Email marketing is an ideal channel for building relationships with your customers, nurturing leads, and turning them into loyal repeat customers. It is a chance to handle their complaints, educate them on your products and services, share offers and promotions, and manage their customer journey. This article shares tips on how to build email marketing lists to help you make the most of the opportunity.
What are email marketing lists?
An email marketing list is a collection of names and email addresses used by companies to send promotional messages to multiple recipients. It reflects the total number of subscribers you can market to directly. Email marketing is a valuable marketing channel for your business, which makes this list a crucial element in all your marketing efforts.
What are the benefits of email marketing?
Emails look professional
While marketing channels like social media have the wow factor, emails offer a more bespoke approach that most customers and other businesses prefer. Customers are bound to take you seriously when you reach out through emails because they effectively convey the gravity of your request.
Emails allow for customisation
Collecting emails from different customers through different channels allows for a more customised approach. Depending on the channel and interest, you can group these customers into different mailing lists, delivering more tailored and effective information. Such grouping also allows for more effective CTAs, because you already know where the customer needs to be directed.
Effective feedback collection tool
Once you establish a rapport with customers through email, you can conduct surveys and collect opinions more effectively. Customers find sharing such information after several correspondences easy and convenient.
How to build email marketing lists
Use pop-up offers
Pop-ups are only as effective as how you execute them. If done poorly, they will annoy your customers enough to send them away. Therefore, you need to customise your pop-ups to appear when necessary and cease once a customer shares their email address. Keep them relevant and timely to ensure positive reception.
Incentivise the sign-up process
People will share their email addresses only for a good reason. Therefore, you need to make them eager to share their information. A proven strategy is to use a lead magnet. You can ask them to sign up in exchange for a voucher, freebies, templates, worksheets, more insights as an extension to an article, etc.
That said, you need to offer incentives that match their initial engagement. For example, someone looking for steps to tackle a specific problem is likely to sign up if you share more effective strategies to handle their issue. Additionally, a regular shopper will sign up if you regularly share discount coupons via email.
Use the CTAs in your web and blog content
One of your calls to action can be an invitation to share email addresses for more in-depth information, a call back from customer support, scheduling appointments, etc. This leverages the appeal of your content to make it easy for customers to share their email addresses with you. Additionally, it also improves the ROI of your content. You can sell to potential customers immediately, or you can collect their contact information this way for a chance to sell in the future.
Use your social media platforms’ popularity
Social media is an effective marketing tool, but also one that can support your email marketing efforts by collecting email addresses. You can create a sign-in button on your social media pages or run a campaign specifically to encourage followers to sign up for your newsletter. You can also include the sign-in option in discounts and other promotional posts, encouraging customers to take that step for more regular offers and discounts.
Use existing contacts
You can make your loyal customers part of your marketing team through a referral program. Having enjoyed your products and services, they are your best bet at reaching out to more customers with that first-hand experience. They can easily influence people they know to share their email addresses and make purchases immediately. This strategy has the ripple effect of creating more brand ambassadors who will continue spreading the word.
Focus on your About Us page
New customers tend to head straight to your “About Us” page to learn more about you. Therefore, capitalise on that assured visit to get them to share their email address. Placing a CTA on that page has proven effective at getting customers to take certain actions, and requesting the email addresses should enjoy similar levels of success.
Ask directly
You could also place this CTA on your home page or several landing pages, asking customers to sign up for your newsletters. This direct approach works on customers who genuinely wish to sign up to receive more information from you, depending on how helpful they find your website. It is especially effective for informative and educative websites and blogs.
Use your loyalty program
When you run a loyalty program, you’ll need to collect customer contact information, and their emails should be part of it. Customers normally don’t think twice about sharing that information, as it is standard procedure when signing up for a loyalty program. This allows you to collect tons of email addresses that you can use to contact them and sell more.
Conclusion
Email marketing is a proven strategy to reach more customers, retain their loyalty, and even reach out to people they know. Email communication is personal, effective, and welcome in most instances. You only need to approach it the right way. If you’re just getting started, it helps to consult experienced professionals for that approach. Get in touch today, and let us show you how to build email marketing lists that work.
