How to Grow Your Email List

Contacts are important when you are building a website or trying to market your products. Many beginner bloggers do not pay enough attention to their email list. This is one of the most common mistakes among people who want to make money online. They tend to forget that, even online, it is important to talk to people and to create relationships. Another mistake beginners make, is that they overwhelm their subscribers with news, offers, emails about giveaways, events, and so on. Both not paying enough attention, and fixating too much on the email list, are two opposites that must be avoided to succeed in building a relationship with the subscribers.

WHY DO YOU NEED AN EMAIL LIST?

There are two ways to succeed online. The first one is if you are already famous in the real world. For instance, if you are an actor, a campaigner, or a politician. The other way is through marketing. According to Wikipedia, marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. It is the business process of identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customers’ needs and wants. So if you want to be successful, you will need to build a relationship with your audience. An email list is the fastest way to grow page views. Compared to social media, the email list helps get more clicks to your website because when you are posting on social media, you are just shouting out to the crowd hoping that someone is interested. When sending a link to an email, you are making it personal, you are addressing that one subscriber who signed up because he or she is interested in your content

HOW TO BUILD AN EMAIL LIST FROM SCRATCH?

Content
The most important thing is to have meaningful content. If you can get your readers to want to read your articles and to engage with your blog or website, they will most probably also be happy to give you their emails. Create content that will make your readers look for the subscription box.

Freebie
Give away something for free. We all know that nothing is free in this world, and when it comes to marketing, this is especially true. In return for the freebie, your readers will have to enter their email address so they can receive it. Make sure that your audience, when entering their email, is aware that they are also agreeing that you will be sending them marketing information. Having that disclosed with big, bold letters will prove to them that you are trustworthy, and you care about transparency. Also, when you begin your marketing email campaign, don’t forget to include the Unsubscribe link in case somebody changes their mind. It is not only nice to have, but required by law in some countries like described in the CAN-SPAM Act in the United States. Having said that, the freebie that you are offering has to be related to what you do. If you are a blogger who writes about home design, you can give away a free book with advice on interior design, color matching, etc. If you are a food blogger, offer free printable for the fridge, if you are an educator, you can offer a list of educational online resources.

Ads
Running ads is not something that everyone can afford, and for sure it is nothing that any business enjoys spending money on. But it is something necessary, especially when you are just starting, and you need not only email subscribers, but you also want to let the world know that your website exists. Besides Google advertisements, there are countless social media platforms you can look into, like Facebook. Most people prefer to run ads on Facebook and Instagram because they have a big user base. Another platform to consider is Pinterest. Of course, with ads, you can only advertise the website itself, but when people click on the ad and land on your page, it is up to you to capture their attention, to pique their curiosity, and make sure they subscribe to your email list. So ads are only the means to get to your website from where the visitors will have to be lured into leaving their email.

Exit popup
Exit popups are a relatively new technique for capturing the emails of the readers. Once the visitor navigates towards the upper page boundary and cursor movements show that he wants to leave the page, an exit popup will show up. There are many things that you can write in this window, which is considered the last chance to capture the visitors’ email. You can offer them to subscribe to your newsfeed if you have such, if you plan on streaming a webinar or any other online event, you can describe the event and ask them to enter their email address if they are interested in attending. Exit popups are considered irritating and spammy, and some users might be turned off when using such a technique, especially if they are frequent visitors of your site and see those popups every time they decide to navigate somewhere else.

Consider using an exit popup only to build an initial user base, but once you reach the 1000 mark, you might want to take it down, so you don’t chase away your audience.

Content upgrade
In a way, content upgrades are similar to freebies. The way it works is when a visitor is reading your article, somewhere within the lines of that article there should be a suggestion for a content upgrade. To read the additional content on the subject, the visitor will have to enter an email address, and you will be sending the bonus content straight to their mailbox.