While it may seem that the world has moved past email and onto more active methods of marketing like social media, email marketing is still one of the most important and effective ways of gaining leads and conversions for your site. Building an email list is something each and every business should strive for.
Today I’m going to show you eight interesting and uncommon ways to grow your email subscriber list. These methods really work, and the success of your email campaigns will skyrocket as a result.
Eight Unique Ways to Gain Email Subscribers
When it comes to marketing, there are a lot of avenues to take. Organic search, social media campaigns, pay-per-click, and others are massively popular. On top of these things, an email marketing solution should always be at the forefront.
A study done by The Direct Marketing Association showed that email marketing can have an ROI (return on investment) as high as 4,300 percent. Email still remains an effective way to reach your audience. Let’s check out eight new methods you can use to grow your site’s list of subscribers.
1. Put Together a Drip Campaign
Value is the name of the game, and a drip campaign can create a huge amount of ongoing value for your readers. An easy way to set one up is to create a blog and start producing high-quality posts. Once you have some solid information under your belt, offer the option for an email subscription that consistently provides your readers with exclusive information.
On your end, you can take the big points from your content and repurpose them for the emails. You’ll send them out over the course of seven to 10 days consistently. Each one will be short, only a few paragraphs, but will be enough to bring them back to your website.
2. Organize a Webinar
Streaming video content online is huge these days, especially with conversational tools like Blab taking the place of Google Hangouts. You can tap into this new craze and simultaneously build your email list as well. Organizing a webinar is the perfect way to attract new people to your site and give them a huge value in return.
To do this, you’ll want to find a topic that you can discuss during the event that your audience is going to be interested in. Dive deep and bring all the details to light so they can feel like you’re overloading them with new and exciting information.
Try using one of the common webinar tools to host the event like Any Meeting, GoToWebinar, and WebEx. When people come to view the event, these tools will ask them for their email address before they enter the webinar. They won’t even think twice if you promote the event on social media. They’ll be too excited to care about a quick email capture.
3. Give an Incentive
In this day and age, privacy is the main focus. People don’t just hand out their email addresses for free, so you have to think outside the box to earn their emails. Look for enticing ways to make them sign up.
If you own an online store, offer a coupon for a discount or, perhaps free shipping? If you have a blog, then offer a free PDF or an eBook to bring in those emails. Remember to deliver on your promise as well, even after the initial email capture.
Continue sending them great content and valuable information once you’ve captured their interests.
4. Implement QR Technology
If you ever seen one of those square-shaped barcodes that looks like a bunch of static, those are QR codes. I’ve made one for you to try out, give it a shot!
These codes can be scanned by smartphones and other devices. They are hugely popular in marketing, and can be used to send people to specific websites or pages. You can place these on your website, your social media pages, your business cards, pretty much anywhere really.
Have people scan one and send them to your email signup page for some great leads. It’s fast and fun.
5. Ask Your Current Members for Help
Odds are that the people who currently read your emails have friends and family that fall into your target audience as well. Simply asking them for help in bringing new email subscribers to your site is something most people would be happy to do. You can even give them a template to forward on to their friends and family.
Make sure you include a subscription button so they can be added to the list within a few clicks. Another option is to offer social media sharing buttons in your emails so subscribers can post a link to your signup page on their personal profiles.
6. Promote Your Email List to Interested Readers
This seems like a no-brainer, but it’s a delicate process. If you blast a full page ad asking for their email, you may end up annoying them instead of enticing them to sign up. If you ask them immediately, instead of giving them a chance to read your content, you’re also risking your chances of getting their email.
When using a pop-up tool, make sure you tweak the settings to only trigger when certain other triggers have been activated:
- Show the pop-up if they’ve been on the page for 10 seconds or more.
- Make the ad appear only on specific pages.
- Only show the ad to someone who has visited three pages or more.
Keep it small and tasteful. We want to capture their attention, not demand it or even worse, lose it.
7. Work Online and Off
While most of your emails will come from digital efforts, there’s still success to be had in the classic paper-and-pen method of gaining email subscribers. If you’re attending a conference or meeting with potential customers, bring along a sign-up sheet where they can write down their email addresses. This personal approach works more often than not.
All it takes is a clipboard, a pen, and a winning smile.
8. Request Assistance From Colleagues
The entire responsibility of gaining email subscribers doesn’t have to rest on your shoulders. Ask for help from other members on your team, or by cross-promoting with other businesses and blogs. If you already partner with anyone else, try striking an agreement where you both casually (be careful not to appear “spammy”) promote each other’s email newsletters.
This is doubly effective if your audience is composed of people who would naturally be interested in both email lists.
Final Thoughts
The standard methods of gaining emails, things like sign-up boxes and plugins like the Hello Bar, are great ways to build your email list. But by combining those with these out of the box methods, the number of your email subscribers will soar.
How do you bring in new email subscriptions? What tips would suggest? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
Matt Banner is author and owner of On Blast Blog, where he puts proven strategies to the test to help you start a blog and get more traffic to turn readers into customers.
