How To Grow Your Email List: 6 Proven Methods
Are you concerned about the length of your contact list?
Knowing how to grow your email list consistently after launching a website is key to fast growth.
If you’ve had a site for a while, then you might have seen your contact lists growing steadily. Until one day, you notice they’re losing addresses instead of gaining them.
Growing your list is exciting, but when contacts disappear, it can cause anxiety as you begin to wonder if what your offering isn’t up to par.
But there’s no need to let emotions get the best of you. If you’ve noticed your contact list shrinking, it doesn’t mean that you’re doing anything wrong. Contact lists can shrink for a number of reasons. Some people will unsubscribe, but others simply change their email addresses and stop receiving messages.
Luckily, there are plenty of proven methods that reliably gain new subscribers while engaging and retaining existing contacts.
Whether you’ve just started your website or been running it for years, learning to steadily grow your email lists takes time, trial, and error. At ClearBrand, we want to save you the hassle of making mistakes that have been made before.
To help you skip the learning curve, we’re offering you a shortcut by sharing some of our favorite methods for growing an email list. We’ve combed through (and tested) hundreds of ideas to figure out which are the most effective. Learn more about them below.
Method 1: Take Advantage Of Site Traffic With Strategic Forms
Are you presenting visitors with upfront subscription opportunities? If not, you could be leaving money on the table.
One of the biggest mistakes made when launching a website is the ineffective use of forms.
When used properly, forms present an excellent opportunity to increase the number of visitors who sign up for your email list. But when not utilized to their fullest potential, they just annoy visitors who want access to quality information now.
There are limitless possibilities when it comes to how you’ll present forms to visitors. When visiting your website, where do visitors spend the most time? How long is the average visitor’s session? On your website, which content is downloaded most frequently? The answers to these questions can determine when and where a form will be most effective.
If you’re wondering how to grow your email list with forms, many websites benefit from placing them in these two places.
Before Accessing A Lead Magnet
Lead magnets should always require interaction before a user receives access. Are yours currently accessible directly through your website? If so, you’re throwing away a great opportunity!
Instead of offering lead magnets as direct downloads, consider collecting email addresses with a form. This way, users will be required to provide email addresses where they will then receive the lead magnet.
Strategically-Timed Popups
Popups are especially effective for growing contact lists – as long as they’re used correctly.
It isn’t a good idea to bombard new visitors with popups, especially right when they’ve opened a website. But if you know how long an average session usually lasts, you can use that information to your advantage.
Generally, visitors who spend more time on your website spend more time engaging with content. Invite your most engaged visitors to join your email list by displaying a popup after a predetermined amount of time.
There are options here. Some agencies recommend using a fixed rate of time, like 7 seconds after a visitor opens a page, while others prefer popups to appear after users complete a specific action.
If you’re unsure of what will work best in your case, consider displaying a popup halfway through the average session. This will ensure that you’re inviting better-qualified leads to your contact list by filtering out visitors who engage less..
By choosing which visitors see a popup based on average session duration, you increase the quality of your contact list when you offer it to those who spend the most time on your site.
Sending content to more qualified leads will lead to more sales, making your marketing more effective overall.
Method 2: Use SEO Techniques To Attract New Subscribers
Forms are fantastic lead generators for websites that already receive lots of traffic. But for those that don’t, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) may be a more reliable way of attracting potential contacts.
SEO ensures that the right visitors are finding your website. If your web content isn’t optimized for search engines, then you risk attracting the wrong audience.
For example, imagine someone who offers house-cleaning services. If they’re known for using the best equipment, they probably want to mention this in their marketing, right?
Mentioning it once or twice won’t hurt. But imagine they plan their entire marketing strategy around owning the best equipment. They mention it on multiple landing pages, in every email, and in every blog post. Will this attract people who need cleaning services?
No! Publishing content that focuses on equipment rather than services will attract people who need equipment rather than services.
To avoid misalignment between message and offering, focus on optimizing content based on what your customers need rather than your offer.
Using the right language and keywords in every piece of published content is critical for getting contacts that lead to sales.
Method 3: Include An Explicit Call To Action
Convincing the correct visitors to browse your website is half the battle. The other half is convincing them to join your contact list. Think about it: how many times have you meant to do something, but simply forgotten to follow through?
Your customers are people too. It’s safe to assume they’re busy, and we all know that when you have a lot on your plate, finishing everything you want to is challenging.
Reminding visitors to subscribe to your email list with a simple call to action is a great way to get them to follow through.
If customers are already seeing a popup form for your email list when they visit your site, there’s no need to worry about overwhelming them with another.
A call to action (or CTA) can be as simple as a button or banner that says “Subscribe to our mailing list!” It doesn’t need to be a popup. When deciding on a CTA, draft and test multiple variations with A/B testing to see which are most effective.
This method is particularly effective if paired with techniques for SEO. If your site already has engaged visitors, they are much more likely to respond to simple measures like this one.
Method 4: Reorganize The Layout Of Your Webpage
Have you ever opened a website that was so poorly designed, you closed the page seconds later? You might offer the best products or services in your industry, but it won’t matter if navigating your website isn’t easy.
Using a marketing framework, like the ClearBrand Website Blueprint, helps to create a landing page that aligns with your customer’s journey, leaving them more likely to join your mailing list.
Website navigation shouldn’t be a hassle, and no page should use unnecessary elements or loud colors. Both of these can create visual clutter, increasing the odds that quality visitors leave before they have the opportunity to subscribe.
When your website is well organized, it captures visitor attention and allows business owners to better guide potential customers through the sales funnel.
Once visitors see that you understand what they’re experiencing, they are more likely to want to hear what you have to say. And how do they do that?
By joining your mailing list.
Method 5: Create A Subscription Incentive
So far, we’ve been explaining how to grow your email list and optimize your site for the ideal customer. But what about the stubborn ones?
Sometimes, your website and content alone won’t persuade visitors to become customers. But they might convert if they have a better reason.
So give them one!
Creating incentives for those who join your mailing list increases the odds of changing a “maybe” to a “yes.”
You can offer customer discounts, freebies, exclusive content, or other goodies in return for email addresses. This extra incentive is often enough to turn undecided visitors into subscribers and (eventually) customers. Even if they don’t convert right away, you end up with their contact info.
Method 6: Offer Free Trials With Sign Up
Discounts, freebies, and exclusive content are great for incentivizing customers if you sell a product. But if you sell lifetime subscriptions or flat-fee services, these may not be appropriate rewards in exchange for contact information.
Instead of the above, consider offering a free trial that is only available by submitting an email address with a strategically placed form, as discussed earlier.
The idea is simple: offering a trial provides a glimpse of how life improves when the customer chooses to work with you.
For the majority of interested visitors, offers like this are nearly irresistible. From their perspective, the trial costs nothing more than the few seconds it takes to fill out a form.
Step Into Your Customer’s Shoes
In whatever capacity you interact with customers, it’s critical to engage with their goals and aspirations if you want them to join your list of contacts.
Even with these proven techniques to help, learning how to grow your email list requires dedicated time and effort. But if you’re a business owner, your time is already spread thin.
That’s where hiring a marketing agency comes into play. If you want to employ all of these techniques and more to grow your contact list, schedule a call with ClearBrand today to learn more about how you can engage with potential customers through a story-based website.
