Tips to Grow Your Email List

Email marketing is one of the most valuable and consistent forms of marketing, making it a crucial component of your marketing strategy. Before you make it part of your marketing program, though, it's important to know what it can give you and the best ways to use it successfully. Then, you have the best chance of seeing higher returns for the time and effort spent. Here's what you need to know.

Track Analytics

If you want to grow your email list, you need to track some of the data surrounding it. That helps you see if your message is reaching the right targeted population and whether the people receiving your email are doing anything with it. If they're not opening it, or they're not clicking on any links provided in it, you may need to make some changes.

Adjust Your Marketing Accordingly

Adjustments could include targeting different people, or simply creating a different kind of message your audience will be more receptive to. Maybe, you'll need a combination of both. To decide, first look at the open rate. (The percentage of people who open your email instead of just deleting it.) Next, investigate the click-through rate. That will tell you how many people clicked on a link in the email after opening it.

Choose the Analytics You Need

There are also other analytics that can help you see how well your email marketing campaign is going, including:

• Conversion rate
• Bounce rate
• Unsubscribe rate
• Overall ROI

Whether these and a few others are important to you may depend on exactly what you're trying to do with your marketing emails. You could be trying to increase sales, but you may also want to get your brand's name and information in front of more customers. Monitor what will give you the most information about what you're actually trying to accomplish and remember that you don't have to monitor every single data point available to you.

Segment Your Lists

Instead of just sending the same email to everyone, take the time to segment your lists. You can more easily maximize your ROI and overall engagement by targeting a narrow, specific audience instead of trying for a broader group. Even if you're trying to get everyone in that broad group to eventually buy from you, there are some specific ways you'll need to approach different types of people. When you segment lists you target your emails more directly.

There are several different ways you can segment, and some of the most common are:

• Demographics
• Behavior
• Email activity
• Stage of funnel/customer journey

You may also want to segment based on the feedback you receive. If you have specific customers or potential customers who engage with you on social media, for example, or who ask a lot of questions and interact with your brand, you might want to email them different information or offers than you're sending to other people. There's no right or wrong way to segment, and you can divide your email lists in any way that works for you.

Just make sure you're paying attention to how you're dividing things up and why you're choosing that division. It shouldn't be random, because there are a lot of important data points you can use when deciding which person goes on what particular list. You may even move people to different lists over time, depending on whether they move to a different stage of their customer journey or exhibit behaviors that change how you view them as a potential customer.

Update Your Opt-In Offer (Freebie)

Before you can grow your email list you have to get people to start signing up. They'll need to see why they should do that, because an email is a piece of personal information. Unless someone really wants to find out more about your company they aren't going to just give their email address out for free. You need to provide them with an opt-in offer in the form of something for free, essentially in exchange for their email address.

Some of the most common types of opt-in offers you can choose from include:

• eBook or guide
• Checklist
• Challenge
• Template
• Planner or calendar
• Mini Course
• Resource

Naturally, which one of these is going to be right for your potential customers depends on a lot of factors. Your product or service may not lend itself to a mini course, or you may have tried offering a template in the past without much success. No matter which freebie you provide (and you may have several different offers available), it's important to make sure the offer is something potential customers will likely want.

If you have more than one offer, rotate them based on something logical such as the time of year, a holiday, a season, or another specific data point. For example, if you offer a planner you may want it to focus on back to school, tax time, an upcoming holiday season, or something else that will pique the interest of your intended target audience.

Use Automation

You want to be authentic and help the people on your email list connect to you and your brand, but that doesn't mean you have to make every email they get from you a personal message. Instead, save time by using automation when appropriate. Things like welcome emails, weekly updates/newsletters, and abandoned cart emails can all be automated to give you more time in your day and still get important information out to your subscribers.

Automation is the use of autoresponders and other types of programs that will automatically send out specific emails related to certain actions. For example, if someone inputs their email into the "subscribe here" box on your website, you can have an automated process set up that sends them the welcome email with the freebie offer in it. You can also set automatic emails to let people know they left items in their cart, or to prompt them to take a specific action.

Create (or Update) Journeys

Your customers and potential customers have a specific lifecycle with your business, and part of that is their email journey. From their very first contact with you and the welcome email they receive, all the way through turning them into long-term customers and keeping them engaged, you need to ensure they're getting what they need. If you don't provide them with ongoing value, they may never buy from you originally or stop buying from you in the future.

This journey typically has five distinct stages, which are:

1. Acquisition: Attracting potential customers and making a good impression is the first step, and a very important one.
2. Consideration: A potential customer is thinking about whether they want to buy from you, and you need to show them why they should.
3. Purchase: A customer makes a purchase from your brand, but your marketing job doesn't end there.
4. Retention: Remember that it takes effort to keep customers coming back when there's so much competition.
5. Re-engagement: Even when your audience isn't interacting, you should take the opportunity to stay in touch.

Fortunately, you can automate a lot of these stages such as the welcome series during acquisition, educational information during the consideration stage, order updates after purchase, and offers during the retention and re-engagement stages.

That's not to say that you never want to create something that's more personalized, and you shouldn't just send out automated emails when customers have questions or problems, but a lot of the email marketing journey can be automated and planned to move potential customers through the funnel more easily and in a shorter period of time.

Refresh Your Brand Presence

Your brand and what it offers will likely change somewhat over time. Even if you're sticking with something that's working perfectly for you, though, and you don't intend to make changes, you still want to refresh your copy, landing pages, pop-ups, and other information. It needs to be cohesive, and fully representative of your current brand.

Take a step back and look at your marketing efforts through the lens of your target audience. What are they seeing? Does the email information they're getting match the energy of your site? Make sure everything is how it should be, all links work, and customers can access your products or services with ease. They should be able to get the knowledge they're looking for, and they shouldn't feel ignored.

Making small updates from time to time also shows that your business is active, and your company cares about giving its target audience what that audience wants and needs. If you're open and receptive to customer feedback regarding the emails you're sending out and the quality of your website experience for visitors, you're much more likely to continue to grow both your email list and your customer base.

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