How to Strategically Grow Your Email List

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How to Strategically Grow Your Email List

Alex Rossman • Sep 21, 2021

How to Strategically Grow Your Email List

Many marketers make the mistake of brushing off email marketing and some rely on other, less fruitful strategies. Don’t be one of these marketers. When it comes to digital marketing tactics, email is the oldest but don’t confuse that fact with this strategy being “tired.” It is still one of the best ways to increase brand awareness and engagement.

If you’re ready to grow your email list, be strategic. You want to ensure you’re adding qualified contacts and your strategy should focus on quality over quantity. In this post, we are going to explore ways you can grow your email list for your brand with the RIGHT people.

Whether your brand is tiny or enormous, email marketing just may be your most lucrative digital marketing strategy and supports your other marketing efforts, so what are you waiting for?

Why Should I Care About My Email List?

When done correctly, email yields $42 for every $1 spent making it a crucial piece of your marketing strategy. But, to achieve this ROI, you need a solid list of contacts.

Email amplifies your other marketing strategies and ties campaigns together. With a good email list you can:

Promote all of your content
Advertise new products or services
Keep contacts engaged with your brand
Gather feedback
Nurture new and returning customers
And much more!

The most important aspect of a good email list is converting a lead into a sale. This happens when brands convey trust and thought leadership through their emails.

Blog Subscribers

Chances are, your brand has a blog. If not, stop what you’re doing and read this.

It’s one thing to blog, it’s another to use the blog as a way to grow your email list. People like being in the loop so make it easy to subscribe to your blog and position it as “you will miss out on great content if you don’t subscribe.”

Include subscribe buttons on the sidebar of your blog and at the end of each post. Syncing your blog with your CRM is very easy and it’s also simple to add subscribe buttons to your blog, but if you have trouble, we are here for you so reach out and we’ll make sure you are capitalizing on blog subscribers.

Gated Content

Your more valuable content should be gated with a lead capture form in which people fill out their name and email address to access the content. This allows you to grow your email list while offering something of value to your consumers and target consumers. The beauty of gated content is that a contact or target consumer is pre-qualifying themselves as a good contact for your brand by filling out the form.

The types of content to gate and leverage to grow your email list include:

eBooks
White papers
Research reports
Webinars
Worksheets

Host a Contest on Social Media

Who doesn’t love free stuff?

Hosting contests on social media is easy. The most common type is a giveaway. Offer free products from your brand or a gift card and set an entry as filling out a form with name and email address. Create a landing page for your contest with social share buttons to maximize awareness.

When running your contest, use a widget like Rafflecopter to ensure it goes smoothly.

Create Segmented Landing Pages

It’s likely you have 3-5 buyer personas for your brand. Creating a landing page geared at each one is a way to get the attention of your target consumers in a more personalized way. These landing pages embrace SEO and website traffic and take it a step further to convert your traffic into a contact. Once the buyer hits the customized landing page, make it easy for them to sign up for your emails with CTAs.

Encourage Forwards

It sounds like a small and mindless detail, but, having a CTA at the end of your marketing emails that invite the reader to forward the email to their friends and colleagues actually goes a long way. Sometimes people just need a little nudge!

The act of someone forwarding your email acts as an endorsement so it’s a great way to gain new sign-ups and to grow your email list.

Co-Market With a Like-Minded Brand

Think you’re the only brand trying to grow their email list? Think again. Every brand wants to grow their email list and already has contacts in place.

Identify like-minded brands (brands with similar buyer personas not competitors) and reach out to them for a collaborative email marketing campaign. Essentially, you’ll “swap” emails so that your emails get in front of their subscribers and their emails get in front of your subscribers.

Be mindful of the messaging as you want it to be enticing to sign up for your emails so consider leveraging a piece of gated content over a sales pitch.

Organic and Paid Social

Tap into social media channels to grow your email list! Again, stray away from self-promotional messages and leverage something of value.

A good rule of thumb is that every 5th post should have a CTA to fill out a contact form. This can be through leveraging gated content, publishing a teaser of your newsletter, offering a discount, etc.

It’s a great use of your paid social media budget to market gated content so that you're putting money behind growing your email list.

Where to Add a CTA

You can grow your email list by embracing smart CTAs. Think of succinct wording to promote your CTA and sprinkle it all over your assets. Some example CTAs are:

Sign up to receive valuable offers
Stay in the loop by subscribing to our newsletter
Don’t miss our amazing offers by signing up for our emails
Sign up for updates and be assured we only email you amazing stuff

But where to sprinkle these great CTAs? Consider the following:

A section on your home page
The sidebar of your blog
On all of your social channels
In your email signature

Convey Social Proof

Consumers want to hear about value from their peers and colleagues. When gathering new contacts, it’s smart to gather and publish quotes from people who are already subscribed to your emails.

Reach out and offer a $10 Starbucks gift card in exchange for a one sentence testimonial about how your content adds value to their lives.

Offer Exclusivity

It’s no secret that people have a fear of missing out. Framing exclusive content access in exchange for a sign up will gain you more sign ups. Just be sure to follow through with your promise and email out content, resources, offers and updates in a timely manner.

Be Mindful of the Lead Capture Form

When gating content, gathering subscribers, taking sign ups for an event, promoting your webinar, etc., there is a delicate lead capture form balance to consider. You want to ask them for enough information that you can segment them in your CRM but, you also don’t want to ask them too many questions and make them abandon the sign-up process. A good balance includes 5 fields maximum.

These 3 fields are crucial:

Full Name
Email Address
Company (if B2B)

These fields are optional and should line up with your goals:

Birthday
Gender
Phone number
Website URL
Location
Industry

Next Steps

Using the right email marketing platform, it’s easy to monitor your list as it grows. Take note of the characteristics of your contacts and use this information to scale your list growth. Strategies are always more successful when they are based on actual data.

Inboxes get cluttered so people are hesitant to sign up to receive yet more emails so it’s your job to convey value to encourage sign ups.

With Google constantly changing their algorithms, the social-sphere being so crowded, and the competition being fierce--email offers a personalized and engaging way to keep your brand top-of-mind for your contacts.

What strategies have you implemented to grow your email list? We’d love to hear all about it in the comments below!

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