What does it mean to acquire email? It doesn't necessarily mean you are gathering a ton of emails (even if you are part of a mailing list yourself). Though it's a good idea for research purposes to see how others do email marketing, we are going to focus on the acquisition of an email list. Email addresses are vital to your business operation. Though you can get them many ways, we are going to focus on a specific strategy to collect a mailing list.
Your business should use email campaigns as a way to effectively communicate with your customers. Even if you don’t have a large email list, you can start to build one. Look over this guide to help you with your email acquisition, or list building in the ecommerce world.
Table of Contents
- What Counts as Email List Acquisition vs Simple Email Address Lists?
- Strategies for Email List Acquisition
- List Email Types into Groups
- Expand Your Email List
- Optimizing Email Acquisition Campaigns
- What's Next?
What Counts as Email List Acquisition vs Simple Email Address Lists?
You can collect addresses by simply asking people on the street to give up their email address so you can send them marketing emails every once in a while. Better yet, you can create an eye-popping landing page enticing visitors to enter their personal information in exchange for something like a subscription to a newsletter or percentage off their first purchase or a service. In many ways email acquisition is just another way of saying "collect email addresses" but in a more precise way.
When a business works on their email list growth, they have to focus on two aspects of it: Building up their email list and working on/ applying your email campaign.
You need both to succeed and to build up your email marketing, and ultimately the deliverability of your marketing content. As you work on your email list and your email campaign, you will see your email acquisition grow. You will gain new subscribers and increase your metrics. Good news is you can do all of this for free, especially for a growing business who is just starting to work on their email acquisition.
Strategies for Email List Acquisition
Any article you read about email acquisition may tell marketers the miriad of ways you can do it through Facebook with popups and other landing page designs. While all of this information is good, you have to reach the right audience first. Let's go over what the best practices actually are to gain subscribers. Hint: a lot of it has to do with knowing your brand and how your brand will help you gain a user relevant to your business.
Customize Welcome Emails
Different subscribers have different expectations. Sometimes, the email marketing service providers do not have this level of customization available or it simply may not part of your purchased plan. If that is the case, then you should focus your efforts on users that most likely fit the persona of becoming profitable customers.
Once a customer decides to opt in to get your emails, they expect their information will be used appropriately. Customers who sign up for anything also expect the business to know what they want. If you personalize emails and other content with a first name of the customer and give offers directed for them, then someone will read the email and likely follow through with the top offer you gave. Just like getting mail delivered to your house, you get annoyed when you get information about a merger of two companies or whatever news of the business. You want great content and an offer that seems relevant to you.
Target Point of Sale
It has been experienced by market leaders that customers are usually less resistant to sharing personal contact information at the point of sale. In fact, many times users are looking for ways to stay in touch and welcome program participation when they feel it benefits them. A great way to get customers to share some information is to not ask for too much personal information. Since your goal is to just grab an email, a name and email is the most important thing to gather. You can search how to gather information from someone's Facebook. When people log in to their social media channels to also use that personal information for other businesses, it is simpler for the customer.
Mailing Them an Offer They Can't Refuse
Research has shown that customers who get the promise of discounts on their next purchase are more likely to sign-up or opt-in to an email list. If they don’t respond to your discount, you might want to send in a reminder a few days before the coupon is expiring. The image below shows a great offer with little to no loss to the customer or lead. If they don't respond the first few times, you can add limit your emails to avoid your emails going into their spam folder.
Use Content that Has the Power of Choice
It will help if you give your potential customers the option of either signing-up via email or text messages. People like choices and are likely to choose one over the other. An added advantage of this is that you’ll potentially grow both, your email and mobile marketing programs. People are more likely to sign up when they have choices but also have access to the policy. With a simple privacy policy, people feel comfortable making a choice because they know their privacy is protected, and they can continue to shop or download any content your business offers.
Give Them a Second Chance
Remember the contacts who didn’t opt-in the first time? Give them a second chance with an even better offer. They might have simply been too busy the first time and your follow-up could compel them to opt in. Generally, practices prove that showing people an offer at least 10 - 15 times will entice them to buy or at least click to view the offer. The more you send (over a reasonable period of time), the less likely someone will unsubscribe from your email list again. It can't be said enough - your content has to show value if you want to build acquisition of email.
Get All Data on a List, Deliverability, etc.
The secret to successful list acquisition is to measure everything. Also, you'll want to keep this information about your content, deliverability of some content, number of subscribes and unsubscribes, etc. in an easy-to-understand database. Constant measurements will help create benchmarks for you to work on and further improve. Save data until it becomes useful, track the results and then act on it. Repeat regularly.
To have a great database, everyone in marketing needs to know how to segment their list into certain email groups. This makes the data easier to read. Also, getting marketing software for email messaging that can collect all the data you need is vital. Check out TruVISIBILITY's email app - even if you sign up for free, you are guaranteed to see the deliverability of your messages, bounce rate, subscriptions of people who sign up over time, and much more. When you can view how your messages are doing over time, you can view which email campaigns have content that is successful.
List Email Types into Groups
It's important to segment your email lists for many reasons, such as to market a particular product or service to a certain demographic or to simply make email automation go quicker and easier. How should you ultimately separate your list acquisition into groups? There are two main ways: those emails you get from your website (organically or not) and based on the goal of the contacts or new leads and customers. You can always group these emails into smaller subgroups for marketing purposes, such as wanting to send female product emails to those who are female.
From Your Site
You can bring traffic to your site from a popup or other advertisement that directs people to your landing page. You can build email acquisition by directing the right visitors to your site. Offer a free download, offer a discount, whatever you feel fits your brand. You can segment your lists into different groups, meaning those emails you get from your website can be put into a list. Why? Because this audience may have a different goal or need than those who go to your social media pages, like those who are only looking for deals or special events.
On the same note, your site should have a clear home button so leads can know where to go after filling out a landing page form. Or after your landing page form is complete, you can have your website direct the person back to your home automatically.
Email List Based on Goals
You can have those people who opt in to your email list for free. They can also give information, such as what type of jobs they have, what they are searching for buying, and what annoys them about a particular aspect of your business. Usually when people are on the search for something better, it means they are bothered by something they currently have or are doing. Whether your business is offline or online, you can reach people with messages to direct them to your business. Yes, even stores and just social channels can sell whatever your business sells.
Expand Your Email List
As you expand your email list, you want to add the right kind of people. If you send emails to everyone on the planet, then they will just mark the emails as spam and ignore your marketing message. This ruins the point of email campaigns. Instead, focus on sending your emails to potential customers, just like we mentioned - reach the correct audience. This will require some market and audience research in order to make a great list.
You may wonder how you can find potential customers. After all, you want to find the right people to increase the odds of them opening your emails. These three points should get you started on building an email list. Promote your email newsletter on your website. Use your social media pages to promote (yes, you can even use pop-ups on your website and direct people to your social channels). Lastly, think about encouraging people to share your product. Ever see "refer-a-friend" email campaigns? These emails definitely encourage others to share, especially if they get, say, $20 off their next purchase for referring a friend who also spends at least $20.
You can even promote your new email campaign through your website! Post advertisements and easy to find buttons that invite website visitors to sign up for your email campaign. Since these people are on your site, they likely have an interest in your business or products.
On your website, there are tons of different strategies you can deploy to increase email sign up, like a popup, landing page(s), static forms and get more eyes to pay attention by promising valuable content and free downloadable docs or fun quiz.
You can invite your followers on your social media page to join, yes. But as you do so, make a post explaining your email campaign to your followers and encourage them to sign up. Don't forget the button that has a line for them to put down their emails. You can also check their profile pages for email addresses to send them invites directly. If they follow you on social media, then you know that they want to know more about your business and stay informed. We do not, however, suggest stalking them on Facebook or messaging them directly through Facebook since they will likely unfollow and/ or block your business if you start sending too many messages to join the email list. No one wants to read email marketing all day, every day. Play it cool and be precise when directing people to your site, and your conversion rate will surely rise... if you put in the time and have patience.
Make sure to encourage your subscribers and customers to share the email newsletter with friends. They likely know people with similar interests who want to hear about your company. As you try different strategies for email acquisition campaigns, you can find more email addresses that can turn into customers.
Optimizing Email Acquisition Campaigns
Email acquisition doesn’t end once you collect a list and send out emails to your potential customers. After this step, you need to focus on identifying problems with your current campaign so that you can improve it.
One in every three email marketers place a focus on increasing subscriber engagement. This means getting your subscribers to open emails, click the links, and interact with your business. Figure out where your strategy falls short and adjust it accordingly.
Find out what prevents you from finding more customers or increasing subscriber engagement. Even if you’re happy with your metrics, you can always aim to increase them. While you can look up different ways to increase these metrics, you need to figure out what your customers want.
As you continue to build email lists and try different email marketing strategies, pay attention to your customers and how they react. How are your metrics affected by changes? As you do so, you can discover different ways to improve your email acquisition strategy.
What's Next?
One in every three email marketers place a focus on increasing subscriber engagement. This means getting your subscribers to open emails, click the links, and interact with your business. Figure out where your strategy falls short and adjust this marketing accordingly.
Find out what prevents you from finding more customers or increasing subscriber engagement. Even if you’re happy with your metrics and email marketing strategy, you can always aim to increase them. While you can look up different ways to increase these metrics, you need to figure out what your customers want.
As you continue to build email lists and try different email marketing strategies, pay attention to your customers and how they react. How are your metrics affected by changes? As you do so, you can discover different ways to improve your email acquisition strategy, such as creating more content.
Now that you understand the ins and outs of email acquisition, you can start building email lists, optimizing email acquisitions campaigns for a particular holiday, collect data on the emails you send, and improve your overall email marketing based on the great knowledge you gained in this article. Of course, to do any of the above suggestions for email acquisition, you will need great email marketing software that allows you to create email address lists. You can get TruVISIBILITY's top email app for free and try our email messaging app by clicking below!
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