Memos covering software and technology.

Growing your email subscriber list

You need a great strategy for growing your list and the stamina to keep it up.

Growing your email subscriber list
Photo by Visual Stories || Micheile / Unsplash

We discussed the power of email marketing in our last premium article. But to make the most of your email marketing efforts, you need to consistently grow your list of highly engaged subscribers.

Growing your list doesn’t have to be difficult. As long as you have a valuable offer, use clear subscribe CTAs, and incentivize your email signups, you’ll be set up for success. In the rest of this post, I will show you how to do just that.

Value

The easiest mistake to make when trying to grow your email list is to fail to explain why someone should sign up. What is the value proposition? When your first getting started, you probably don’t even know why yourself!

You can’t expect someone to blindly sign up for your emails without understanding what they’re getting in exchange. Your email must provide a valuable offer that solves a problem for the subscriber.

If you provide enough value, your newsletter can even grow itself through word-of-mouth marketing. It's easy to forward an email to a friend or colleague. If you charge for your newsletter this may be discouraging, but social proof is a powerful marketing tool for increasing new signups just by delivering value.

Keep in mind this valuable quote from Eugene Schwartz, one of the best copywriters of all time and author of Breakthrough Advertiser.

“What are you doing when you market something? You are not creating demand for a product. If you think that you are creating demand for your product, you’ve doomed yourself to a lifetime of hard work and failure. You can’t create demand for anything because demand is too large for you to create. The demand has to be out there. The demand has to exist before you even walk into the picture.”

When writing your value prop, ask yourself: “Is there existing demand for this?”

Focus on channeling demand, not trying to create it.

Conversion

Now that you have a valuable email and your copywriting skills produced an ironclad value prop, let’s shift our attention to how you’re asking people to signup.

Your email subscription funnel should be very straightforward. Let’s assume you’re relying solely on the organic traffic coming to your site. The number of email subscribers on your list will be the amount of organic traffic multiplied against the conversion rate of your subscriber form. If you want to increase subscriptions, you either need to increase your traffic or increase your conversion rate.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: increasing your conversion rate from 1% to 2% is always going to be easier than taking your traffic from 100k to 200k.

Here are a few ways to increase your conversion rate.

Popups

We all hate to see a popup appear after landing on a website for the first time, or as you move your cursor to the URL bar. The hard truth is that popups are one of the most effective ways to capture emails.

Sliders

Sliders are the small boxes that slide into the page, usually on the bottom corner. It’s not as intrusive as a popup and gives you a lot of room to convey the value prop for signing up for your emails.

Scrolling header

Scrolling headers have become increasingly common for the years as they provide a great way to not only prompt users with a CTA but also as a way to convey your brand by always showing your logo wherever a user is on your page.

With any tactic you use to prompt users to subscribe to your email list, you must make sure your button text, or CTA, is clear and consistent. Use a simple word like “Subscribe” on the button and stick to it. If your message varies depending on the button or page, you will confuse the user asking them to do so many different things.

Incentive

If your product or service is sold online, you can offer discounts or present other value-added offers to create an even greater benefit for people to subscribe to your list.

Here are two examples:

Discounts

Over 70% of people will open their email each month in search of discounts and promotions. Try encouraging your visitors with a product or service discount in exchange for a subscription to your email list.

Giveaways

Running giveaways as a method to grow your email subscribers can be a surprisingly effective route to a quick jump in subscribers. Giveaways drive immediate action, they’re a lot cheaper than placing ads or other paid channels, and if you target them right you’ll drive subscriptions from people who are interested in buying your products down the road.

Summary

If you put everything we covered in this post into practice you’ll be in good shape. Creating a strong value proposition should always be your first step. From there, focusing on improving your conversion rate and playing with additional incentives will only make your flywheel spin faster and faster.

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