.5% (HubSpot March 2015) each year as a result of customer opt-outs. So it’s important to make sure your email list continues to grow.
How to Grow your Email Marketing List
Here are some helpful pointers to help you grow your email marketing list.
Clear Calls to Action
Using your website as a vehicle to drive sign-ups is imperative, make sure you have clear calls to action in place to encourage visitors to sign-up to your email list. Adding an incentive for signing-up is a great way to increase your email list, give visitors to your site a reason to want to join your email list. For example sign up to our email list to get our latest blog posts direct to your inbox.
Simple Sign-up forms
While it’s important to present incentives to the customer here to encourage sign-ups, it’s even more critical that you make it as easy as possible for your visitors to sign up. Long and complicated forms will only result in a high level of drop-offs. Only ask for the information that you really need, i.e. name, email address and interests. By limiting the number of fields to complete to around 3 or 4 they are less likely to abandon the sign-up.
If you are going to ask customers for information such as interests, make sure you are using them for a purpose. While asking customers for additional information is great for segmentation to target specific communications, it’s important that you intend to do this as part of you email marketing strategy.
Use Multiple Channels
There are various other channels you can explore to gather sign-ups for your email marketing communications. First of which is using social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. If you send customer email communications through Mailchimp, you can link your account to Facebook and apply an app which will allow you to add a newsletter sign-up form on your page.
This is a great way to gather data from your social media following. Alternatively you can add an email sign up app by creating a static iFrame on your Facebook page using third party tools such as Woobox.
Social media is also a great way to raise awareness of your email sign up and the benefits, create a series of posts to be published throughout the month, to reach a wider targeted audience consider running a Facebook advertising campaign to promote sign-ups.
Another simple yet often missed opportunity channel is your email signature. If you’re contacting customers directly by email and not adding a link to your email marketing sign-up form, you could be missing out on additional sign-ups. If you have an email newsletter, make sure that it’s communicated in offline marketing channels to help drive additional sign-ups.
Once you have reviewed your present opportunities for email marketing sign-ups to build your list, using tools such as Google Analytics will enable you to keep an eye on whether the changes you have made are bringing in additional sign-ups.
Just like email marketing in general, it’s a process of trial and error and if you’ve noticed that sign-ups have dipped then continue to look at reviewing your calls to action and the design of your sign up form.
A business armed with a powerful email marketing strategy can really go places. From building a list, creating bespoke templates, setting up multiple contributors, on-going data management and analysis and tracking, we can help. Get in touch on 01527 517309 or fill in our contact form.