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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
When 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.
A 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:
On your form, reassure them with the following:
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:
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.
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.
