Email marketing is one of the best email marketing strategies out there. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you will get up to $38 in profits, meaning we are talking about 3800% return on investment from this marketing approach. The first step in building a marketing strategy is, of course, to collect as many email addresses as possible for potential customers, but how?
1. Encourage the user to sign up for the newsletter
People usually refrain from giving out personal information such as their names and postal addresses. But if you give them something in return, they will be more willing to share their personal data and sign up for your mailing list. In some surveys, 85% of respondents said that the first reason they sign up for email lists is the desire to obtain some benefit, such as discount coupons or special offers.
Try to offer something to the visitors of the site, if you own an online store, you can offer them to get free shipping in return for subscribing to the mailing list. If you own a cooking blog, for example, you could offer their family access to special recipes, personalized diet information, an e-book, and more in return for subscribing to your email list.
Another approach used by website owners is to offer free services in exchange for a mailing address. These services may be converting a file to another format, drawing an icon, obtaining SEO indicators, or any useful service. When building your email marketing strategy, always try to think of a useful service to offer your visitors in exchange for email addresses.
2. Harvest email addresses from social networks
Take advantage of your social accounts and ask followers to sign up for your mailing list. They follow you anyway, which means they are interested in you and your content. Therefore, convincing them to sign up and give you their mailing address will not be difficult. You can also organize contests on social networks, offering prizes or coupons to the winners for participation and postal addresses. And if you have a YouTube channel, you can ask them at the end of the videos to visit your site or visit the landing page.
There are many social networks, but the largest of them is Facebook, which is the largest social network with tens of millions of visitors from all Arab countries. Whatever the nature of your business, Facebook is ideal for attracting new customers and expanding your newsletter. If you want to reach the largest number of Facebook users in a short time, there is nothing better than targeted ads .
Facebook allows targeting ads to a specific segment based on factors such as: age, gender, geographic area, and others. Create unique content on your site, and put the content link or landing page link in the ad. And based on the characteristics of the target segment, you can direct these ads to appear to the most convertible potential customers and subscribe to the mailing list.
3. Avoid spam words
Avoid words and phrases that sound like spam. Don’t use too many words like “free”, “gifts”, “money”, and other words used by spam or scam messages. The reason for this is that people are used to not trusting this type of message because it may carry viruses or may be deceptive.
Email is a personal space, like a mobile number, and people only like to share it with people they trust. Therefore, it is necessary for the visitor to feel that you will not send spam to his email or flood him with dozens of marketing messages per week. Use words of confidence and make it clear that you respect his privacy and that he will be able to unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time.
Here is an example of the text of the invitation to subscribe to the mailing list:
4. Use personal language
Emails are personal. Clients like to be treated privately and personally, taking into account their privacy and needs. So you should segment your customers and tailor your messages to each segment. This is made easy thanks to A/B tests that allow you to experiment with several types of content in order to determine the most suitable content for each segment.
5. Ask for minimal data
Some sites require a lot of data to register for the newsletter. In addition to the name and email address, it asks for other personal information, such as: mobile number, gender, the name of the company in which you work, and others. It is true that the more information you have about your subscribers, the higher your chances of personalizing messages for them and converting them into customers. But remember that asking for too much personal data will cause a large percentage of people to unsubscribe, and this will hurt your email marketing strategy in the long run.
Fill in the minimum personal information on the newsletter subscription form. Only ask users for their name and mailing address. And if other information is required, be sure to explain to them in brief terms why you want that additional information. In addition to their reassurance that it will be safe and will not be used for other matters except as agreed upon.
6. Put the registration form in the newsletter everywhere
Do not assume that site visitors will necessarily enter your site through the home page. Many of them will go directly to specific pages or posts. Therefore, you should place the registration form in the newsletter on all pages of the site. Try to put the registration form in front of visitors in every convenient place. Place it at the bottom of the page or in the sidebar to make it easier for visitors to sign up for the list from anywhere on the site.
7. Use pop-ups
Have you ever entered a website and when you were about to exit a window popped up inviting you to take action or sign up for the newsletter? This trick is widely used by website owners as a last ditch effort to convince a visitor to take action before they exit. There are millions of sites on the Internet, and if someone lands on your site, they may never return. So the pop-up strategy may be your last chance to convince him to subscribe to the mailing list.
Unlike annoying advertising pop-ups, the windows that pop up when a visitor is about to exit do not negatively affect the user experience in general, because they only pop up at the last moment of browsing the site. Therefore, it is not annoying like other advertising pop-ups that appear as soon as the visitor enters the site, and therefore may slow down the site or may block the contents of the site – especially – on mobile screens.
8. Be persuasive
When a visitor sees the mailing list registration form, he or she will decide whether or not to register in a matter of seconds. Therefore, the design of the form should be beautiful and elegant. The content of the invitation to be included in the list should be convincing, clear and concise. You must explain to the visitor the purpose of registering in the mailing list and the benefits that he will reap in less than 5 seconds.
9. Take advantage of webinars
Webinars or webinars are interactive seminars on the Internet, and special platforms are used to organize direct and live forums. And it is in the form of a lecture in which information, lessons, news, meetings, and others are provided. Webinars can be a powerful pillar of your email marketing strategy. Studies show that 79% of business to business (B2B) customers say they are willing to give their personal information such as: email in order to attend a webinar.
Try to organize webinars from time to time on topics related to your field of work. This is a great way to get email addresses, as the addresses you will get will be of high quality, because people interested in attending webinars in a particular field have a special interest in that field, so they will be more likely to convert into permanent customers.
10. Use A/B tests
There are a lot of factors that control the success of an email aggregation strategy, such as the content of the invitation to register, the design and placement of the registration form, the time the popup appears, and more. It may not be obvious at first how all of these factors can affect the enrollment rate of your mailing list, and your email marketing strategy as a whole. In this case you may want to use A/B tests .
A/B tests are tests designed to measure the effect of positively or negatively changing one of the aforementioned factors. These tests will give you a clearer picture of the factors influencing your strategy, and help you discover where the flaws in your plan are to improve your overall email marketing strategy.
In order to succeed in email marketing, you should constantly strive to expand your mailing list. If you have a thousand mailing addresses, increase it to two thousand, and if you have 5,000 addresses, expand it to 10,000. The more email addresses, the more potential customers. Finally, do you have another way to collect email addresses? Share with us in the comments!