5 Best Practices to Grow Your Email Marketing List

Best Practices to Grow Your Email Marketing List

By Jennifer MalinsJun 17 /2021

As your potential subscribers hover over your form deciding whether to allow you to add them to your email marketing list, concerns pop up in their heads like dandelions after a spring rain.

Are you going to send them irrelevant emails? Email them too frequently? Or worse, are you going to sell their contact information to a list service, resulting in endless spam?

With virtual “weeds” filling their inboxes daily, the prospects visiting your website need a compelling reason to give up their contact information, which is why so many companies lure new subscribers with free ebooks, video tutorials and other content.

Yet even these offerings may not be enough unless you work hard to build trust, a necessary ingredient for inbound marketing to work.

Here’s how to do it.

Grow Your Email Marketing List Through Trust

Building trust is at the root of any good strategic marketing plan. If people trust you, they’ll do what you say, but when it comes to digital marketing, there are a few key ways to earn that trust.

1. Attract Customers with Your Content

Just as brightly colored, fragrant flowers draw bees, good content that targets your ideal customers will draw them to your website through organic searches. After all, 53% of web traffic comes from organic searches. This means when you do your keyword research and implement it properly, your content will rank high on Google, leading to more website traffic.

This is one of the few freebies in business. So what does this have to do with earning trust and building an email marketing list?

When you offer free content that targets your customers’ pain points and provides a solution to those problems, you establish yourself as a trustworthy expert.

Here are a few tips to do this:

  1. Engage in social media posts, entertaining videos and informative blog posts. These are examples of content “seeds” you can plant to grow your email marketing list in the hope that some of those seeds will sprout into conversions.
  2. Regularly update your content and include relevant keywords to increase SEO. This will improve your chances of being found through organic searches.
  3. Frequently analyze your email marketing efforts so you can tailor your content to what your customers want.

When creating content, be consistent and patient. It’s like growing a tree rather than a weed, so it can take at least six months if not longer to see measurable growth.

2. Inspire Them to Drink the Nectar

You’ve attracted the bee to the flower, but now it needs to decide if the nectar is worth drinking. Bees are busy, after all, and there are so many other gardens to choose from. The nectar is that free gift your prospect gets when they take the desired action or “convert.”

Each page of your website and each blog or video post should have a clear call-to-action (CTA). What do you want them to do once they’ve read your post or watched your video? Sign up for a webinar? Contact you for a free consultation? Download your ebook?

This is the most important part of your content because it’s the point at which your prospects give up their contact information in exchange for something else: a coupon or discount code, an ebook, or a free video tutorial.

email marketing listWhen gating content behind a form, the content should be something substantial and special that they cannot get elsewhere, and it should take your free content that they’ve just read or watched to the next level.

For example, HubSpot wrote a blog for Instagram beginners. The gated content for this blog was a 30-day Instagram guide with free templates. After their prospects clicked the CTA button, they were directed to a landing page that continued to build both excitement and trust.

email-marketingA good landing page will use a strong headline, an eye-catching image, and a clear CTA. You can also gain momentum by highlighting the benefits rather than features (features describe what your product or service does, while benefits tell customers why it’s good for them).

When you give them a sneak peek, you build trust even more:

email-marketing-listsOn your form, reassure them with the following:

  1. You will never sell or give away their contact information without their written consent
  2. They can easily unsubscribe from the list at any time
  3. You value their privacy (prove it by providing a link to your privacy page)

email-marketing-form

3. Keep Your Subscribers in Your Garden

When it comes to having a healthy email marketing list, bigger is not always better. You need a list that is teeming with active, engaged subscribers who actually want to receive emails from you and have given their consent to do so.

Cultivate and maintain a healthy email marketing list by:

  • Following all of the rules listed in the CAN-SPAM Act or you could end up paying some heavy fines while also losing the trust you worked so hard to gain.
  • Only emailing contacts who actively subscribed to your email marketing list. This means you should not purchase lists. Earn the right to someone’s email address by providing valuable content that provides solutions to their problems
  • Reminding subscribers how they ended up on your email list each time you email them and providing a link to unsubscribe
  • Sending emails your subscribers want to read

This last bullet point is where segmentation comes in. Segmentation allows you to target your customers according to their interests and needs. In other words, you don’t have to have just one email list. You may have several, depending on how many buyer personas you are trying to reach.

Which lists get certain emails from you depends on their interests, pain points and goals. Why did this group of people agree to hand over their info versus another group?

To properly segment your list, keep relevant data on your subscribers: How did they hear about you and end up on your list? Did they find you through organic search? A webinar you hosted? Were they referred by a customer? This gives you vital information about the customer’s needs and desires.

Where are they in the buyer’s journey? Are they in the awareness phase or have they already purchased your product or service?

There’s nothing more annoying than getting sales emails regarding something you’ve already purchased. That’s a great way for your email to end up in the trash. Even worse, you could lose subscribers, so be sure to audit and clean up your database regularly.

Although there are many ways to track customers and segment your email lists, at Kuno, we use HubSpot, a powerful content marketing tool. As a customer relationship management database (CRM) and content management system (CMS) rolled into one, it enables you to personalize your content, build landing pages, create and post blogs, create webpages, and more.

Expand Your Garden

Share your content across your social media channels and encourage subscribers to do the same. This will improve your reach, engage your subscribers, and create additional trust.

Repeat the cycle: provide good content that solves a problem for your ideal customers, ask them to take action, honor their privacy and make sure you are sending them content they want and need.

A garden doesn’t grow overnight and neither will your business, but not everyone has the time or resources needed to create flourishing digital content. At Kuno Creative, this is our specialty.

Our experienced team of writers, graphic designers, SEO analysts and web developers can help you create the fertile ground necessary to grow your email marketing list and more. Schedule a consultation to learn about the many ways we can help your business bloom.

Email Marketing Strategies in Content & Design for 2017

Jennifer Malins
The Author

Jennifer Malins

Jennifer uses her journalism background to capture client narrative and translate it into marketing that matters. Previously, she wrote SEO-rich web copy and blogs for a variety of healthcare practitioners and served as the VP of Programs for a literacy nonprofit.
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