All online business owners should implement email list building. It’s the same for all business owners actually. Having your potential customers’ or past customers’ contact numbers gives you the ability to contact them when you need to run a promotion or new product launch.
This will be a call for them to come back to your shop and possibly make a purchase.
An email list is a way that you group your customers and are able to directly communicate with them inside their email inboxes.
While building an email list can be hard, we will share some of the best ways to build an email list fast for your business online. In this post, we will share also the main tactics & tools you can use to acquire a high-quality list.
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Lead magnets – Email list
People tend to hide their contact details to avoid being disturbed. With the increase in spam emails sent every day. You will need to provide a good reason for your target audience to convince them to sign up for your email list.
In order to ask for something, the best way is to give something in exchange for that. Most people will expect to receive something in return when they give something out. That’s where lead magnets come in.
A lead magnet is an incentive you offer to your visitor in return for their email address. Most commonly, lead magnets come in a form of an ebook, a checklist, a cheatsheet, or a free tool.
When someone visits your landing page or squeeze page, you offer them the lead magnet and ask for their email address to be sent the lead magnet.
And if you are wondering, a webinar will be the highest conversion rate, followed by DFY templates or written type of lead magnets like cheatsheets or reports. Personally, I seldom provide long ebooks though, as not everyone will read long ebooks.
They would prefer the instant result.
But then, depending on your business and niche, you should know and understand which type of lead magnet works best for your audience. If you are not sure about that, don’t worry.
You can split-test it. You can always split-test different types of lead magnets and see which one is having the highest conversion rate.
Optin forms – Email list
An opt-in form, contact form, or signup form is a form embedded in your landing page or website for your visitors to submit their contact details.
This is the key mechanism that you’ll use to capture leads.
There are different kinds of opt-in forms you can use. The difference between them is usually where they locate on your page.
The most popular one includes:
- Embedded form
- Popups and lightboxes
- Exit intent forms
- Scroll forms
- Fixed bars
On your website, you’ll want to use a variety of different types of forms. The minimum you should aim for is to have an embedded form on every page of your website & pop-up forms on the pages that get the highest traffic.
When designing your contact form, there are three important elements. Eye-catching headline, sub-headline/description, and the signup form.
Let’s break it down – Elements of Pop-up
The headline should be the hook, to bait the visitors to read the description offer and give you their contact details. And in the description, should include the irresistible offer for the lead magnet so they will not hesitate and sign up.
It’s tempting to ask your audience for more information. However, never do that. You can have that information later when you already got their emails.
Why?
The contact form is usually the initial touch. You want to reduce their objections to you and are reluctant to give you that information. Hence, making it as simple as possible will increase your conversion rate. A basic input should be first name and email address.
That’s all.
User experience is the most important. You want to make your website simple and clean so your visitors will feel easy to view your website. In implementing a contact form, you want to limit the number of forms as well. If overload, you might annoy your visitors.
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Landing pages – Email list
A landing page or squeeze page is used to contain your contact form and offer for your lead magnet. They’re meant to provide information for all the types of visitors that enter the page.
Why we don’t use a website, but instead a landing page?
A website page is too complicated and is not designed to convert customers. There are so many links and navigation buttons inside. This is why marketers build dedicated landing pages for lead-generation campaigns.
While there are many different types of landing pages, each having different goals. Like a sales page, thank you page, squeeze page, or order page. You should use a squeeze page to capture emails.
Every element in the landing page is there for a reason, to convince the visitor to give their email contact. Nothing else.
That’s why most squeeze pages contain only the following elements:
- An eye-catching headline – hook
- A subheading that explains the offer – story
- Key benefits of the offer and the lead magnet – offer
- The signup form
As you can see, a squeeze page is very simple compared to a normal website homepage. That’s exactly why they’re so effective.
Paid ads – Email list
Now, how to drive traffic to your page. Well, the fastest way is to use paid ads to drive traffic onto your squeeze pages.
We call this Lead Ad on Facebook. And Google Lead Form Extensions in Google. And on LinkedIn, you’ll find them as Lead Gen Ads.
Every platform has its own name, but the principle behind them is the same – they offer a simple way to collect emails from the platform’s users. And why is it simple? It’s because the platforms prepopulate the lead capture form with the email address the user signed with.
While this significantly increases the conversion rates, it also has a downside. Most of us are signed into Facebook using our personal email addresses and not our business ones.
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How to segment your email list
Now you already build your list, how should you segment it?
Email marketing allows you to control your list and run targeted email campaigns as opposed to sending the so-called email blasts to everyone. You can use segmentation to group the target customers to send the email.
The purpose of email list segmentation is to segmentize subscribers which are in different sales stages into different groups.
People in different stages of the sales funnel will react differently and will need different words to convert them. You need to tailor the communication to better meet their expectations & needs.
By making your email communication more relevant to your audience, you can achieve higher engagement and conversion rates.
How you’ll want to segment your audience will vary depending on the type of business you’re running or your email marketing campaign’s goal. A welcome list and a recurring customer list will need different languages and different goals.
Most marketers segment their email lists based on:
- Demographic information (e.g., gender, age, income)
- Firmographic information (e.g., company size, monthly budget)
- Psychographic information (e.g. people who share similar beliefs)
- Contact behaviour with communication (e.g. page visits, link clicks, email opens)
- Contact buying behaviour and purchase history (e.g. products purchased, products added to cart)
- Contact stage in the sales cycle
Four types of emails you should send to your Email List
The content of the email can vary depending on your goal.
You can use email marketing throughout the entire customer lifecycle aiming for different kinds of objectives for each stage. Here, we’ll focus on the types of emails you can send based on how you are sending them. Not the content of it.
Newsletters and marketing offers
Most marketers use email marketing to communicate their offers and send regular updates regarding their business.
These types of emails are usually sent as a one-off campaign that’s targeted to the whole of their audience or a particular customer segment.
To build relationships and reputations, you can send newsletters. A newsletter email normally aims to provide value and is entertaining to read, and at the end of the email, only you will have a side note about your product. And since these are just regular emails, they tend to get lower engagement rates.
On average, an email newsletter sees an open rate of 22% and a click-through rate of 3.4%.
Event-Triggered emails
Event-triggered emails or automated emails see much higher engagement rates. Their average open rate is around 44% and their click-through rate is above 10%.
Why so much higher than newsletters?
An event-triggered email sequence is normally sent in response to your contact’s actions. They did something, and trigger the sequence to be sent.
It could be the welcome email sequence that was sent out after someone signed up for your mailing list. Or it can be an abandon cart recovery email that is sent out after someone left your website without completing the order. Or, it can be an email that is triggered after someone reject your offer or ignore your email.
An automated email is very powerful as it relates to what they see or do. And as a business owner, you don’t need to send it out manually. The entire workflow is created to work automatically.
Most automated emails contain information that’s specifically intended for the recipient who’s just performed some sort of action.
Automated emails
Automated email campaigns or autoresponder emails are similar to triggered emails. You send them out automatically. A time-based email is an email that sends it out after a predetermined sequence or certain time.
Usually, it can be a reminder email for upcoming webinars or events, email courses, lead nurturing sequences, or onboarding sequences. Setting up an automated email sequence this way gives you the opportunity to keep your brand at the top of your audience’s mind and makes your content easier to digest.
Email drip campaigns are easy to create and tend to get pretty high engagement rates. Their average open rate is almost 30% and CTR is almost 6%.
Transactional emails
Transactional emails are automated messages sent to individual recipients, usually in response to a transaction or user activity.
A transactional email includes order confirmation, shipping confirmation, password reset, and other types of automated emails.
Due to their nature, they’re very engaging and observe exceptionally high open and click-through rates.
The key difference between transactional and triggered emails is that transactional emails typically don’t include an unsubscribe link for recipients to opt out with.
Final Thoughts – How to Grow Your Email List Fast
An email list is one of the very important assets that you as the business owner own and it is really worth the effort to build and maintain one.
If you would like to start your email marketing journey, you can try this autoresponder called GetResponse
Since email marketing is the core of GetResponse, it does pack with a lot of essential tools that you will need to create and send marketing emails. In addition, it does provide new features like landing page creation and website creation.
The email list growth and expansion part are highly improved as well. You can now create your squeeze page, and launch it on the same platform. No external third-party integration anymore.
In addition, it’ll also let you organize webinars to convert to bigger audiences easily.
Key features:
- A free plan for starting an email marketing
- Intuitive drag-and-drop email editor that comes with 100+ stunning prebuilt email marketing templates
- Email marketing and email automation to help you create and send emails
- Forms and popups, landing pages, websites, webinars, and funnels to help you build an online presence and grow your list
- Live chats, web push notifications, and SMS to help you reach your audience through other channels
- Transactional emails if you’re an eCommerce that wants everything under one roof
Pricing:
GetResponse offers a free plan that lets you store up to 500 contacts and gives you access to its essential email marketing features along with the website builder, landing page creators, and signup forms.
The paid plans are based on the size of your email list and the features you want to use.
The Email Marketing and Marketing Automation plans are designed for those who are primarily interested in email marketing features, building their website, and growing their audience. E-commerce Marketing and Max, on the other hand, are aimed at those who want extra tools like eCommerce product recommendations, web push notifications, transactional emails, or SMS.
In its free plan, GetResponse also gives you limited-time access to its premium features, so you can not only build your website, collect emails, and send newsletters but also try email automation, webinars, or live chat.