How to keep growing your email list

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Is growing your email lists important to your business? You’re not alone.

More than 80% of B2B marketers say their most used form of content marketing is email newsletters.

However, email fatigue is real, as consumers get more and more marketing emails daily. 

So, how do you still see results from your marketing emails and get people to subscribe to your list? Here are a few ideas to grow your email list again.

Focus on quality over quantity

A big list isn’t valuable if it’s full of subscribers whose emails bounce back, who never open the emails, and who never engage with your business in any way.

READ MORE: Five social channels under-utilized by businesses

In fact, such subscribers just waste your time and increase your email marketing costs. 

Practice good list hygiene to clean off the “time wasters,” and start with a good list.

Invite your current customers to subscribe

Identify the customers with the highest lifetime value and seek to add them to your lists. 

Customers who buy from you, for instance, are the ones you want to engage with via email. 

Make the email signup part of the templates for your email communications, such as order acknowledgment, receipt of payment, or account alerts.

Identify your most effective subscriber acquisition sources

Identify the most and least successful email subscriber acquisition sources and methods to focus on what works.

For many companies, the most effective tactics are:

• Access to value-added sections of the website
• Sharing on social media
• Free content downloads
• Capturing email during the purchase process
• Email forward to a friend
• In-store email capture

Of course, your mileage may vary, so take the time to figure out where new subscribers to your email lists are coming from (as well as the tactics that aren’t paying off) so you can focus on what works best for you.

Offer frequency flexibility

Offer multiple options for “opting down” instead of just opting out. 

For instance, allowing subscribers to change the frequency or type of emails they receive from you can make the difference between losing and keeping a subscriber.

Few email marketing platforms offer you this flexibility, so pick yours wisely.

Design your website to capture email subscribers

You should have visible, top-of-page opt-in forms on the home page, other main pages, and key interior pages. 

You can even try using a popup opt-in, but be sure to track results carefully—many consumers get annoyed by intrusive popups, and you don’t want to turn people off.

Improve your social media sharing success

While social media sharing is a top way to grow email lists, respondents say it’s also time-consuming and hard to do. 

READ MORE: How to attract more customers to your local business

Holding a contest or sweepstakes on social media and giving fans incentives for sharing the content with their friends and family.

These could include loyalty points, special offers, or discounts. To make it easier for users to share the campaign, include sharing links.

Do your best to bypass spam filters

Spam filters are getting increasingly aggressive, so make sure your emails bypass those. Make sure your emails don’t look spammy.

First, don’t use free email addresses to send your emails. These will be trapped.

Get a separate domain name to power your email marketing campaigns to avoid your main one being flagged for spam.

Additionally, use Mail Tester to see if your email is likely to be considered spam.

The tool will run your email through the most common spam filters (including SpamAssassin and Gmail), check your email content for common red flags (like too many links), analyze your email subject, check most common blacklists and look for broken links and redirects.

Write emails that get read

Make the most of the first part of your email, including the headline and two first paragraphs. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense.

People are likely to see the top of your email, either because it’s shown as a preview in their inbox or because they deliberately open it.

Put your most important and valuable information there to catch their attention, help them take action (like signing up for a webinar, free event, or discount), and pique their interest, so they want to read more.

If you end up “saving the best for last,” your best may never be seen.

Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to generate revenue and drive customers back to your site.

Use the tips above to see better results from your email marketing campaigns.

Have any thoughts on this? Carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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