So, Right here's How To Construct An Electronic mail Advertising and marketing Listing ASAP
Email marketing isn't as trendy as it used to be, but it remains a consistent source of leads and prospects for many marketing agencies and businesses.
Successful email campaigns are based on reliable email marketing lists. This guide will walk you through the best tips in the business to grow your email list and get the most from your leads.
1. Content upgrades
Content upgrades can mean the difference between converting your blog post at 6% and converting it at 60%.
Updating content includes:
- Write a blog post
- Create content that covers the topic of the post in more detail
- Offer the readers of your blog post the opportunity to receive the updated content in exchange for their email
This strategy is brilliant in its simplicity. Your readers have already expressed interest in a topic by clicking through to the blog post. Why not take advantage of their interest by offering them more in exchange for their email address?
While this method produces unrivaled results, it can also be one of the most time consuming strategies. To cut the time, see what others in your room are doing to get results. then do better.
2. In-email social sharing options
Typically, when sending blog posts to your email marketing list, your goal is to get click-throughs to your website and generate website traffic.
Statistics show that having multiple links in an email (11 maximum) increases click-through rate. Another study shows that the average click-through rate for emails with social sharing options is 6.2%, while the click-through rate for emails without the sharing option is only 2.4%.
Even if your subscribers aren't reading the article you post, each release is likely to generate traffic from multiple visitors, which means more to your marketing dollars.
3. Host a giveaway
The more you can connect with your audience, the more likely they are to sign up for your email marketing list. One method of reaching your audience is through a giveaway.
Tips for a successful promotional gift are:
- A compelling price that your audience actually wants
- Bonus entries for referrals (the KingSumo Giveaways plugin makes this easy)
- Guaranteed bonus incentives for all non-winners (something you can give for free)
- Promotion to a relevant audience
You may be thinking, "Sure, a giveaway will add to my email list, but the emails will be of poor quality and mostly made up of freebie junkies who are not interested in buying my product."
There is a very simple way to solve this problem: make your price something only potential customers will love.
For example, Videofruit once offered a price for a 10 year subscription to Leadpages, an industry leading landing page service. For someone in Videofruit's target audience who is an online marketer, that's $ 3,000 worth and an amazing price. It's worthless to someone who doesn't work in marketing.
Problem solved.
Freebies are a lightning fast and guaranteed way to boost your email list. In addition to the direct benefit of more subscribers, freebies can also increase your goodwill towards existing subscribers by offering them something for free.
4. Recommended opt-in incentives
It's rare that a high-traffic website doesn't offer opt-in incentives such as an e-book, swipe file, white paper, resource list, free software tool, or any number of types of content. Incentives to purchase email subscriptions.
The difference between opt-ins and content upgrades is that the incentives offered are not tied to a specific blog post, whereas content upgrades are. Most websites create a high quality opt-in incentive and advertise it through:
- Sidebar
- Lead capture top bar
- Opt-in popups
- Blog post footer
- Author bio
The advantage of this strategy is efficiency. All you need to do is create a single reusable piece of content to grow your email marketing list. This is a much tastier option for small business owners who don't have the bandwidth to create updated content for every new blog post.
For example, Buffer (see below) is simply using the free version of its flagship product as an opt-in incentive.
The incentive presented is a simple and straightforward way to instantly increase your subscription rate.
5. Popups
Most of the internet uses hate pop-ups, but the fact remains that they can be a useful tool for generating leads.
The Social Media Examiner credits 70% of its 190,000 subscriptions to the site's popup form. That's an astonishing number.
The best thing about popups is that they are easy to implement. The steps to install a successful popup are simple.
- Install a popup script or plugin
- Write a few lines of copy
- Watch your subscription prices go up
What about bloggers and companies targeting a non-marketing audience? You can use popups to create subscriptions.
I jumped out of the marketing box even further and installed SumoMe popups on a men's blog with amazing results. When I analyze the data it's pretty obvious when the popup was installed as my subscription rate has more than doubled in a month!
6. Take advantage of the social evidence
There's no other way to put it: social proof is a powerful way to grow your email marketing list.
One of the keys to harnessing social evidence is volume. The bigger your numbers, the better.
For example, if you have 2,000 email subscribers, 10,000 Facebook fans, 15,000 Twitter followers, and 5,000 RSS readers, you are better than most, but none of these numbers are particularly impressive. You want a potential subscriber to look at your "proof" and think, "Wow, a lot of people like what you do!"
Why not just add up all of the above? 32,000 followers / readers / subscribers is way more impressive.
Michael Hyatt is a great example of someone who does this well.
Look at this number in the top right corner of this picture. The number of subscribers is 512,944 which is very impressive. This number is likely a combination of all possible follower formats including his email subscribers, 241,000 Twitter followers, 57,000 Facebook fans, etc.
If all Michael had was the 57,000 Facebook fans listed right under the subscriber count, I'm nowhere near impressed. However, when combined with the large number mentioned above, the Facebook Fan Numbers serve as a crucial confirmation of the number of subscribers listed on the page.
The good news is that this strategy works for everyone.
When your total number of subscriptions has been calculated and you are happy with the result, add this information to your email marketing lists. You can also show the number in your ads and on your website to attract readers and gain their trust.
7. Name drop
There are two types of people:
- People who care what people think
- People who care what these people think
For the second audience segment, your social proof isn't nearly as effective as a well-placed naming loss.
Deleting names and associating them with another brand you respect is a way to borrow and leverage someone else's authority and influence while establishing your own.
On our blog we named everyone from Forbes to President Obama:
- Amazon
- NBC
- GM
- HP
- Viacom
- The Wall Street Journal
- Forbes
- Entrepreneur Magazine
- President Obama
- The United Nations
How does this apply to you, assuming you don't have the POTUS on your speed dial?
The nice thing about the drop of names is that you only need one. When you find a credible brand ready to support you, your leads may be more willing to serve their emails and join your email marketing list.
There are a number of things you can try to get links from credible companies and brands.
You can try to write a post that is specific to the brand that you are looking for. After you include a link to them in your post, it may be appropriate to send a thank you email that includes a link to your article. In some cases, this can encourage your target mark to give you a backlink in return.
Note that the blog post you send to your email marketing list must be of the highest quality. You want brands and credible sources to link to your posts because they create value and engagement.
Also, with quality content, you will organically get more leads over time to add to your email marketing list. Credible brands want to link to credible content.
8. Customer recommendations via a tasty bonus
Nothing has a greater impact on your buying decisions than a direct recommendation from a friend you trust.
People want to be happy and make their friends happy. Of course, when you keep the subscribers on your email marketing list happy, they want to share the love.
Your first option is to simply ask subscribers to forward your content to their friends and colleagues.
You can do a lot better than just asking. Make your leads an offer they can't refuse. A bonus so delicious it would be foolhardy to say no.
GiftBasketsOverseas.com is offering customers a $ 20 voucher to refer a friend to their products. In addition, the referred friend will receive $ 20 off their first purchase.
Take away people who enjoy your work, offer them even better value for money and give them the opportunity to share this great experience with their friends at a reduced price.
Setting up a referral system is a fantastic way to quickly hack your email subscriptions. And best of all, you can do it yourself at a low cost. Here is a guide from Sacha Greif on setting up a simple referral system.
9. Partner with influencers
There's a reason celebrities are charging exorbitant rates for their endorsements. Influencers can go a long way in helping drive conversions.
However, money isn't the only currency you can use to partner with influencers. There are a number of brilliant strategies you can use right now, regardless of your budget, to partner with the big dawns.
The Poster Boy strategy
Many of today's influencers are building their empires on some method, strategy, or knowledge base that is supposed to help people make money or achieve something they want.
They are "experts" trying to sell themselves as teachers, and to do so effectively they need one thing: successful students.
Influencers need stories about how their strategies work. You need a "figurehead".
To develop a relationship with the influencer, you can be their figurehead. This usually means that you will be featured and discussed as a case study in all marketing materials.
If you can become an influencer's "success story", you have forged a lifelong partnership with a major influencer.
Fill a need for free
Everyone who is famous or even moderately known in their niche is constantly busy with advertising inquiries. People ask, ask, ask all the time.
What most people don't offer influencers is a free product or service. If you can meet any of your influencer's needs,
If you can help them without asking for anything, you will build favor in the right places.
A common example of this is guest blogging. Content providers require high quality content on a regular basis. By providing them with high quality content for free, you are building goodwill with both the influencer and the influencer's audience.
Team up with tomorrow's influencers
Most of today's top names in blogging and marketing started between 2002 and 2005. Many of them seek out each other and use each other's audiences all the way up.
You can take the same long-term approach, but you'll have to look in different places.
Start connecting with people at your current level of influence. Find people who are serious about building their brands and work together to build your collective influence.
Alexis Grant is a great example of someone who has used this strategy successfully.
Through her company Socialexis, she has connected aspiring influencers in various industries and jointly promoted websites such as Brazen Careerist, The Penny Hoarder and The Write Life, while establishing herself as a powerhouse for blog publishing.
10. Make your website faster
Speed kills on the road, but on the internet it's a lack of speed that hurts your conversion rate. You have to do everything possible to speed up your website.
This seems like an obvious topic of conversation, but you probably don't realize the importance of any slight increase in load time as your traffic increases. Just take a look at these statistics compiled by ViperChill.
- Amazon's revenue increases 1% for every 0.1 second decrease in load time.
- When Google tried to show 30 results per page with a load time of just 0.5 seconds, traffic and sales fell by 20%!
- 40% of visitors leave a site after only 2 seconds of loading time.
- Shopzilla increased its pageviews by 25% and its conversion rate by 7-12% after improving the average page load speed by 4 seconds.
How do you speed things up?
A quick way is to install a caching plugin and use a content delivery network like Incapsula. Or like ViperChill did after doing the research above, you can pay for your own dedicated server. Obviously, most companies cannot afford this option.
If you're not sure how your website is performing, free tools like Ubersuggest or premium options like Searchmetrics can automatically search your website for errors, speed reports, SEO warnings, custom error reports, scheduled website crawls, and automatic warnings.
The point is simply that site speed affects 100% of your critical metrics. This should be the top priority for your website.
11. Webinars
Webinars are one of the most efficient and versatile forms of content you will ever create. They work like a charm for adding to your email marketing list.
A solid webinar can be recorded in 15 minutes and serve as a standalone product, launch piece, or gear in your direct sales funnel.
Webinars are more compelling than regular videos because they have a limited duration. You can't just watch them whenever you want. You have to show up at the right moment, which A) creates micro-engagement and B) creates urgency.
Viewers are often persuaded to claim that they “have limited seats”, creating a false sense of scarcity. Since users have to enter their email address to attend, the right webinar, or better yet, the right series of webinars can result in a massive influx of subscribers.
Conclusion
Adding contacts to your email marketing list can be done through a number of strategies. Choosing the right strategy or strategies can increase your subscriptions and grow your brand's fan base.
Building and maintaining your email marketing lists and your overall marketing strategy can be a huge undertaking. Let us know if we can help.
Have you tried any of these strategies? How did they end?
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