Email Marketing: Three Ways to Build Your Email Marketing List

Some of you may be swamped with spam and seriously questioning the validity of email marketing as an effective tool. We see most of you flocking to social media, and we even notice that some of you are dipping a toe into text message marketing to reach your target market. If you’ve been wondering what text message marketing looks like compared to email marketing, check out our quick comparison here. You may be surprised at some of our insights. There are even platforms that allow you to send push notifications to your customers. The means of contact are becoming endless! Now, that’s all well and good, but don’t disregard the power of the inbox. Email marketing is alive and well. In fact, McKinsey & Company conducted a study that uncovered the fact that, “Email is a staggering 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.” GetResponse’s 2016 State of Email pointed out that, “For every $1 invested, email marketing generates an average return of $38.” OK, so now that we’ve established that email marketing campaigns do in fact drive business, we bet you’re brainstorming your next subject line as we speak. Or write. Or whatever. You might want to pump the brakes, to make sure you’re not putting the cart before the horse. Before you start firing off promotional emails, it’s important that you have a solid, clean, organized email list.   Go ahead and login to your Mailchimp or Constant Contact or Emma account — it’s OK, we’ll wait — and check to see how many subscribers you have. Underwhelmed? Yeah, it’s OK.   We’ve outlined a few simple ways to build your email marketing list below.   You can start by subscribing to our list, so you can make certain that you get little tips and tidbits like this one, direct to your inbox.

Email Marketing List Growth #1: Free Content Pop-Up or Pleasure Button

Bribe to subscribe, lead magnets, carrot content. This is information, tips and tricks that you promise to provide once someone forks over their email address. This content has to be well-timed and relevant in order to rope someone into giving you their contact information. This should not be a sales piece, rather it should be valuable content that someone would welcome into their inbox. Creating custom, click-worthy content isn’t a walk in the park, but it also doesn’t have to be a marathon. Create something simple that addresses the core problem that your would-be clients are facing. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Just give away the goods to achieve one great solution. OK, great. So, we’ve convinced you to spill the beans for free to get subscribers. Now, practically speaking, how will this go down? You’ll need a place to make your promise and a spot for people to type in that all-important email address. C’mon, get creative! Use a homepage pop-up with pleasure or pain buttons to entice someone to open up their inbox to you. Something like this would work well: Headline: Want Marketing That Plucks Customers from Your Competitors? Subhead: Grab this PDF to learn how to steal business from the competition. Buttons: “Yes, I want to beat the competition!” - or - “No, I’m good losing business.” If you’re not sure how to build a pop-up, that’s OK. Because we are! Lucky for you, we can create and implement something like this for you, like tomorrow. Really. Just give us a shout.

Email Marketing List Growth #2: Host a Giveaway

If you’re not keen on giving away the secret sauce to anyone and everyone that signs up on your site, you could host a giveaway instead. Make the prize something substantial — a free month of classes at your barre studio, a $100 gift card to your restaurant, a complimentary massage at your spa — you get the idea. Determine contest start and end dates, set up an email collect on your homepage, and then market the heck out of it. Post about the giveaway on your website, social pages, in-store, and to whoever will listen. The idea is to get as many entries as possible, right? Bonus points for telling people that you’ll announce the winner on social media and encouraging them to also follow you there.

Email Marketing List Growth #3: Sign-Up Sheet or iPad App

This one is easy. Just collect emails everywhere you go. No, seriously. If your team is a vendor at an event, or you host an event at your place of business, make sure to make email collection a priority. The money you spend on the event will come back to you in spades if you’re able to generate a list of leads that you can add to your email database. Remember, every dollar spent on email marketing pays $38 in revenue. Several iPad apps like icapture are available to make email collection a breeze. Mailchimp even has its own app for collecting emails and adding them directly into your list. Even if you don’t want to get all tech savvy with it, you can simply put out a sign-up sheet and ask people to leave their contact info.   We would recommend keeping this as easy for the potential customer as possible by only asking for the email address and possibly their zip code if you serve multiple regions. Obviously, you should also take the email address of every customer you serve either at your point of sale or during the course of communication with them, and make sure they get added to your list. Now, segmenting this list, that’s for another blog post — stay tuned! Now that we’ve established the importance of email marketing, and the importance of a good, solid list of subscribers, we send you out into the world to market your services. If you’re sitting there in your office or on your smartphone and you’re reading this thinking — that really sounds like a lot of work, well then, fear not, because we would make the perfect partners. Email campaigns really get us going, and we would be thrilled to beef up your list to get some emails going out and dollars coming in. Contact the Nice Girls today to get started building up a list of leads.