Email List Building
The super clever folk over at Hubspot recently recently published a helpful set of tips to give small business the tools to grow their opted-in email lists. Here’s eight of our favorites:
1) Create remarkable email content. Your content needs to be amazing if you want people to stay subscribed and forward your emails to their friends, family, and colleagues that aren’t already on your email list.
2) Encourage your current email subscribers to share and forward your emails by including social sharing buttons and an “Email to a Friend” button in your marketing emails. That way, you’ll gain access to fresh networks, friends, and colleagues who might sign up for your list. At the bottom of your emails, include a “Subscribe” CTA as a simple text-based link so that those receiving the forwarded emails can easily opt-in, too.
3) Promote an online contest, like a free giveaway, and have entrants sign up or submit using their email address. (And don’t forget to promote your contest on social!)
4) Create a new lead gen offer — like a free ebook or whitepaper — and require visitors to provide their email address in order to download it. (Need ideas? This blog post lists 23 ways to create lead gen content quickly and easily.)
5) Create a free, online tool, or resource and have users sign up with their email address. For example, we’ve created quite a few free tools, like Marketing Grader, to gather email addresses.
6) Promote one of your lead-gen offers on Twitter. Create a Twitter campaign to promote an ebook or a free resource to your followers that requires an email address to redeem.
7) Use your Facebook Page to promote an offer that requires an email address submission. Promote offers on your Timeline, and be sure to add social sharing buttons to the landing pages and thank-you pages you send them to so you encourage your leads to share those offers.
8) Leverage your company’s YouTube channel. Add calls-to-action and URLs in your videos to encourage people to subscribe to your list, and include links to relevant landing pages in your videos’ text descriptions.
9) Link to offers that capture email signups throughout your website. Don’t make people dig around your site to stumble across subscription options. Keep your offers up front, and include calls-to-action on just about every page of your website. Key places to consider are your website’s homepage, the main page of your blog, your ‘About Us’ page, and your ‘Contact Us’ page.
10) When creating content for guest blogging opportunities, include a call-to-action as well as a link for readers to subscribe to your site’s blog or email database in your author byline.
