11 Ways to Grow Your Email Marketing List [2016]

The demand for Email Marketing Services is increasing day by day. Unfortunately, many of the marketers are unaware of the ABC of email marketing.

If you’re a marketer, you should know the fact that your email marketing database is getting corrupted by about 22.5% every year.

It is not unusual that email addresses of your contacts’ vary as they move from one company to another or sometimes when they unsubscribe your email list. Change of their old AOL address which is used to fill in forms on sites can also affect your email list.

Adding fresh contacts to your email marketing campaigns in a regular manner helps you to have an upper hand in your business. (Make sure you never enhance your email marketing by purchasing email lists.)

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Here are 11 amazing ways to grow your email list, if you’ve run out of ideas to do so.

Some simple ways to build your Email Marketing List

Via Email

  1. Create incredible email content

Why should you create remarkable content? It’s simply because people stay subscribed and forward your email to their friends and colleagues only if your content is interesting. Remember, these friends and colleagues will be new to your email list.

  1. Push your existing email subscribers

Try to include social sharing buttons, “Email to a Friend “button in your marketing emails. This will drive your existing email subscribers to share and forward your emails to friends and colleagues. Sometimes these friends and colleagues might sign up for your email list and you will get access to fresh networks.

  1. Online contest rewards you

Promoting an online contest will attract online users. New members begin to sign up using their email address (Make sure you promote your content on social!)

  1. Make use of multiple email subscription types

It’s quite natural that email recipients click through emails that have been targeting them. So, if you can create multiple email types, the visitors might get attracted to any one of them and there is a chance for subscription.

  1. Refresh unnoticed email list

If you have an ineffective older email list try to refresh it with an opt-in campaign. Think about sending an engaging opt-in message to your older list in order to bring back interested contacts.

Make sure you remove all contacts who don’t respond. It may sound unreasonable to remove people from your email records as a move to improve your email list. Keep in mind, emailing only active contacts can improve your deliverability.

  1. Linking employees’ email signature

If you can add a link, directing people to your mailing list it will benefit you in the long run. Consider adding that link to your employees’ email signatures, so that people will be tempted to sign up for your mailing list.

Read Also: 6 Reasons Why E-mails are Important for your Internet Marketing

With Fresh Content

  1. Try lead generating offers

Lead generating offers like free ebook, whitepaper etc. can attract visitors. Create such lead generating offers and allow visitors to download it by simply submitting their email address.

  1. Via free online tools or resources

As people always search for online tools, you can offer a free online tool in order to improve your mailing list. Let the visitors use the tool for free, by just providing their email address.

With Social Media

  1. Promote a lead generating offer via Twitter

Promote an ebook via a Twitter campaign, so that your followers can access it by submitting their email address.

  1. Promote one of your top offers via Facebook page

Obviously, promoting offers via Facebook page will attract a huge audience. Make sure you add enough social sharing buttons to encourage your audience to share your offers that requires an email address.

  1. Adding call- to- action button

A call- to- action button on your Facebook business page gives you room to improve your email list. Create a link to the call-to-action button in such a way that requires an email address for access.

6 Reasons Why E-mails are Important for your Internet Marketing

Email has an ability many channels don’t: creating valuable, personal touches- at scale-David Newman

Today, email marketing is the most preferred online marketing tool for a wide range of businesses. Marketing through e-mails is a strong way to connect with people. Also, it helps to build loyalty and trust in the business.

It is found that most people use the internet for checking email and not just for visiting social media sites. Hence email is a great medium for companies to market their product or service successfully.

Read Also: 14 Smart Tips to Get Your Email Subscriber’s Attention

Following are six reasons emails are important for internet marketing:

  • Email is more effective than social media

Though social media is a great channel for interacting with the audience, email is a great medium for customer acquisition. It is possible to personalize an e-mail and thus grab the attention of target customers easily.

  • It is cost-effective and economical

Email marketing is comparatively easy, effective and economic. It helps business owners to reach a large number of audience without much expense. For small business owners, it can be a better choice than seeking the usual advertising media such as television, radio or direct mail.

US retailers consider email marketing as one of the most effective customer acquisition tactics. One of the greatest benefits of using e-mails is that it is possible to get follow-up information by clicking on the website.

  • It is personal and customizable

In email marketing services, it is possible to segment the audience and send message to each of them according to their preference. The send mail should have some value to the audience. Also, it is possible to address people individually by name, split the topic according to the type of audience and eventually send to their personal inbox.

Emails subject lines with recipients’ name has higher chances to get opened over the others. Email marketing helps to build relationships with expectation, leads, current customers and even the previous customers as it gives a chance to interact with them directly. Unlike other medium, emails can be made friendly and personable.

  • It is action oriented

People often respond to emails. They either reply, forward or simply click through the mail. E-mail can be used to increase traffic and thereby boost sales. Using e-mails, one can track the growth and progress of the business.

  • It is measurable

By using email marketing software, you can track who opened the email, which all links were clicked and how many people unsubscribed. With such data, you get an idea about how email campaigns are performing, how to make adjustments and improve effectiveness of such campaigns.

  • It is possible to check email using mobile devices

Today, people can easily check emails from their personal mobile devices. This is convenient for them as it allows checking email anywhere at anytime.

Social media platforms might be more popular. But there is no chance that e-mails will completely lose their prominence. Most people use their smart phones to access e-mails instead of using social media.

Recommended Read: Email Marketing: Still Far from Over

E-mail marketing has more impact than social media marketing as it delivers marketing messages directly to a target customer’s inbox. Most of the business owners use email newsletters to keep suppliers, employees and stakeholders informed about important changes and development.

Thus we can conclude that email marketing is the most effective and easiest means of communicating with the masses.

Email Marketing: Still Far from Over

 

The status of email marketing is a popular topic for debate in every Digital Marketing Agency. Is it dead or alive as of now? Well, email marketing is something that will never ever leave its place in the world of digital marketing. Its importance and presence can never be ignored. Email marketing is not dead, definitely not, and neither will it die anytime in the near future.

A simple statistic will prove the importance of emails in our everyday lives: Over 200 million emails are sent out in a single minute every day. So, you see how heavily email is used as a communication platform for brands, marketers, and even consumers.

There are even more numbers to prove this fact. Over 72% of the adults in USA have stated that they prefer the companies to communicate with them through email rather than any other platform. 91% said they would love to receive promotional emails from the companies that they do business with. As far as the companies are concerned, 72% of them have said that they use email marketing as an integral part of their business and marketing efforts. 25% of the companies consider email as the top most priority and channel for an advantageous return on investment.

Read Also: 14 Smart Tips to Get Your Email Subscriber’s Attention

If you are still not convinced and doubtful about the existence of email marketing, here you have three major reasons why email marketing is not going anywhere. Go through them and decide for yourself.

  1. The advantages of social marketing

Social media has a lot of fancy and exciting options to it. This is why there are several rumours that it is slowly killing email marketing which is more of old school. Well, even though social marketing may seem to be more effective in certain case, this one marketing medium is not able to do anything alone by its own. This is one point you need to keep in mind. Vanity metrics and other hollow impressions usually give the marketers a sense of false satisfaction about social marketing. There are simply distracting you.

There are a number of marketers who try their best to gather attention through slightly spammy tactics on social media like filling out Twitter feeds with automated tweets all round the clock, blasting their pages on Facebook with completely irrelevant posts and updates, sending direct messages that are nothing but automated, and also using a huge number of cat memes and circulating them. They do not understand how annoying these techniques can be. Spamming only reduces your followers. They tempt the users to click the unfollow button, and you do more harm than good.

Email marketing, on the other hand, provides useful and relevant content to the audience. This audience consists of people who have willingly subscribed to receive newsletters and other informative emails and would love to learn more. As per data collected in 2012, nearly 90 percent of the internet users have an email account while a smaller number of just 70 percent have an account on any of the social media networking websites. This proves that email is still reigning as the top most form of communication. If you want to reach a majority of the audience and increase your reach, then email is definitely what you need as it is the most effective method in this case.

  1. It is evolving at a higher rate

With emails, brands could get the power to drive customer engagement by monitoring, testing, measuring, and tweaking the emails sent out as newsletters or targeted offerings. The whole game of email marketing has now changed and evolved to a greater extent. Slowly, it is ceasing to be a medium purely for communication purposes to a complete platform that could help the different brands deliver their experiences across various channels.

Here are some of the key email trends that have been explored by Liga Bizune in a recent article that illustrate how emails are slowly evolving to become more than just a channel for communication:

  • Wearable technologies are evolving. This will slowly change the way brands communicate with the email subscribers.
  • A new technique of email marketing will surface, which will be hyper-targeted and also location based. The credits for this goes to the integration of proximity and geo-location applications into emails.
  • Behavioural email marketing will start to get driven by predictive analysis.
  • As emails are transitioning to mobiles, it has become more necessary than ever to develop better and more creative content. This is the only way to capture the attention of the audience and keep them hooked on.
  • Videos have started to evolve and find their own place in the world of marketing. They will start playing an even bigger role in email marketing. A bigger emphasis needs to be put into this aspect.

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  1. Correct execution makes it most effective

Emails need to be used properly and effectively to make it more than just a passé. The biggest challenge you face in case of newsletters is that only a small part of the subscribers actually care to open and read the email newsletters you send out to them. This does not, in any way, imply that email is dead or dying. It just points to the fact that your newsletters are not able to make the mark among the audience. They either fail to create the interest in them or your calls to action are not effective enough. Ask yourself a few questions to get your answers:

  • How is the tone of your content? Is it purely promotional and impersonal, or is it helpful and friendly?
  • Are you making an effective and meaningful one on one engagement through your content?
  • Are you striking up a conversation with the reader, or are you just talking at them to get your job done?

These questions will help you understand where you are going wrong. Understand the effectiveness of email marketing to be able to use it in the best way possible.

One thing you need to remember is that email marketing is not going anywhere. Each and every Digital Marketing Agency makes sure to emphasise this point. If you even believe that emails are dying and there is no point in marketing via emails, you will surely start missing out on the wide range of opportunities that this platform has got to offer you. Do not make this mistake, and keep your place in the digital world.

14 Smart Tips to Get Your Email Subscriber’s Attention

 

Email marketing is always an effective strategy to reach out to people. It is also one of the least expensive ways to ensure that you get your word spread out among prospective clients. Every Digital Marketing Agency you approach will surely bring out this one aspect out to you.

Even though email marketing works great, people keep getting promotional emails all through the day. Very few people bother to actually open emails and read their content. It is very likely that your email could get lost in this clutter and remain ignored. As such, it is a marketer’s job to ensure that your email is actually opened and read. You need to increase your chances of being noticed among the crowd. This does take some effort, but is worth it for sure.

Here are a few tips to help you get your emails opened and read:

  1. Make A Targeted List Of Recipients

Make a list of targeted receivers. This is very important if your expertise covers various areas. You need to create content that is specific for a group of people with similar interests. This way, your email would match their interests and increase your chances of getting noted. Your content will be able to speak directly to the audience’s interests and will make the mark. Also, it is necessary to have a list that is clean, and consists of only people who have opted to receive your emails.

  1. Set Up Specific Expectations

Each time a subscriber signs in to receive your e-newsletters or such emails, or subscribes to you, do send them an auto-response email to let them know what to expect from you. Give them a detailed idea about the kind of emails and also the frequency of emails you will be sending out. This lets your subscribers know what to expect from you in due course.

  1. Show That You Are Real

This point should reflect in your content first of all. The content in your email should be real and accurate. No fake promises or messages should be promoted. This is also applicable to your email address. Use a real name instead of generics like info@abc.com and such ids for the address that you use as a “reply to”.

  1. Keep A Catchy Subject Line

Your subject line needs to be a well researched one. Spend enough time to sit and think about what you would put as a subject for your email. This must be something that actually provokes your recipient to open your email and check its contents. It needs to be really enticing.

Read Also: 10 E-mail Marketing Hacks That Every Marketer Should Know

  1. A Good Pre-header

A number of e-newsletters and emails have pre-headers that instruct the reader to open the email in a web browser in case the viewer is not able to see it properly in the mail. This is actually not a good way to proceed. You need to use this option to give the user a really compelling reason to go on and read the email completely.

  1. Call to Action

A Call to Action or CTA is necessary in every email. This lets the user get to know what you actually expect them to do. A common mistake is to let this portion go towards the end of the email. Instead, place this somewhere near the top of the email. This will help the readers notice it soon \enough rather than giving them pains to scroll through the entire email to get it.

  1. Give them Control

You need to allow the subscribers to opt out easily if they want to. There is no point in marketing to people who have no intention to do business with you. It is better to let them opt out and not disturb them with your emails again.

  1. Personal Message

Make your email personal by greeting your readers using their name. You could also use their first names in the subject line. According to market studies, it has been found that the by using personalized emails you could increase the chances of getting your email opened by around 14%.

  1. Share

It is a good idea to add some sharing features to your emails. You could make use of social sharing options to allow your readers to share the email to their family and friends. This could highly increase your chances of being opened and help you get a much wider audience. According to researches, it has been found that emails that have social sharing buttons have a 115% higher click through rate as compared to other emails that do not implement the feature.

  1. Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is an essential part of every digital marketing strategy these days. With increased use of smartphones and tablets, this is one aspect that you can never overlook. Around 40% of all emails are now opened using these devices. This number just keeps growing all the time. As such, you need to have your email optimised for mobile devices so that your viewers are able to view it properly on any device. You can also use email services to do this for you. Such services also give you detailed statistics about how many of your emails are opened on mobile devices.

  1. Analyze and Monitor

You need to analyze and monitor the behaviour of your email recipients. This will help you understand what content they prefer, when they prefer, and other such minute details. This will help you build better strategies and succeed in your ventures based on these statistics.

  1. Update your Subscriber list Periodically

You need to keep this one point in mind. “Keep only those subscribers who open your emails”. This is an overlooked point that usually no one cares about. One sure thing is that every person is not going to open your email. The smaller the list, the higher will be the open rate you can achieve. Just keep those people in your list who are interested in receiving your emails and reading them. There is no point in keeping others there. You need detailed statistics to know how many of your emails are being opened and by whom. Once you have this ready, you can direct your emails to specific targets.

Based on the emails opened over the course of a few months, you need to edit your lists and update them. If there are subscribers who have had no interaction with you over a few months, there is no logic in emailing them all the time.

Before you cut them down, you could send them a small notification as to you are deleting their subscription or so. Another thing you could do is ask them if they are interested in receiving your emails. If you get a response, keep them in. If there is no response, you could surely delete them from the list. This is a subtle way of letting them know.

Recommended Read: Effective Social Media Marketing Tricks for 2015

  1. Encourage Email Classification

You need to ensure that your recipients receive your emails bypassing any of the possible filters. This is a way to make sure that they open all your emails. You could send them detailed instructions to prevent the emails from going in to the spam folder or promotions tab. They need to follow the instructions to prevent it with the email provider. You could ask them to add you to their contacts, or even better, to their favourites.

  1. Reward them for reading

Give your readers some kind of rewards for reading your emails. You could share a useful tip to make them benefit or try something simple like that. This inspires them and makes them feel better.

These simple and easy techniques will surely help you go a long way in getting your emails noted and opened by your recipients. Every Digital Marketing Agency is sure to suggest you the above. Email marketing is one with great scope. If you use it smartly, you can get lots of benefits out of it.

Why Is Segmentation Important In Email Marketing?

 

When we talk about email marketing, the success of your effort is mainly affected by the nature of your email segmentation. By knowing how to segment your email audience properly, you can create more effective email campaigns for enterprise level marketing and can achieve your goal efficiently.

When we discuss the significance of this type of email list separation, you must know exactly why segmentation is important in email marketing? It’s quite simple:

  • All Your Customers are Not the Same. Generally businesses serve more than one type of clients. Even if you deal with only single product or service, there are various types of clients that should be treated independently, with a specific end goal to get their attention in the most effective way.
  • You’ll Create Your Fame. It could be excessive, but here it’s one more of a chance: If you send focused, significant emails with luring content to your potential client base, you will come to be more fascinating and captivating to your customers. This will result in finding increased number of subscribers.

Read Must: 10 Best E-Mail Subject Line Formulae to Rock Your E-Mail Marketing Campaigns

  • You Need More and More Leads. The more you speak to your different customers about the value of your services, the probability of them purchasing from you is also higher. If you furnish content that speaks and relates to your clients, you will develop a bond with them. This bond creates an interest your emails, and they will come to see it! What’s more, with such a relationship, you will be the main priority when they want to buy a product.

Once you have segmented your lists, no matter to what extent, it’s vital to keep the categories up-to-date. Segmenting your lists can be tedious. This can be helpful when you have both prospects and buyers on the list. When someone becomes a customer, they can easily be moved from one segment to another without any kind of subscription process.

So, it’s necessary as it helps you to comply with applicable laws and send the right messages to your contacts. And you can expect immediate positive responses from your customers once you’ve gone through the process.