Mastering Email marketing, Lesson 2: Growing an email list

 

Growing an email list is not rocket science. Essentially, it comes down to:

• Creating an email or offer (product, service or content) people want to sign up for

• Making sure the people visiting your website are converting

If you can get those two steps right you’re going to be flying.

Step 1 - Creating the right email or offer

The most common mistake people make is failing to explain why people should sign up. And often it’s because they don’t know themselves.

I can’t tell you the number of signup forms which look like this:

Your email must have a purpose. And you have to clearly explain this purpose to the user.

For example, look at our email digital content form. We’re not asking you to blindly enter your email. We’re clear about the value you’re getting in return: Gain complete access to digital marketing contents

Look at some more examples:

• Product Hunt - Get the best new products in your inbox

• Tesla - Be the first to receive the latest product updates

• Remote OK - Get a weekly email of all new remote jobs

In every case, there is a clear reason to join the email list. The offer is crystal clear. There’s no ambiguity. So, before you do anything else figure out what value your email could offer.

Step 2 - Improving Email Conversion

Ok, now we’ve got a valuable email we can turn our attention to making sure people are signing up.

No. of Email Subscribers is equal to:

Website traffic * conversion rate of your subscriber form

It’s much easier to take your conversion rate from 1% to 5% than it is to grow traffic from 100K to 500k. Here’s a quick conversion checklist:

1) Get a popup

Love them or hate them, the reality is that popups are the most effective way of capturing emails. If you’re conscious about interrupting your users, one middle ground is going with an exit-intent popup. That way you’re not going to annoy your users by springing open a modal while they’re in the middle of a paragraph.

Exit-intent popups on mobile are far from perfect, so one option is to default to a timeout based solution on mobile. Or you could look at this article by Optinmonster about how to create mobile exit-intent popups

• hits the back button on their mobile browser

• scrolls up a little

2) Replace “Subscribe” with a value-based button.

No one gets excited about “subscribing” to an email list. They get excited by the value that the email brings. And your button should reflect this:

3) Add social proof

Social proof is a psychological concept which states that people are more likely to engage in an action if other people are doing it. It eliminates consumer concerns which makes it a powerful conversion agent.

On landing pages, social proof is considered a necessity, but it’s often neglected when trying to grow an email list. Anytime you ask for someone to do something you should include social proof. Period.

Let’s put it all together

And finally, let’s put everything we’ve learned into practice with a before and after email example:

1) Clearly explain the purpose of your email

2) Change button copy to more “value” based

3) Add social proof

That's it for this lesson. Now our email list is growing, next lesson will focus on the power of segmentation - sending the right email to the right person at the right time.