How to Grow Your Email Database
Email marketing remains an effective tool to build customer relationships, nurture leads, and even generate sales. However, having a pre-existing email database is a crucial part of making it successful. Without an audience to send your emails to, you won’t make any headway in driving your business goals.
This short guide shows you the most effective techniques to grow your email database.
Understand the Value of Email
Before you start to make any headway with growing your email database, you first need to recognise the value of an email database for your business. Having access to an engaged list of contacts is a powerful tool for many reasons.
It gives you a direct line of communication to promote new products, educate customers, and generally maintain relationships with customers. An email database also allows you to better segment campaigns to ensure you are targeting the right people with the right message in order to trigger desired responses. Email is also one of the most cost-effective marketing channels available.
Create Clear Messaging
When people come to your website, they need to understand what value they get out of signing up for your emails. Make sure the messaging around the email sign-up form is clear and concise.
You should be straight-forward and explain how frequently they will be receiving emails, why they should sign up, and what benefits they will get in return. Keep the form fields to a minimum to ensure the barriers to entry are low.
Incentivize Sign-Ups
Provide your visitors with an incentive to sign up for your emails. The rewards can range from discounts, exclusive content, access to product launches, or anything else you can think of. It will also help to extend your reach as your visitors can then share the offers with their friends to expand your email list even further.
Promote the Sign-up Form
Once you have the sign up form set up for your email database, you then need to get people to find it and start signing up. An often-overlooked approach is to place the form on your website’s homepage as this is the page that receives the most attention.
You should also consider adding banners and other visuals to other pages on your website, as well as a prominent link in the navigation to make it easier to find.
It’s also important to ensure your promotional emails contain an opt-in. People are more likely to click through to the website if they feel they achieved something valuable.
Leverage Social Media
Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and other social networks are great places to promote your sign-up forms and special offers to entice people to your website. You can do this by linking to direct sign-up forms or landing pages, or you can even just let people know what offers you have available on your emails.
Just remember to be consistent with the language and design from emails to social media when directing people to sign up for your emails.
Blog Posts
Content is a major resource you can use to drive people to your email sign-up forms. Try including a pop-up or an opt-in form at the end of a post, ideally with an offer that gives readers something valuable in return.
You could also try experimenting with other locations for the opt-in forms, for example, a dedicated sidebar. If you have a lot of content on your site, you may need to place the form somewhere at the middle of the page in order to optimize your chances of people seeing and engaging with it.
Ensure Your Emails Are Worth Reading
Finally, make sure that your emails aren’t just generic messages, but valuable content as well. Your emails are essentially the backbone of your relationship with your customers, so ensure that you are delivering content that is relevant to them.
This will help to keep them engaged and also encourage people to share your emails on social media, which will allow you to grow your email list even further.
Gaining an engaged email list is an invaluable asset for any business. Although there are many techniques you can use to grow your email database, understanding the value of email, creating clear messaging, incentivizing signups, promoting the sign-up form, leveraging social media, and writing blog posts are great ways to get started.
By implementing these strategies, you can make sure that you are taking full advantage of the opportunities presented by having an email list and make the most of your email marketing campaigns.
