Email List Building: 9 Tips to Increase Subscribers

Building your email list should be one of your top marketing goals. Having great content that would attract your ideal client is a major component of this email list building process, but even with the best content, some businesses still haven’t built an email list of subscribers that can help them with their long term marketing efforts.

So, what are some of the key tactics that can help you build that valuable email list?

• Understand your who you want to attract (target market) – Like every other marketing activity you plan to do, you must understand who you are trying to attract and why.
• Use an email marketing service – There are two major reasons for this. First, you will get more subscribers if you indicate that you are using a service because it means they can unsubscribe safely when they want to. Second, the days of sending email from your computer directly to your list, even if you have been diligent at getting permission, is over. No one trusts email messages coming from a random source. MailChimp is the email marketing service I recommend to small business owners because they have a free service for up to 2000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month and their features are very impressive. (Watch for a future post with more details.)
• Make sure your sign up form is very visible and on every page – Make your sign up form easy to find by putting your sign up form at the top of your left or right sidebars. Don’t just have it on a separate page that I have to consciously find. WordPress makes it easy to do with widgets. Drop your form in a text widget and you are ready to roll.
• Put your sign up form on your Facebook Business Page – Add your sign up form to your landing tab on your Facebook Page to encourage new fans to sign up as well as like your Facebook page.
• Make the form simple – If you’re trying to build an opt-in, permission based email list, you only need the email address. I like to personalize my emails, so I also ask for their first and last names, which I find most gladly provide. But don’t ask for what you don’t need. Less is more in email list building tactics.
• Don’t be overly aggressive in how you encourage people to sign up – Pop up sign up forms do increase sign up rates, but if you don’t like them, don’t thrust them onto your visitors. Remember point 1 – understand your market and whether these techniques will work or hurt you more than help.
• Build trust with a visible privacy policy – If you collect personal information on your website, make sure you have a policy that tells people what you do with that information. Between a solid policy and an email service, you should gain your visitors’ trust.
• Put your past email newsletters on your website – That valuable information that you provide in your monthly newsletter should be archived on your website to encourage new visitors to subscribe if they like what they see.
• Create an offer they can’t refuse – Knowing your target market helps you develop the content you need to attract them to you and then provide you with a valuable asset: their email address.

When you have built an email list from the ground up with people who are interested in what you have to offer, you can then provide them with information, offers, events, news and other types of activities that they will find helpful. Remember that it is a privilege that they gave you something as valuable as their email address. Once you have their permission, do not abuse it.

Now that you have a qualified list, what do you do now? That’s for the next post. So what other creative ideas do you have to build a quality email list for your business?

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