10 Effective Strategies to build your Email List

Did you know it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one? So, why not grow an email list and engage with your current audience? 

Focusing on customer retention is a valuable long-term solution for increased revenue and sustainable growth, but it’s not always easy to cultivate that kind of loyalty. And there are top brands who do this incredibly well.

Covered in this article

A Personalised Call To Action Can Go A Long Way
Slide In With The Slide-Ins For Each Page
Timed Pop-Up Surveys Are The Way To Go
Flash Your Value
Your Email Signature And Social Channels Are Free Real Estate
Load More Landing Pages
Encourage Sign Ups All Over The Show
Your 'About Us' Page Needs A CTA
Do You Even Scroll Box, Bro?

One of the ways Netflix, Spotify, and Woolworths cultivate customer loyalty is through valuable content. While there are many ways to do this, email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to reach your target audience. But with that said, we should also take into consideration that there are a lot of companies and entities out there who are doing email marketing dirty. Be it through unprofessional, badly designed emails, or simply spamming their contact list with purposeless information, there are a million ways to miss the mark with email marketing. But we're here to talk about how to do it the right way. 

If you’re starting from zero, building an impressive email list can feel like an impossible feat. Fortunately, you have your friends at Velocity Media who will help you grow that subscriber base from high-quality strategies to the latest tips and tricks, we'll be discussing. Best of all, these strategies are designed to cultivate a loyal email subscriber base, so you can use your emails to attract better long-term customers.

A Personalised Call To Action Can Go A Long Way

Studies have shown that calls-to-action have a 42% higher view-to-submission rate than calls-to-action which are the same for all visitors – that’s almost double your potential email subscribers. The great thing with these personalised CTAs is that it also gives you the opportunity to segment your audience – read more about this in our Segmentation Strategies article. 

The logic is there: the users who visit your blog post or web page are looking for something specific, so your CTA needs to align with the problem you are trying to solve. For instance, if you’ve got a ton of traffic visiting your “Commercial Leasing Strategy” blog article, why not entice those people to subscribe to your email list by including a simple CTA like this: “Click here to download a free Commercial Property Guide.”

Of course, personalised CTAs only work if you have the resources to create that quality content in the first place, but that process doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming. Instead of a toolkit, you could also offer an e-book, a fun quiz, or an exclusive article from your CEO on list-building strategies. Leads magnets are the way to go. 

If you offer content directly related to your visitors' needs, your email newsletter won’t feel like a gimmicky advertisement. Instead, it will feel helpful and valuable -- key principles for a long-term customer retention plan are the name of the game here.

Slide In With The Slide-Ins For Each Page

Pop-ups have become the norm these days. By tweaking when and where a user sees a pop-up on your site is the pinch of paprika that your subscriber list stew needs. After a user spends a certain amount of time on your page, they can receive a pop-up relevant to the content on that page. Examples include exit pop-ups, which appear when a user tries to leave the page or scroll pop-ups, which appear after the user scrolls a certain percentage down the page.

Digital Marketer conducted a case study to determine the value of onsite re-targeting. For one experiment in particular, Digital Marketer introduced a pop-up ad to returning visitors only, which appeared after a visitor spent 15 seconds on their site. 

Ultimately, their campaign generated 2 689 leads in two weeks and increased their average time on page by 54%. Pop-ups aren’t always gimmicky, and if done right, you’re able to appeal to your visitors with quality content when and where they need it.

Timed Pop-Up Surveys Are The Way To Go

The general rule to mailer sign-ups is that you need your viewers to feel invested in your content before you present them with a request for their email address.

To kick off the subscriber count to your mailing list, it's best practice to reach out to visitors on specific pages with surveys related to those specific pieces of content. Users are more willing to answer an “A or B” survey question if they're already invested in the content – it feels like a fairer trade-off.

Flash Your Value

Without coming forth as contradictory, to optimise your subscriber list, you don’t want to use the words “sign up” or "subscribe." Who wants to “sign up” or “subscribe” to more junk emails? Instead, you want to outline the value you can offer upfront, using language like, “Download,” “Featured”, “Exclusive,” and “Access.” You know, fancy synonyms that nudge towards the same thing. 

Your web viewers need to know upfront how your emails can offer unique and exclusive content that isn’t already available on your website. They want to believe your company is offering something special via email.

Your Email Signature And Social Channels Are Free Real Estate

You might not have a long list of email subscribers, but that doesn’t mean you don't have a network. If you have a following on Twitter, a fan base on Facebook, or businesses you communicate with via email, why not use those firm and loyal connections to build an email list?

You might try pitching an email newsletter on your business’s Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn accounts. The people who follow you on those sites already know they like you, but they aren’t necessarily the same people who receive your newsletter.

If you’re uncomfortable pitching your email newsletter on social media, or if you don’t have a large following on any of your accounts, you could also include a link in your email signature -- that link could go directly to your email newsletter, or it could be a link to a blog post or landing page with email subscription CTAs.

Load More Landing Pages

Individual and personalised landing pages allow you to appeal to a wider demographic. Every person who visits your site needs something different, so the more landing pages you can create to answer each person’s individual concerns, the more sign-ups you’ll gain. 

It’s like a restaurant menu. The more you can offer to cater for specific demographics, the more customers you’ll bring in. Someone could be looking for the best gluten-free pizza, while someone else might just want some good sushi.

Encourage Sign Ups All Over The Show

You want to strategically place personalised CTAs where it counts – on landing pages and blog posts. But what about the rare, but real, visitors who want to sign up immediately?

Suppose your newsletter primarily centres around one or two topics. In that case, it’s relatively easy to create a personalised CTA – simply write a CTA that mirrors your newsletter’s purpose, such as, “Want free SEO hacks? Sign up for our newsletter!”

Your 'About Us' Page Needs A CTA

In case you haven't noticed, the biggest denominator in this game of growing your email audience base is CTAs. So, your 'About Us' page is one of the most potent pages in terms of conversion potential. Think about it – how often do you visit About Us pages for businesses you don’t care about? More than you'd care to admit? Don't worry, we're in the same boat. 

With that in mind, your 'About Us' page will prime visitors to want more from your business, but it might not be enough to convince them to purchase. A CTA that encourages them to sign up for a newsletter is easier to concede to than a “buy now” plea.

Do You Even Scroll Box, Bro?

Timing is everything. Your call-to-action works best if you catch visitors when they are, in fact, ready to take action.

Figuring out when your visitor is ready to convert depends on your website viewers’ behaviour, so you’ll want to conduct A/B testing to determine where you need to place your CTA. Does it work best towards the bottom of a blog page, when it slides out to the right, or does it get higher conversions at the beginning of the page, sliding out from the left?

Ultimately, it will vary depending on your page’s content and your viewers, but a scroll box is a subtle and useful option to help you catch your viewers when they’re most ready to convert.