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How to Grow Your Company’s Email List (And Maintain It)

April 22, 2021

A Guide to Growing Your Company’s Email List in 2021

With over 4 billion email accounts worldwide (more than half of Earth’s population), the potential value of growing an effective email list for your company is particularly high. Today, social media is at the heart of many marketing strategies, although organic reach for sites like Facebook is down to about 6%. Conversely, email open rates across most industries fall between 15% and 25% – with rates even higher in some niche industries.

Truly, a thriving list of email subscribers can give your company a competitive edge. To tap into this prospective market, you’ll need to convince them of a few key (yet simple) things.

First, customers need to see that it’s easy for them to subscribe to your email list. No one wants to waste precious time searching for a way to give away their contact information. Second, your audience needs to see the unique value in doing just that. By demonstrating value with a subscription to your company’s emails, you’ll have a direct resource for releasing company updates and new products or services.

2 Keys to Growing Your Company’s Email List

  • Make signing up easy
  • Consistently offer value through subscribing

Leading Customers to Subscribe

Depending on the type of products offered by your company, there are several ways to lead customers to the Subscribe button on your website. Most importantly, it should always be easy (and fast) for people to sign up for your company’s email list. If you use website builders like Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace, you then have access to their email capture boxes using their site building tools.

If you have social media accounts on sites like Facebook or YouTube, use their promotional signup tools to drive traffic to your email list – or to a landing page on your site for signing up. Other online tools to integrate into your company’s website to make subscribing to your email list easier include:

What They Are

What They Do

Call-to-action text on homepageOn the homepage of your company site, a call-to-action in featured text below your header (but above the rest of the page’s text) is an excellent place to promote your email list because it is usually the first thing people see.
Embedded formThe easiest embedded form for capturing emails is a newsletter signup form. More complex versions may use customer feedback surveys or quizzes that require an email address to complete.
Pop-ups If you use the right messaging, you can use pop-ups to convince people already scrolling your website to sign up for additional valuable content.
Scrollbar and sliding textWebsite tools like Hello Bar and certain plugins on WordPress can add scrolling text or a scrollbar to your webpages. These tools allow customers to subscribe no matter where they are on your site.
Signup at checkoutShopify and other ecommerce platforms let shop owners toggle a selection to add an automatic email signup for customers at checkout.
Social sharing buttonsAdding “Email To A Friend” buttons at the bottom of blogs and other shareable content lets you capture a wider audience through direct referrals from existing customers.

Demonstrating Consistent Value

If you’ve used any of the above email capture methods, you may have a list of subscribers ready. Unfortunately, email lists shrink by nearly 25% each year through abandoned email accounts and those who unsubscribe. Consequently, you’ll need to replenish these numbers in your email list by consistently demonstrating your company’s value to new and existing customers. Although this sounds like a colossal task, organizations have found countless ways to market their products while introducing customers to all aspects of their brand.

How you choose to demonstrate your company’s value will largely depend on your industry and the services/products you provide. Nonetheless, you can motivate customers using any of the below strategies by giving them an incentive to subscribe. By entering their email address, customers can:

  • Receive early or exclusive access to products or events. Many online retailers, airlines, and ticket vendors offer early or exclusive access to certain services by signing up for emails.
  • Enter free contests and giveaways. Several studies have found that giveaways of free items or experiences can be hugely motivating. In fact, one study found landing pages with contests outperformed pages without contests with 700% more email signups.
  • Gain access to gated information or products. Online fashion retailers like The RealReal require visitors to their site to sign up for an account. Therefore, entering their email allows exclusive access to luxury items.
  • Receive discounts and limited time offers. Signing up for special discount codes via email is a proven method for growing email lists.
  • Sign up for a newsletter or industry updates. Starting a blog can benefit your company in a variety of ways. For example, in addition to increasing your search engine ranking by establishing expertise, a blog provides evergreen content for email newsletters.

3 Email List Maintenance Tips

Maintaining the addresses in your company’s email list is as important to its effectiveness as your marketing strategies. Therefore, use the following three tips to maintain a “clean” email list.

  • Divide email list into categories of customers. For example, categorize people who have (or haven’t) made a purchase or those with items still in their cart.
  • A/B test marketing strategies to pinpoint successful ones.
  • Remove email addresses that negatively affect your bounce rate.

Want to take advantage of the above digital marketing strategies without having to learn all of the lingo? Contact us today for a complimentary consultation.

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