No matter what your business, building an email list is a great way of improving its performance. Why is this?
For starters, email marketing has one of the highest conversion rates of all digital marketing efforts, so that’s an encouraging statistic straight away. Success with email doesn’t, however, happen overnight. Email marketing has a high conversion rate only when you have a well curated list of subscribers.
A good email list is a list of high-converting potential customers. Building one involves finding the people who are interested in what you sell. They may have bought from you previously or signed up for a service on your site. These people will naturally be more interested in what you’re selling than others, making them more likely to buy.
Repeat customers are the best starting point for your email list since they’re most likely to convert. You know they want what you’re selling because they’ve already bought from you. A well curated email list will keep track of people’s buying habits so you can target them precisely with what they’re looking for.
When you know what people have bought in the past, you know what they’re likely to want in future. It might be the same again, or something similar, or it may be something that complements their first purchase. In any case, this is a potential buyer you already know, and email marketing is the perfect way to re-engage them.
People who consent to receiving emails from you after a successful purchase are probably interested in buying again, and have the highest conversion rates in digital marketing. Build a list of these repeat customers and you have instant business potential.
An email list offers you a boost in traffic from a large audience. Apart from increased conversion rates, you can also expose that audience to a new web page, article, service or product.
This has SEO implications, but mostly it means that if you have something new you want to show people, you have a large audience ready and willing to take a look. Given how difficult it is to get traffic, having an email list is a major advantage in this scenario.
Social media is one of the biggest platforms for engaging your customers online, and has its advantages. The downside, however, is that you’re not always in control of what you can do with your social media platform – as you might be with email. You’re at the whim of various algorithms, devised to benefit the social media platform rather than your business.
The same is true of relying on search engines for traffic. Although your interests and those of the search engine may coincide, you might find yourself being penalised.
Sometimes those rules work in your favour, and sometimes they don’t, but it’s not something you have to contend with when marketing via email. You’re in full control of your email marketing, which allows you to make decisions that work in favour of your business.
Another advantage of email marketing is that recipients don’t have to read your messages until they want to. Although this may sound like a negative, it tends to work in your favour. Recipients gets to decide when and where they look at your message. If it’s not convenient when they first receive a message, they can revisit it later when they’re more receptive.
It’s powerful to let your customers decide when they want to listen. Since you’re giving them something they want, chances are they will make room to receive it.
But how exactly do you build a good email list? It’s not just a case of clicking your fingers and conjuring up dozens of email addresses of customers poised to buy. It involves work, but the return on investment is high and the longer you invest, the more valuable it becomes. Here are a few tips to get that email list going.
You’re probably already gathering email addresses from conversions on your website, since these will be your highest-converting customers.
To ensure such customers don’t mark your emails as spam, give them an option to opt-in to marketing when they go through checkout. In this way, you can be assured they’re happy to receive your emails.
This one is obvious but effective. Add an email sign-up form to your home page, or in a sidebar, and you’ll be surprised at how many people sign up. You can always provide extra incentive, by offering enticements such as a discount code, special offer or free eBook. Some service providers offer free consultations or seminars, which is worth considering as a method of gathering email addresses.
Creating a customer login involves work, but offers a payoff. Apart from facilitating personalised offers on your website, it allows you to gather email addresses, and deliver special offers straight to the inbox.
Business cards provide contact information for potential clients, so make a habit of adding them to your mailing list. Every business card includes an email address and extra information such as names and job titles, to personalise your emails further. In a business where networking contributes to growth, business cards play a big part in building an email subscriber list.