When it comes to keeping your email list healthy and growing it, a user’s involvement is imperative to your business. If your subscribers click unsubscribe the instant your carefully created campaign hits their inbox, all your work goes down the drain. But it’s not only important to craft good emails and campaigns, it’s also important to keep enriching your emailing list with data that keeps them engaged.
- It’s also a good way to identify inactive subscribers, remove them from your email list and keep your pipeline healthy.
Do you know that in 2019, approximately $3.07 billion were spent on email marketing in the USA alone?
Mailing lists are never constant. They are constantly evolving, with a few contacts being dropped on a regular basis and more active ones being added when you run marketing and sales campaigns.
So we put together a few tricks and techniques to do that in an effective manner and enrich your email list.
How to enrich and grow your email list
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Tap into the website visitors
You have a brilliant website that packages everything about your business in the most informative way. But do you really think every visitor to your site would willingly subscribe to your email list because you’ve done a good job at presenting who you are? Not really. But that doesn’t mean you can’t convert these visitors. Here are a few tactics that are proven to work:
- Place a subscription widget upfront
The best way to increase your email database is by adding a subscription widget or form to the strategic pages, i.e. the home page, the blogs, and the likes. By being prominently present, it nudges the visitors to subscribe. - Use email pop-ups strategically
Use tools to integrate pop-up windows across your website. This should contain your newsletter’s subscription form. Ensure that it pops up on a web page within the first few seconds of the person visiting the website. You can further entice the potential subscribers using a ‘Free gift’ option or a value add in lieu of their email address. - Create recall value with newsletter references
Call-to-actions are amazing. Make efficient use of those. If you have a running blog, make sure you mention the newsletter, along with the link to the subscription form, every now and then within the content or towards the conclusion.
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Engage and reward your subscribers
Once a visitor subscribes to your email list, the goal is to keep them from unsubscribing. That is, after they’ve enjoyed your initial offer, preventing them from unsubscribing from your list and doing your best to get to know them better. This is where you put your thank you page at work.
On this page, ask your subscriber to share more information about them. It could be their birth date, their location, what they came looking for and what they want to learn more about. You can also set up a rewards system that offers a value-add to subscribers who share more information with you.
The more information you have, the more enriched your email list gets.
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Find the lead with extensions
If you have a list of target accounts and their websites ready, make sure of smart browser extensions to find leads that can be added to your email list.
With Chrome extensions like FindThatLead, you can visit any website or LinkedIn profile, and get email addresses of potential contacts there. This helps you growth hack your email list, reaching targeted prospect accounts faster and learning more about them to enrich your email list.
4. Go and get social
One of the most untapped hacks to growing and enriching your email list, is social media. Yes, social media accounts are not just for sharing engaging content, but also driving subscribers to your business. Here’s how you can do it:
- Make the most of social media ads
Use segmentation tools to select your ideal buyer profile. Create paid campaigns to reach this audience with top of the funnel promotions like content from your blog, case studies or freebie content upgrades. Nudge your readers to subscribe to get access to more such content. - Add subscription link to posts
This works like a call-to-action. You can pin a post to your social media page, and that should be about the subscription. Alternatively, you can even have a cover image that has the link included in the caption. Also remember to schedule posts with the subscription link, at regular intervals. But remember to always highlight the value you have to offer to nudge these subscriptions.
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Offer valuable content
Make sure your content is relevant and not repetitive to who you’re targeting. If your content cannot engage the visitor, there is no way they’d stick around long enough to subscribe. Your visitor has come to you looking for a solution, address the pain points and cut straight to the chase. The more ambiguous you are, the more are the chances of visitors leaving, the more the bounce rate, and the fewer the subscribers. Thus, offer content that adds value to their knowledge base.
We recommend sharing knowledge without including your sales pitch. When you win their trust first, they are more likely to convert.
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Encourage people to share your content
Someone that subscribes to your email list obviously finds value in it. And it’s human nature for this subscriber to have a network of people who have similar interests such as him. What if you could get his network to convert?
Nudge your subscribers to share your content or the insights they gather from your website pages. Include easy-to-use social sharing and email-sharing buttons on each of your content pages to serve as a subtle reminder.
When your content gets introduced to a more qualified network, there is a higher probability of getting more subscribers that enrich your list.
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Minimize clicks
Do not make a complicated interface as far as the subscription form is concerned. Keep it simple and catchy. If there are too many pop-ups crowding up the site, it can instantly turn off the visitor.
While it is important to collect as much information as possible, getting relevant information is more important. Keep the questions at bare minimum to start with, then slowly warm up the subscriber to capture more information.
If it is absolutely critical for your business to capture more details from a subscriber, include a progress bar on your subscription form. The closer the visitor feels they are to completion, the more likely they are to remain engaged enough to complete the process.
Now that you have a few tips on capturing visitor information, here are a few on keeping them happily engaged.
Keeping your email list enriched
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Create catchy email subject lines
When your visitors have subscribed to your newsletter, it is important to keep them active and engaged. Set up automations or weekly newsletters to reach out to them. But no matter what you share over email, keep your subject lines catchy. That’s the very first thing a subscriber views.
Remember to not get too click-baity and promise only what you can offer. Also, match the content of your email to its subject line. If the content is bland as compared to the subject line, it can have the opposite effect, i.e. the subscribers unsubscribing.
We recommend you segment your subscriber list based on their interests. This will help you keep your email subject lines relevant to what they have their eyes on!
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Make maximum use of email preview
Email previews are the most underrated and underutilized feature. Considering how an average internet user consumers thousands of content pieces online, it’s important to build recall. So while your subject line is to capture attention, the preview is to give enough content to prevent a subscriber from deleting your message or unsubscribing from the list.
When your email subject line and preview are contextual to the subscriber’s interests, they’re more likely to engage with it. The better the engagement rate, the lower are the chances of unsubscriptions.
And the lower your unsubscriptions are, the more you can enrich your email list campaign-on-campaign.
It’s time to smarten up your mailing list
Growing your mailing list can take time. You have to be consistent in your efforts. Offer valuable content that is shareable, do not be redundant, and keep creating more value.
While generating new content is extremely important, it is also essential to keep nudging and reminding your existing subscribers to share more information about them. While campaign insights will give you a breakdown of what they want more of and what they don’t like, it’s important to make some nudges upfront.
In the end, an enriched list is one when you can answer “how well you know your subscribers” with a positive response.
