There is no denying that contemporary methods of converting leads like social media platforms, chatbots, online influencers are all great sources to increase engagement for your website or business.
But you most definitely should not overlook one of the most perennial mechanisms that have proven to be effective and powerful – email marketing. Statistics show that in 2018, the number of global e-mail users amounted to 3.8 billion and is set to grow to 4.4 billion users in 2023. Seeing these trends email stays strong and has no intent on going anywhere in the near future. Seeing that it would be wise to move your strategy towards email marketing.
Just to give some insight, email marketing is an approach that many uses and has proven itself to be a very cost-effective and conversion-rich method in promoting your products, services or content. It allows you to engage with our users/customers and create a bond with them or reach out to new potential ones.
Keep your subscribers always on the loop by providing valuable content that will drive their interest. Benefits are huge if you use a compelling email marketing strategy and engage to provide value to every email and content. Your ROI will fly up the roof since with every dollar you spent, you will get a return on investment of $42. We don’t say that study shows it.
For all of you who haven’t started yet and those who want to grow their mailing list, this article will provide you with some useful and effective techniques to a more potent and persuasive mailing strategy. Hop on.
Email vs Social Platforms
Both platforms are a huge source of leads and gather around their orbit an enormous amount of users. Which one should you choose depends on many factors that vary from your targeted audience to your ultimate goals.
Here arises the question: is your audience more of an email or social media type of audience? Chances are both. We have previously stated that around 3.8 billion users have an email account, but the number of social platforms users falls just under 3.5 billion users.
Having established that statistic, you are left wondering the age domain that each includes, as per emails, you have old people, young and in between that use emails and have at least one account, meanwhile, the case with social media is different depending on age and platform. So,if you are targeting an individual there are great chances they have an email account you can reach them by, which would be a great addition to your email marketing list.
Something else you must take into account should be customer preference, as it turns out that 60% of consumers subscribe to a brand’s email list to receive promotional messages compared to 20% of consumers who will follow brands on social media to get deals.
This leads us to the primary goal of your website and business, if your primary goals are conversions and business growth in general, then you should light all your focus towards a better email marketing strategy and get those subscriber numbers to fly high.
As demonstrated, email is a platform most universally used and it is more popular than social media for communication on many levels, thus driving more conversions and establishing you a name for your brand.
All in all, it would hurt to try and intertwine the two, since growing your list should not be limited only to your website, you can use social media accounts to invite your followers to subscribe to your newsletter.
Techniques and Strategies to get more subscribers in your mailing list
Looking to expand your email marketing checklist, or improve your current strategy, we will provide you with some of the most efficient and concise approaches to generate more leads for your business and help you grow your email marketing list.
Write compelling content
It is no surprise that content is a multi-beneficial factor that will get you success in many areas, and email marketing does not fall short on that. There is a thin string between the click and unsubscribe button that will make all the difference.
But if you offer value to your content, your subscribers will be enticed to read your newsletter and possibly share with friends or other people they feel would enjoy the email. And just like that you will be making happy an already loyal user of yours and bring home new potential clients or readers to your email marketing list. It’s a win-win situation.
Some of the best content you can write is evergreen content. You have heard the expression being referred to a plant that keeps its green leaves all year round. Just the context explains evergreen content is content that doesn’t have an expiration date.
It revolves around a topic that’s always significant to readers, regardless of the current news cycle or season, and it will be appropriate for a long period of time.
Include irresistible offers by using Lead Magnets
This is probably the most important strategy plan to increase your mailing list. The common problem today is that people are prone and protective of their information, and they should be, that is why they are sceptical to handing out their email addresses to just anybody, in this case this is where a lead magnet can intervene.
In order to get what you want you have to give something in exchange. Lead Magnets are offers you make to your users that you know they won’t be able to resist. Everything is a trade so why not use it in your email marketing game plan.
You could offer something as simple as a coupon discount or something more advanced such as an eBook, or a white paper, whatever your trading value is for that so wished contact information or email. Even if you are not familiar with the concept there is a high chance that you have seen or used one through your online search. I know I have.
Inbound Marketers know the real benefits of lead magnets and use them very often, it’s time you do too, since it converts emails to a lead, and those who provide you with it express interest in your offer, and that gives you the ability to market your products or services to them.
If you are wondering what should a lead magnet contain, here you have to :
Provide a solution to their problem
Your lead magnet needs to provide a solution to an almost-subscriber’s problem. Let’s say you run a business on healthy food, to get your visitors to give you their email address you can give them a white paper of a nutrition plan or healthy recipes.
Keep it short and simple
Your lead magnet should be content long, it should be straightforward and to the point. Highlight all the features that make up for that lead magnet like the solution you offer and a box where they can subscribe.
Including a CTA
CTA is a must in a lead magnet, you can back it up with a button saying Get White Sheet or something creative. Figure it out, if you want that potential lead to be an addition to your email marketing list.
Align with your brand
The lead magnet will represent you and your brand, as long as you have a business on healthy food you can’t go handling around white sheets about best email marketing techniques, that would be suicide, since it wont correlate with you brand and your targeted audience.
Immediate value
Provide easy and fast solutions within your Lead Magnet because people nowadays prefer quick results so instead hand out offers like “30 minutes healthy meal preps”.
Don’t forget about the design
Catch their eye first with a nice looking polished design. Use your brand colors, fonts, and style to design your offering. It needs to be attractive and draw the audience in, but it shouldn’t be too crowded.
Here you have Marie Forleo website as an example of a beautifully exectuted lead market exchanging this a motivational, free audio training to learn “how to get anything you want” for your email. Sweet deal and nicely done.
Simplify the process of email signup
Being one step closer to expanding your marketing email list would mean that you need to simplify the process a user takes to subscribe to your newsletter.
Use that short attention span technique to your advantage and you can go ahead and leave to fill in only the name and email address, this way you will be able to personalize your content and newsletter in the future or just go with email address only, it is a much faster way of giving you the numbers you want, as it won’t require great commitment when filling details.
Whichever option you go with will prove to be successful as it will be quick and halfway through they won’t be thinking, why do they want my phone number? Only ask for information that is relevant to your goal, minimize everything.
Add a CTA on all your top-performing pages
It is a good practice for email marketing to include CTA at the end of content that you feel proud of, since it will generate more subscribers and if they have scrolled all the way down it is an indicator that they liked the content and they are willing to get some more. You have convinced them that you’re worth their time and attention, so a click of the CTA button will be the icing on a cake. Of course you can use CTA just about anywhere you see deemed in your site just make sure they are kept simple, short and natty to make them respond to your calling.
You should choose the phrases carefully when addressing a CTA, be specific for the following events that will happen after one clicks on that button or benefit the reader will get from clicking through from your email. It can be something like Click here to Download or Learn to write a copy that sells.
Alongside the copy of a button design plays a huge part in it as well, your button must stand out from the rest of the content in order to be noticed, which is what we want. Try using colors that contrast the other colors used in your email campaign. Except for colors you can use white spaces to separate the CTA from other elements on a page that way it will be enhanced more.
Make clever use of popups
A popup is an asset for building a vast mailing list. I know what you are thinking, that popups are annoying and that they interrupt visitors’ experience but they are proven to be very effective.
Besides choosing the right timing for them to show up, provide compelling content that blends together with an eye-catching design will not be so annoying after all, in fact, it will generate leads like no other technique.
Popups show up in lightbox meaning all the content behind it darkens, focusing only on the popup, due to this nature you can use popups to highlight one clear call-to-action. What this does is remove all distractions from the page, leaving the users with only that specific request.
Also, popups are catchy, if designed properly they can make an outstanding distraction. With all the developments happening, it is possible to choose exact timing when you want your popup to show whether that be immediately when users enter the page, or after a few seconds of after customers on online shops have abandoned their cart.
One of the most effective popups to grow that email marketing list is exit-intent popup. This advanced method tracks the cursor’s movements of a user and just when they are about to move the cursor up above the page, it gives signals that they want to leave the site, at that moment a popup will show up, giving a second chance to convert users and add them to your email marketing list.
An exit-Intent popup can be very powerful, you need to make sure you offer them what they are looking for, make them an offer they can’t resist, otherwise it will be of no use.
Personalize your newsletters
Giving your newsletter a personal touch will make your subscribers feel familiarized with you and your brand giving them a sense of connection.
Personalization, in email marketing, is the act of targeting a campaign to a specific subscriber using the information they provide. By segmenting your email list by user persona you will create a bond with your audience and as a result, they will become loyal to you and your content.
You can use various types of subscriptions that will send the information in different channels of your email service. You have to do more than addressing them by their first name, you can give your audience targeted content that is specific to their interest.
A study by Hubspot found that targeting emails by persona increases email click-through rates 16%. This is due to the fact that personalized content will spark your subscriber’s interest better than any other generic offers and messages.
Partially Gated Content
A lot of information online is restricted to be fully viewed until you are given permission to, and it often comes in the form of a membership.
Most marketers use this technique to boost their email marketing list, they lock parts of a post and make them visible only by making the user perform an action in our case to provide an email.
That is what we call a gated content and for this concept to work you must provide two things to your users.
First give them something they want, something of value, it could be something like exclusive tutorials and posts, access to free tools and resources or free ebooks.
And second, you must provide easy access to those pages, if not you will most likely discourage potential leads.
Another example of gated content is Statista’s website that requires your email address and some information and after that, you will be given access to their data for free. It is a pretty good deal so most people just go for it without hesitation.
There are successful examples where this strategy worked, Whole Whale had an increase of 21.42% of their subscribing list by adding a Content Locking option to one of their posts.
If you are wondering how you can add such a feature, it is simple, there are tools for that like OptinMonster that will simplify the process. You can use OptinMonster to gate our content on your WordPress website or any other platforms and eCommerce sites.
OptinMonster is a powerful lead-generating tool and to be able to add gated content to your site, first make sure you create valuable content, you can use the tips we showed you in the lead magnet approach to give something in return for your visitor’s email address.
Once you are done with that you can go ahead and navigate to Optin > Inline Setting from the OptinMonster campaign builder and turn on Lock Content Below Campaign by clicking the toggle and choose the type of content blocking Obfuscation which blurs content, or removal which totally removes the content below the option.
Save and publish the campaign. Grab the embed code and paste it into your post or, if you’re using WordPress, go to your dashboard, after you have installed OptinMonster, click on the ‘Optin’ Menu and scroll down to the content blocking section.
Turn on content blocking for this “Optin” by switching the on/off button and then choose a content blocking type as we did in the first example.
A/B Test Your Optin Forms
A/B testing is an amazing tool with which you can examine the best practices for online promotion and market strategy. Sometimes the size, color or copy of a button can make a huge difference in lead generation, and you don’t want to be missing out on new potential leads just because you choose the wrong button color.
If you play your cards right and plan well-executed testing you can narrow down the most effective elements of email marketing promotion. A good start for effective A/B testing can be deciding what you want to test, it can be something like an ad or a sales email.
You can hand out two prototypes of emails to two different groups of subscribers and run the number to see which of the two was most successful. You could be testing various elements like specific offers, CTA, subject line, the layout of the message, personalization or any other element.
In order to run the test, you can use tools like Campaign Monitor and, MailChimp or Active Campaign and all of these three email software providers have a built-in tool for A/B testing. You can, of course, do this process manually by splitting your list and sending two variations to the two different groups but you will have to run the numbers yourself and that might require some additional work.
Once you have run your campaign you can analyze the statistics bb the open rate, the click-through rate, and conversion rate.
Final Thoughts
If you are looking to generate more leads email marketing campaigns are the way to go. We have made it evident throughout the article the importance of growing your email list and provided the data to support the claim that this form of marketing is one of the most effective and low-cost methods to curve that conversion rate. All you need to do is a little effort and commitment, since growing your email marketing list won’t happen overnight, it requires new ideas and creativity.
We have provided you with some great techniques you can use to help you in that direction, mix and match methods to give you some great results. You can use the lead magnet method with exit popup for a final chance of converting users who are on the verge of leaving our site. Use forms in multiple places of the website, without being intrusive and annoying, and make sure you add a subscribe button in all the pages necessary. Be persistent and be convincing.
We would love to hear from you some thoughts, ideas and maybe some of your own email marketing techniques you use that have proven to bring results. Leave them in the comments below.
