Every few years we see news of a message in a bottle sent out decades earlier finally reaching a recipient on some distant shore. We may not know who the sender is and the sender never knew if anyone would see the message. The mystery surrounding a message in a bottle is fun, but we can't say the same for the email newsletter you bend over backwards to create each month.
You want the effort you put into all your email communications to be rewarded with a solid open rate and some sales sprinkled in. But if your email list is small, shrinking, or both, these outcomes can be hard to come by. If you want a better return on your email investment, you have to grow your email list—but how?
Your marketing partners at CMG Local Solutions are here to provide email list growth strategies to increase your email subscribers so you can reap bigger rewards. But first, we'll explain why growing your email list is the foundation for any successful email marketing campaign.
Why Email Acquisition is Your Business
If someone offered to give you $40 and all you had to give them was a single $1 bill, you'd naturally think there's a catch. But that's the return on investment you can achieve through strong email marketing campaigns. For every dollar you put in, you can get $40 back. It's not a deal too good to be true, it's a deal too good to pass up.
Why does email marketing enjoy such a high ROI? One reason is that people are three times more likely to purchase from an email compared to social media. Unlike social media—where nameless, faceless algorithms decide who sees your content—email marketing offers a direct relationship that customers trust. Unlike a social media ad or post, people sign up to see your emails. They want to see your content.
Understandably, some businesses purchase emails to grow their lists quicker. But, when you purchase email addresses, there's greater risk that spam filters will prevent it from reaching the inbox and a far lower chance of being opened at all. Growing your list organically produces better outcomes because organic email acquisition techniques create a direct relationship between your business and customers.
These Email Acquisition Techniques Pull Customers In
At the core of your email marketing should be an email that people long to open. There needs to be some value for the customer that entices them to open your email whenever it hits their inbox. That's true whether your business sends out a monthly newsletter or promotional emails for new deals.
You know your email has value, but the target audience doesn't. That's why you should add extra excitement at the start to ensure a potential customer puts in the effort to sign up to your email list. You can also make it so that it requires very little effort in the first place to encourage sign-ups. These are examples of pull email acquisition techniques, they draw customers to your email list.
As we'll see later, there are also techniques to push your list towards customers and many strategies succeed when these two categories meet. For now, here are some email list growth strategies to pull customers to your business's lists.
Create Landing Pages: One way to pull customers to your email list is to make it the doorway to a customer's desired answer. You can create simple webpages with one message and a clear call to subscribe all centered on a customer's search query and intent.
Simplify Sign Up Forms: If you want people to opt-in and sign up for your email list, it should be as easy as possible to do so. Ensure that your sign up sheets across all your webpages, especially landing pages, only ask the information needed to subscribe. At this point, you likely only need their name, email address, and confirmation that they want to sign up for your emails. Only ask for more if it's essential.
Offer Powerful Incentives: Your landing pages can get an additional boost by offering an incentive like a free guide, ebook, or sample that solves a customer's initial problem. Let's say you run an HVAC business. You could offer a free guide to lowering energy bills in the summer in exchange for a customer signing up for your newsletter.
Use Discounts to Encourage Sign-Ups: You can use discounts, discount codes, or free quotes to further encourage people to sign up for your email list. These incentives might appear on existing webpages rather than landing pages to pull additional customers towards your list.
One great strength of doing acquisition email marketing with these strategies is that they offer the opportunity to track and segment customers. A customer that signs up for your email list from a particular landing page or to get a particular free resource or discount is telling you about who they are as a customer. These strategies quickly tell you what they're interested in receiving more of, giving you a clear window into what to send them next.
Email List Growth Strategies that Push Customers To Subscribe
You can also use email acquisition techniques to push your email list towards customers. Be careful though, the goal is to push the list to customers not be pushy. Master the line and you can achieve an email list growth rate that's the envy of all your competitors.
Create Pop-up Sign Up Boxes: You can push people towards your email list through pop-ups that appear after a web visitor does an action or scrolls to a particular part of the webpage. Pop-ups can easily cross the line into a nuisance, so it could help to offer an incentive like a discount while keeping the form as simple as possible.
Target Non-Subscribers That Engage Elsewhere: You likely have social media followers or long-time customers who aren't subscribed to your email list, yet. Determine who these folks are and push your email list to them through messages on channels you do have access to. You can also leverage social media groups you're a member of to push your list out to them. LinkedIn Groups, Facebook, or Nextdoor would all be places to push this message out there.
Use Purchases and Subscribers to Your Advantage: If it's possible for people to purchase via your website, you should have an order confirmation email with language encouraging people to subscribe to your email list. You can also create referral campaigns so current subscribers invite friends and family that are likely interested in your offerings.
Use Traditional Marketing Channels: You can use television and radio advertising strategies to encourage people to subscribe to your email list. With connected television, it's never been more possible to grow your subscribers while your ad plays on their television.
To really find success growing your email lists, you need to utilize email acquisition techniques that combine push and pull strategies. A pop-up box that offers a free download of valuable content will do better than one that's just pushing the email list. Referral campaigns that give referring customers nothing in return are unlikely to foster success. Putting push and pull strategies together, though, ensures your incentives get seen and your email list grows.
Raise Your Email List Growth Rate With CMG
You can implement some of the email list growth strategies and techniques explained above as soon as you finish reading this. It's likely you'll see a noticeable bump in subscribers. But to see sustained email list growth, you'll need to utilize all these strategies. Creating new landing pages, deciding incentives, and creating free, valuable content might not be in your wheelhouse.
Thankfully, it's ours. Embrace email marketing's full potential with a partner that can guide customers straight to your list. No more messages in a bottle, contact CMG Local Solutions today for emails that reach a growing audience, resonate with customers, and reward your efforts.
