[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Email marketing is an inexpensive way to reach a wide audience provided you have a high-quality email list. Without that list, you are wasting your time.
Effective email marketing relies on targeted email lists filled with clients, referrers, prospects, and friends. Your email marketing actions are most effective when they are sent consistently, are segmented by contact type and tell a story that reduces your buyers’ perceived risk.
A while back, we wrote that email marketing is very much alive and is one element of a business’s digital marketing strategy. In many ways, it is the most important, because email marketing, whether through your CRM or an email platform like Mailchimp, helps nurture your key relationships and touch prospects without much effort, converting quality leads into customers.
So, how do you create a high-quality email list? Here are 5 ideas to pursue.
- Optimize your website to gain signups. Take a look at your analytics to see your users’ behavior to determine the best place for your sign up. If you are unsure and need to go a little deeper, consider using Crazy Egg to track user movement on your website. Most of us created our website way before we started about email marketing and list building, so the email signup was added later. We need to ask ourselves, “did I just find a place for it or is it in a strategic place on my website to gain the most sign-ups?”
- Provide a valuable offering. A common and effective method for inbound marketing is offering a free download (ebook, whitepaper, infographic, video) when a user signs up on your website. All too often, B2B companies rush to get an offering on their website hoping to get a flood of sign-ups. A quality list takes time, but to get a quality list, you need a valuable offering. Create an offering that is unique and beneficial. It should be something that users cannot find after a quick Google search.
- Create “Email Only” or “Subscriber Only” offerings. You can tease users with a snapshot of valuable content. To get full access to valuable content, they need to sign up. You want them to feel like they will miss out on something if they do not sign up.
- Use social media to make it about them. Similar to tip #3, curate social content that whets the user’s appetite. If they like your blog content, offerings, and videos, they are more likely to sign up. The key to social media content is creating the content that is about them, not you. When it is about you, they gloss over your content. When it is about them, they look at your content with anticipation.
- Ask for sign-ups at events. Many companies have a fishbowl for business cards for users to have a chance to win a prize. This can be effective, but it also opens the door to clutter your CRM and email list with unqualified leads. We recommend using your phone, iPad or laptop in hand and asking for sign-ups after a conversation with an individual or a group of people. This way you can “vet” people to determine if they are a qualified lead and keep your list clean.
It takes time to build quality email lists. Strategic planning and hard work will produce a quality list. If you would like to talk more about building quality email lists, please call us at 301-332-0613. We would love to help you.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_custom_heading text=”More Related Blogs” font_container=”tag:h1|text_align:center”][vc_empty_space][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”2″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1584013139471-41f64cbd-6a71-3″ taxonomies=”9, 8″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
