21 Easy Ways To Build An Email List That Will Skyrocket
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This document provides 21 tactics for building an email list of active subscribers. Some key tactics include: using powerful calls to action; showing social proof like expert endorsements; creating and giving away free tools and content like templates and eBooks; hosting webinars and maximizing recordings; experimenting with welcome gifts and exit intent popups; and measuring effectiveness using tools like KISSmetrics and Google Analytics. The goal is to continually provide value to readers so they become paying customers.
21 Easy Ways To Build An Email List That Will Skyrocket
- 1. You want to build a big email list of active subscribers who continually read your content, attend your events, and are more likely to convert into paying customers. Here are 21 email list building tactics that have worked for us. Enjoy! Market Why Your Readers Should Become Subscribers 1. Never underestimate a powerful call to action. Some words are more powerful than others. Try these in your call to action: Free Become Better Now Appeal to the fear of missing out by creating urgency in your call to action. What will your readers miss out on if they don’t subscribe? Look at this example: Don't Lose 15 Lessons and $2,500 Sign up to make sure you get the 15 free lessons and $2,500+ in bonuses! The course closes Monday... Now write your own: 2. Social proof goes a long way. Try the 5 ways to show social proof to entice readers to subscribe to your content: Expert: When an authority in your industry says awesome stuff about you. Celebrity: People search for group membership to mark their position in society, and feeling attached to a celebrity sort of creates this attachment to a product or brand. User: Testimonials, even about your content to help trigger subscribers, can inspire action. Wisdom of the crowds: If tons of people already trust you for awesome content, why shouldn't more? Wisdom of your friends: This is actual word of mouth, likes on social media, and similar referrals.
- 2. Give Your Readers Something Sweet For Becoming Subscribers 3. Build tools and give them away for free. Research tools your audience would find valuable by asking them through polls, surveys, or social media. Explore oft-searched terms for tools you could create for your audience. We made the headline analyzer because, at the time, 720 people searched for the term every single month. What super helpful tools could you create? Get a list going and prioritize the ones that are the best opportunity for 10x growth. Brainstorm how you could build those tools. If you can't build something in-house, how much are subscribers worth in your budget for marketing? Think of outsourcing development. A tool that took us about two weeks to build provides more subscribers than any of our other content. It could be the same for you. Build relevant content related to the tool that you can give away for free as a lead magnet. Content on how to use your tool even better works really well. What could you create? 4. Publish landing pages dedicated to providing free content. Research popular search terms in your niche followed by words like template, infographic, e-book, and more. Those all make for awesome landing pages detailing how to use the piece of content they’re searching for. Make sure your landing pages are: Super actionable with content that goes deep into solving a problem. Long-form. Targeting a keyword your audience is actively searching for. Explaining exactly how to use the templates once visitors download them. What keyword-driven landing pages could you create to turn traffic into subscribers?
- 3. 5. Give away relevant, contextual content. Brainstorm how you could give away free content in every blog post you publish: Explore complementary information you could include in bonus content downloads: 6. Take advice from your Internet service provider on bundles. Instead of providing one free piece of awesome content in exchange for an email address, why not 2? Brainstorm the different types of content you could bundle together as a package: 7. Host webinars and maximize your recordings. Explore how you could repurpose your best content as webinars: Brainstorm how you can turn the webinar recording into a video that gets even more subscribers: Keep these things in mind: 1. Include a special guest of some notoriety. Remember that thing about experts, celebrities, and social proof? Yeah, it definitely applies here. 2. Start promoting earlier rather than later. More time to promote taps into a larger audience. 3. Use the video replays of the webinars to ask for email addresses after the introductions.
- 4. 8. Explore email-automated courses and training. How can you repurpose your best content as courses? How can you invent a really awesome tool, even if it’s as simple as a Google Spreadsheet, to help your audience solve its problems? Your course could walk your readers through the entire problem > solution > outcome process using the tool. 9. Experiment with your giveaways. Experiment with different complementary content types to repurpose the main messages in your post: Templates Guides Worksheets Checklists Infographics E-books Videos Spreadsheets White papers 10. Publish guest posts on other awesome blogs. 1. Use tools like Buzzsumo to research the blogs you'll write guest posts for, or just take a look at the social shares analytics on nearly any blog. Not only will that help you write an awesome pitch (because you can show that you researched the blog and are basing your ideas on what should be super successful for their audience), it will really help you write better content. 2. Include a free download specifically related to your guest post to help turn someone else's audience into your own. Pitch a great post to a blog in your niche. Explore how you could create bonus content to complement that post. Write your guest post, then create a landing page for your bonus content. Link to the bonus content from your guest post.
- 5. 11. Who said this all needs to be digital? While giving away free content and tools is great because of the instant gratification of receiving something, how can you mix in sending physical care packages to your audience? Explore physical content as a “thank you” to readers who are your advocates: Shirts Stickers Notebooks Branded water (but seriously) Try These Additional Proven Email List Building Techniques That Work For Noah Kagan 12. Ask for subscribers. Ask your social media followers to become subscribers. 13. Ask your subscribers to forward info to their friends. Ask your brand-new subscribers to share the love with their friends, coworkers, and colleagues. What Email List Building Tools Actually Work? 14. Sticky navigation. Have a subscribe bar that floats at the top of your blog as readers school down. Build this into your WordPress theme using a signup form from your email service provider. Try the same approach with tools like Hello Bar, GetSiteControl, Attention Grabber Plugin, or similar ones complemented with a signup form from your email service provider or something like LeadBoxes from LeadPages. 15. Sticky sidebars. Have a sticky sidebar that follows visitors down the page with a relevant download that complements the content they're reading. Build this into your WordPress theme using a signup form from your email service provider. Hello Bar has a similar option to let you put a popup in the lower right corner of your blog. 16. Inline downloads. Include inline downloads right in the body of your blog posts. LeadBoxes from LeadPages offers a solid option for this. 17. Video embeds. Include videos (possibly recorded webinars) inline in your blog posts. Try Wistia's Turnstile for turning video viewers into subscribers.
- 6. 18. Welcome gifts. Try welcome popups for new visitors. OptinMonster, LeadPages, and SumoMe offer some great tools for this specific purpose. 19. Exit intent. Try exit intent popups for new visitors. OptinMonster and LeadPages also offer some great tools for this. 20. Website footer. Have a way to subscribe to your blog content in your company’s website footer. Build this into your website’s skin or WordPress theme using a signup form from your email service provider. 21. Measurement. KISSmetrics is fantastic for helping you understand what is converting. It provides the data you need to understand the best content types and topics for your audience to convert readers into subscribers. CampaignMonitor is the best version of truth for actual number of subscribers and how many are active. Review your open and clickthrough rates to understand what lead magnets perform better than others. Google Analytics is a handy way of understanding which pages are getting traffic so you can compare that to your subscriber conversions. CoSchedule will help you plan awesome content to gather your email subscribers. Get started with your 14-day free trial now!
- 7. You just created a fantastic piece of content. Awesome. Now, before you go ahead and share it with your audience, follow this social media plan template to make sure you’re actually participating in the conversation. First, the basics (you knew this was coming!) Find out where your audience is actually hanging out on social media: Go ahead, search a bit, and write ‘em down (networks, groups, forums, lists, blogs, etc.) Plan how you’ll share your content. For every hour you write your content, spend 15 minutes sharing it. Share what you already know will be successful. Make sure your social media messages connect with at least one of these things: This message supports a cause my audience can get behind. This message helps my audience connect with others. This message helps my audience feel involved in the industry. This message entertains my audience. HEAR THE RAVES “I need to keep our editorial calendar sharp, coordinate our guest contributors, and make sure we are amplifying our blog posts with social media. For me, CoSchedule does all that perfectly. It’s like magic for my blog!” —Jay Baer, Convince & Convert Bestselling Author of YouTility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype “I use CoSchedule to promote every new blog post and to re- stsopralupoptsomymetomorp on a regular basis. It is a one-stop solution, since I can post to every social media channel from within WordPress. It is simple, elegant, and an indispensable part of my toolbox. —Michael Hyatt , New York Times Bestselling Author of Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World