How to Boost Your Email List in 5 Easy Steps

Is your email list qualified? 

If you’re looking to grow your business with email marketing, but aren’t having much luck, this guide is for you.

Having a great email list that converts, and results in purchases is easier said than done. You can’t expect to have a generic list of a few thousand people and expect sales. Your audience has to be qualified or you risk losing all the time you put into crafting email marketing campaigns. 

Not only can you lose your time, but these unqualified people can report you for SPAM, which can lead to you being blacklisted by email marketing providers. If this happens, it can be really difficult to undo and will negatively impact your email delivery. That said, you need to ensure your email list is of high quality.  If you’re starting fresh and have little to no subscribers, how do you generate a great list quickly? The following tips are sure to help you grow your email list with qualified contacts. 

1) Complete a customer profile 

When you are building your email list, keep in mind that people are very careful with their email addresses nowadays. They’re always warry of spam, scams, and predatory companies looking to take advantage of them. People simply don’t want an inbox full of junk mail. As a result, you need to be quite cautious about how you ask people for their information. You need to give people a reason to opt-in, and to do this you need to understand your audience. 

If you haven’t already, we highly recommend you build your customer avatar. With it, you’ll be able to get a clear picture of who your typical customer is. You’ll be able to understand where they hang out online, what they are interested in, what makes them tick, and why they buy with clearly defined pain points. You’ll understand where they live, how old they are, how much money they make and so much more.

There are 5 things your avatar should include:

• What their goals are

• Psychographic information

• Demographic Information

• What challenges them? What are their pain points?
• What is their aversion to buying?

If you want to learn more about building your customer avatar, be sure to click here and read our blog post on it. 

2) Offer a sweet incentive

Once you understand who your customers really are, you can start creating a compelling offer for them to join your list. If you expect to generate thousands of qualified prospects with only a generic newsletter opt-in button on your website, it won’t work as well as you think. These buttons hardly influence the right people to join your list.

Instead, what you need to do is provide your website visitors with something that delivers true value to them. By showing people real value, they’ll be sure to opt-in at record rates. For example, if you’re a baker looking for local enthusiasts to join your bread-making class you may want to build a cookbook pdf. You could fill your cookbook with 10-15 easy recipes for beginners. Then, near the end of your book, you can include a call to action (CTA) button asking the reader to sign up for your cooking class online. 

By offering your customers your valuable industry expertise, you are giving them real value, free of charge. This increases the trust they have in you and your brand, further boosting their likelihood of purchasing a ticket to your cooking class. Want to go above and beyond? Set up a tablet in your shop where your customers can quickly download your cookbook in-store.

3) Build Your Landing Page

Now you don’t want to just give your cookbook away for free. Lead gate your cookbook by building out a proper landing page. On this page, you could give visitors an idea of what your cookbook will feature, what benefits it has, and what they will learn from using it. Some key parts of a landing page include attention-grabbing headlines, attractive images, video and body copy explaining the book, and some bullet points describing the benefits people will get from downloading the cookbook. 

Please note that your landing page must have an opt-in form on it. This is the way your customers will be able to download the cookbook. Now there is a lot of debate happening in the marketing world as to what to include in your form. Some experts recommend asking for a first name, last name, email, and phone number. 

Others think it’s best to include only the first name and email address. Increasingly, we’re seeing companies asking for ONLY an email address! There are benefits to all these options. The more information you ask for, the more personalized your emails can get. Services like MailChimp allow you to include your prospects’ names right in your copy or subject lines! 

Ultimately the fewer mandatory fields in your form, the better it will perform for you. If you do choose to ask for more information, you may want to give them a bigger, better cookbook. You could also make the other fields non-mandatory, while only making the email address mandatory. Want to learn more about landing pages? Click here.

4) Pop-Ups

Want to go above and beyond? Set up pop-ups on your website that promote your free cookbook. Why do should you do this? Well according to multiple sources, roughly 70% of people who visit your website never return. There are tools such as Exit Intent technology that tracks your website users’ behaviour and habits on your site. When they hover over the exit button, or if the scroll to the bottom of your page, you may want to launch a pop-up with your cookbook. 

This small nudge of value could be just enough to influence somebody who may have never found your cookbook otherwise. If they didn’t opt-in here, they may simply not be the right customer for you. If you’re seeing a low conversion rate you may want to look into split testing your pop-ups, their location on your page and you may even want to test a new lead magnet. 

5) Opt-Ins

Another great strategy that can drive tons of people to download your lead magnet is through opt-ins. First thing’s first, if you’re not blogging you need to begin right away. Blogging offers your customers great professional insight from a real pro – you! You could blog about nice recipes for a get-together or how you can bake a cake. There are no limits to what you produce except your imagination!

Now comes the fun part. On all of your blog posts, you should insert a form at the end to join your mailing list. When users fill out this form, they are automatically emailed a copy of your free cookbook as a thank you. These users are ready for more content and have high intent as they just finished reading your blog. Your article piqued their interest, your blog kept them entertained until the end and now they’re left wanting more. 

What better time than introduce your email newsletter and the free cookbook to go along with joining? 

BONUS: Use your list for social media campaigns

This step is for digital marketing experts out there. Once you have a healthy list size (we suggest at least 500-1000) you can upload your newsletter list into Facebook and target them with ads. 

This is called a “Custom Audience”. You can build a wide selection of custom audiences that offer businesses unique opportunities. These audiences are often high intent audiences that are quite likely to purchase from you and become a paying customer of yours! 

Want to learn more about building Facebook custom audiences? Click here to read our expert guide.