Email marketing is a powerful tool for your marketing strategy that should not be underestimated. Not only is it a powerful way to connect with your subscribers and promote your brand, but it often has a higher acquisition rate than social media. Other great things about email marketing, is it is call-to-action driven and provides very detailed analytics for you to monitor. While it’s certainly an important tactic, growing your email list organically can be at times difficult, but it’s not impossible! Here’s a look at some ways you can encourage users to sign up for your email marketing.
Create a Reason for Users to Opt-In
If you want users to sign up for your email list, they are going to need a reason why they should join. While there’s a lot of potential value in signing up for email marketing, users want to make sure they’re signing up for something useful to their lives and not just another piece of junk mail. You can do this in a variety of ways. Here are some popular options:
- Receive newsletter updates: If you’re a blogger this could be doing recaps of your posts or highlighting the most popular. You can also share exciting news that you’re readers would be interested in. Same goes if you are a business. This is your chance to share valuable information with your subscribers.
- Sign up for exclusive updates: A great way to increase your email subscribers is by giving them access to exclusive content that they will only receive if they sign up. Making something exclusive adds a little bit of curiosity and the feeling of getting something everyone else isn’t.
- Sign up for special event updates: If you are an event based business, this is a great way to entice people to sign up. Maybe you don’t have exciting news to share often, but this allows you to connect with users around specific events that they may miss otherwise.
- Get access to free content for opting in: This is one of the most popular methods. Going back to the exclusive updates, people will often sign up for something they feel that they are getting value in return for. Offering downloads or access to other content is a great way to entice users to sign-up.
- Provide opt-in discount code: Another one of the more popular opt-ins is providing a discount. This works great for e-commerce businesses or other websites selling services. You can offer a percentage off a first purchase or other special discounts based on signing up for your list.
When you are setting up your opt-in strategy, it’s also important to include several opportunities for people to sign-up on your website. You don’t need overkill it, but having a few opportunities on each page through different designs or including a sign-up on your blog will increase the chance people will sign up. Different approaches will appeal to different people as well.
Create Content Upgrades
If you have built a decent audience on your blog or website but are looking for users to convert on your email marketing, content upgrades may be for you. This is a great option that you can use as an extension of the content you are already providing to your audience on your blog or social media. This allows you to tell your audience, if you liked this content and would like more information, submit your email address to get access to the premium content. Content upgrades can be a very effective way to grow your email list because you are capturing an already engaged part of your audience that enjoys your current content.
Offer Free Downloads
Another great way to encourage users to sign up for your newsletter is by giving them access to free downloads. You can do this a couple of different ways.
- Individual Downloads: Providing free downloads is a great way to encourage users to sign up for your email marketing. You can include links to free content on your blog or another portion of your website and require users to submit their email before being able to download. This option is great for prints, e-books, or other marketing materials.
- Downloads Library: Another option is to create a password-protected section of your website that users can only access if they have the code that they receive by signing up for your email marketing. This is a great option if you would like to provide multiple free download options for your audience and you can promote new uploads through your email marketing as well to entice your audience to visit your website.
Now that you have some tips, it’s time to build your email lists! It’s also important to remember that building your email list is not a one-time effort, you have to maintain it. People consistently change email addresses or opt-out so it’s important that you are consistent with your efforts to maintain a strong amount of active accounts.
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