Entire books have been written about list building yet I find many top email marketing pros don’t focus enough (in my opinion) on list building.
You start to work your email campaigns, you start sending emails and you find that every email generates a few unsubscribes… people who no longer want to hear from you.
Don’t worry about trying to get that number down to zero. You’ll always find someone who wants to leave your list. Don’t take it personally.
I think though that you want to keep a close eye on one ratio. Each month count the number of new fresh email addresses that join your list. Subtract from that the number of unsubscribes AND the number of bounces.
If that number is positive you’re on the right track.
If that number is negative your list size is shrinking and you might want to try these three methods of growing your list.
1. Use Facebook to capture email addresses
Not everyone knows this is possible and even less know how to do this. Conceptually you’ll want to think of this as a squeeze page or landing page strategy. The only trick is the landing page is a Facebook page. You’ll be driving traffic to this page through Facebook Ads as a minimum and you can use a variety of methods to feed this page.
As in many things marketing-related a big part of your success will be based on how effective your offer is. If you have a compelling reason for someone to give you their email address, you’ll get a higher conversion rate… simple as that!
2. Add email capture to your video
You’ll have to be producing videos for this to work for you but you can quite easily create an email capture screen or gateway right in the middle of your video.
A window fades in and says something like “input your email address to hear the rest of the story.” The viewer inputs their email address and software automatically adds the email to your list where you start to deliver valuable goodies that helps to build your relationship.
3. Popups, sliders and sidebars.
I know. You don’t like popups… I don’t like popups… but they work! They work like gangbusters.
All you need to do is give it a try and see if you like the results. You’ll find that a popup is not enough to prevent people from doing business with your brand. For those few people who have a scorched earth policy and get incensed when they see a popup, you actually don’t want this type of person as your customer… trust me on this one.
The biggest obstacle to using these tools to build your list are usually you don’t know they exist or your own perception prevents you from trying them.
One thing is for sure. Your success with email marketing is much improved when your list is 2, 5, 10 or 50 times the size it is now.
Continue to work on your list building skills and YOU will have more email success.