If you’ve been looking online for marketing tips, you’ve likely heard of the importance of your email list. You’ve also likely learned about strategies to help you increase email signs ups and grow your list email efficiently.
In the last year or so, I’ve experimented with different strategies to grow my email list quickly and efficiently. In this article, I’ll be sharing the strategies that have been showing me the best ROI.
Why You Need to Focus on Your Email List
I see a shocking amount of business owners who only focus on building their social media pages, but have absolutely no email list. Even if they do have an email list, they’re too busy focusing on social media and not doing anything with email.
Here’s why this is a huge problem: You don’t own Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. They make the rules, not you. That means that whenever they decide to change an algorithm, not allow you to use certain tools, or shut down like Vine did, you’re up the creek without a paddle. Meanwhile, with an email list your whole site could crash and you’d still have those leads.
This doesn’t mean that social media isn’t important. It is. However, the point of social media should be to direct people back to your site or add them to your email list.
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, we can discuss effective strategies for adding 1,000 leads to your email list (some of which include social media).
Host Webinars
Out of all the strategies I tried to grow my email list, this one proved to be the most effective.
If you’ve done your homework, you can come up with an enticing free webinar to add people to your email list. The best part is you no longer need to do these webinars live. You can pre-record them, upload the video to your webinar software and run it on a monthly or weekly basis.
I’m currently experimenting with evergreen webinars now and may considering running them once a quarter. Or, I may run them weekly and send emails out to my list stating they are “just in time” to watch a webinar.
There are several ways to play with webinars as a way to grow your email list, but the point is they are very effective in growing your list.
Use Facebook Ads
The second most effective strategy I used to grow my email list was Facebook ads.
Some people may not like this suggestion because it’s not free, but the reality is every business needs to figure out their marketing budget.
Granted, this will be more costly at first as you figure out the correct audience. However, once you’ve nailed down the right audience, you can convert people and add leads to your email list for very little money.
Besides, you also have to consider the lifetime value of the lead. It may have cost me $1 to convert a lead, but if they end up buying a book, purchasing a course, joining my membership site or coming on as a consulting client, then I’ve made a major return on my investment.
Use Pinterest to Drive Traffic
One way to grow your email list is to drive traffic to your website and convert visitors. In the last year or so, Pinterest has become my number one traffic driver. In fact, driving traffic is pretty much the only reason I use it.
The reason Pinterest works is because it’s not just pretty pictures, it’s also a search engine where people go to find solutions to a problem. It just so happens that the image is what comes up in the searches, not just text.
Additionally, you can use group boards on Pinterest which leverage the power of community. If you can get on a group board with thousands of people on it, there’s a good chance that many of them will find your pin and then share it with their individual audiences.
(By the way, you can also use other social media channels to drive traffic to your website and grow your email list. Instagram and Facebook are both also very effective for me.)
Have a really good free offering.
Since I’m using social media to drive leads to my website, I have to make sure that I can convert those leads into email subscribers. There are a couple of ways to do this, but the best option is to have a really good free offer. For example, I offer a free five-day financial class as a freebie on my website.
Something else you can do is use something like Leadpages to create landing pages for different offers. For instance, I’m currently testing a free offer where I teach people how to write a proper media pitch. I’ve created a separate page for it and use social media to drive traffic to that specific page. That opt-in is connected to my email marketing service so people get added to my email list when they sign up.
(Note: In terms of classes versus worksheets, I’m finding that worksheets tend to convert better with my audience. Feel free to experiment with different things to see what kind of free offer will work.)
Use a welcome mat on your website.
The last strategy I’ve used to grow my email list by 1,000 people is using a welcome mat on my website. A welcome mat is a plugin you can use to quickly convert website visitors into email subscribers.
Instead of it being a pop-up, it’s more of a mat that comes down on the screen when someone visits your site. I’ve personal found this strategy to be far more effective than using a pop-up.
Final Thoughts
These are the strategies that have been working well for me as I take growing my email list more seriously. Feel free to experiment with different options to see what works best for you.
