How To Quickly And Easily Build An Email List
If you’re looking to boost your blog’s traffic or your business’s sales in 2020, email marketing needs to be your top priority.
Why should you pour your heart and soul into building an email list? Here are just a few statistics about email marketing that speak for themselves.
In 2017, email users around the world amounted to 3.7 billion users and it is projected to hit 4.3 billion users in 2022 (Statista, 2019). Of the 3.7 billion users worldwide, approximately 233 million are located in the United States, meaning that 70% of Americans use email.
The ROI is massive. For every dollar spent on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $32 (DMA, 2018). Nearly two thirds of marketers claim to see the most ROI from email marketing. 61% of customers would like brands to provide information via email, and 59% of consumers claim that email marketing has an influence over their purchase decisions (Business2Community).
What You’ll Learn in this Blog Post:
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is the act of promoting your business or blog via email. To get started with email marketing, you’ll need to start to build your email list. An email list is a collection of subscribers and their information (usually just name and email address) that have opted into receiving emails from you.
Email marketing platforms, such as Constant Contact or MailChimp, allow you to compile and store your list of subscribers and communicate with them via email. Today, these email platforms are very powerful, with features that allow you to segment your list, automate sequences of emails, schedule broadcasts, test emails with A/B tests, and more.
Why You Need to Start Building Your Email List…like yesterday
What would you do if Facebook shut down tomorrow? Facebook owns Instagram, so that’s gone too. Then what? How will you be able to reach out to your audience? Email lists are 100% yours. Your subscribers are your subscribers.
Emails are personal and subscribers are loyal. Your email subscribers specifically gave you permission to enter their inbox, they’re not just people passing through a blog post on your website, never to return again. Additionally, the email messages are between you and the recipient, rather than a general blog post or social media post that is from you to whoever comes across it.
Start building your email list as soon as possible. Maybe you just started your blog three days ago and only have one blog post; you still need an email list. And start sending your emails right away. Even if you only have 6 subscribers (including your mom), your subscribers don’t know that. For all they know, you’re sending messages to thousands of subscribers.
Have you ever visited an online shop or a blog and loved it, but can’t remember what it was? Don’t miss out on a loyal subscriber by not giving them the opportunity to stay connected with you.
How to Build Your Email List
Building and growing an email list is not as hard as it may seem, as long as you don’t overthink it. You probably receive tons of emails - what made you subscribe to those lists?
Incentives are powerful
While I think it is very important to have a simple “subscribe to our newsletters” box somewhere on your website, you’ll probably need to give your audience a bit more of a reason to subscribe to your email list.
So what should you do to give your audience that little push to subscribe? Create lead magnets! According to Optinmonster, “A lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address or other contact information.”
What makes an irresistible lead magnet?
Provides high value - your lead magnet should be valuable and should solve a problem or provide valuable information to the reader.
It seems strange to give some of your best tips and resources away for free, but this is your chance to show the reader what you’re all about. If your lead magnet is unimpressive or underwhelming, your subscribers are probably going to unsubscribe from your mailing list and will not convert to customers down the line.
However, if your audience subscribes to your list in exchange for your lead magnet and is completely blown away by the value they got from you, they’ll be more likely to convert to a customer or a loyal reader because they’ll expect your paid content to be even more valuable.
Instant access and easy to digest - when someone subscribes to your email list in exchange for a digital lead magnet, they’ll expect it right away. We all love that instant gratification! If you wait too long to send your resource to your new subscriber, they may move along and your email could just get lost in their inbox. But don’t worry, it’s easy to use email automation tools to send your lead magnets to your audience as soon as they subscribe!
What to Offer as a lead magnet
Get creative! There are so many different ways to capture your audience’s email addresses and of course you will want it to be something specific to your business or blog. Your lead magnets don’t need to be massive to provide value. A simple PDF checklist can be a valuable resource to your subscribers! A long ebook or large pieces of content may be overwhelming to your audience.
Some popular lead magnets:
Email courses (5-day challenges, 10-days of sales, etc.)
PDF guide/checklist (these work well for blogs - provide resources specific to your blog post for your reader to continue learning/getting value)
Access to resource vault (provide the password to a protected page on your website)
Access to your exclusive Facebook group
Offer discount code to subscribers
What to Send To Your Email List
So now you have used your amazing lead magnet to get some subscribers on your list… what now?
Welcome subscribers with a welcome series
Your new subscribers may already know all about you or may have just come across your site and subscribed to get that incentive you promised without knowing much about you. Either way, you’ll want to introduce yourself and your blog or business and let them know what to expect as a subscriber.
According to GetResponse, the average open rate for a welcome email is 82%. That’s a HUGE percentage, considering that the average open rate for emails in general is approximately 18%. So don’t miss out on that connection with your new subscriber, and as this is one of the most opened emails, be sure to provide important information that you don’t want your audience to miss.
Abandoned cart emails
If you sell a physical or digital product, abandoned cart emails can recover tons of sales that you otherwise would have lost. I’m sure you’ve received an abandoned cart email before (I have a habit of filling up my cart and then forgetting about it).
Listen to these crazy stats. SaleCycle reported that in 2018, approximately 75.6% of carts were abandoned! But thanks to abandoned cart emails, these sales are not all lost. SaleCycle claims, “46.1% of people open cart abandonment emails, 13.3% click inside the email, and of those clicks, more than 35% end up buying something.”
Many companies send discounts with their abandoned cart emails as a way of pushing the consumer to purchase. Be sure to have a large call-to-action in your email to make it as easy as possible for the user to return to their cart and finish their purchase.
new product/new blog post
Email blasts are a great way to let your audience know that you have something new in your shop or a new blog post!
If you’re sharing a new blog post, be sure to only give your readers a little teaser. If you share your whole post in your email, yes it’ll be a very valuable email, but it won’t drive your subscribers to your website. Give your subscribers enough to grab their attention and pique their interest, but not enough that they have no reason to visit your site.
newsletters
Newsletters can be a great way to maintain a consistent relationship with your subscribers. Decide how often you want to send newsletters (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.) and schedule them out in advance.
For the Girlcrush newsletter, we have different categories of content we include in all of our newsletters. This, along with the reusable email template for our newsletters that we created on Constant Contact, makes it super easy to put them together each week.
What Email Marketing Platform To Use
Over the years, I have used several different email marketing platforms. Currently, I use Constant Contact and I am very happy with it.
When I was starting my business, I used MailChimp because it was free (for your first 2,000 subscribers) and because I did not know much about email marketing at all. Once I surpassed 2,000 subscribers, it was time to upgrade my MailChimp account which led me to explore other premium email marketing platforms.
I ended up using ConvertKit for a while, which I did prefer over MailChimp, but I wasn’t smitten’ and eventually made the switch to Constant Contact.
If you’re just starting out
If you’re new to email marketing, MailChimp is a safe bet. The free MailChimp plan comes with the basic features and it is free until you hit 2,000 subscribers. You can’t do anything too in-depth with your email list or automations, but it’s a good way to learn the basics as you start building up your list.
if you want to grow your list quickly
I highly suggest investing in a powerful email marketing platform. For starters, investing in a platform will give you more of a reason to stick to your email list growth and marketing. Signing up for a free email list platform is not much of an investment which may lead to you not putting in as much effort to grow your list and take advantage of all that email marketing has to offer.
Additionally, it’s kind of a pain to transfer your email list from one platform to another. When importing a significant amount of email subscribers, many platforms will require proof that you collected those emails legally and can take time to verify your account.
But most importantly, email marketing is very valuable and it can be a major player in your marketing strategy and business/blog success. Investing in a powerful email marketing platform and building a strong list from the start will only jumpstart your success!
Why Constant Contact?
There are several reasons why I love Constant Contact. First, the drag-and-drop editor makes it so easy to design visually appealing emails. The template library is huge and you can quickly insert your own branding to make them your own unique templates. I use lots of graphics and images in my emails, so the ability to save my own files to a library rather than having to re-upload logos and images every single time is a huge time-saver.
As soon as I switched over to Constant Contact, I created several different templates for all of the different emails that I send out. Now, all I ever have to do is select one of my templates and enter new text - it just takes a few minutes. And the templates are all mobile-friendly, so I know that my emails will look good no matter where my subscribers are viewing them.
With over 10,000 email subscribers all subscribed to one email list for both Girlcrush Collective and InstaCrush Society, it’s important that we can easily segment the list and add various tags to our subscribers. We can easily send certain emails to specific subscribers based on our own filters, past activity, open history, and more rather than having to send every email broadcast to every subscriber, even though it may not apply to everyone.
It’s very user-friendly. Everything is very organized and you can integrate it with many other apps or programs that you use for your blog or business. You can even create sign-up forms, lead pages, and even webpages right inside of Constant Contact, which makes the whole process so much easier than using an outside site for your lead pages and forms and then redirecting the new email subscribers back into Constant Contact.
⇢ Stay tuned for a detailed blog post about the different features that I love and use in Constant Contact to grow and nurture my list of 10,000+ subscribers! ⇠
The customer service at Constant Contact is fantastic, which is very important to me because I know firsthand how stressful it is when something goes wrong with your email list or email address. It feels like a mini end-of-the-world so it’s good to know that the team at Constant Contact will be ready to help if anything should happen.