24 Ways To Grow Your Email List

Their are many ways to get someone to sign up for your email marketing list. We put together a comprehensive list below to get you thinking.

1. Giving something for free like a PDF or Video. Make visitors sign up to your opt-in form before you let them download it.
2. Include a newsletter sign-up link in your signature of all of your emails.
3. Send an opt-in email to your address book giving them something valuable (Link Bait) and ask them to join your list.
4. Host events- Art galleries, software companies, retail shops, consultants (lunch & learn) can all host an event and request attendees to sign up.
5. Incentivize employees – Give a reward for collecting email addresses for qualified leads.
6. Referrals – Ask you customers to refer you, and in exchange you’ll give them a discount.
7. Giveaways – Send “bulky mail” and ask for their email address as well as their postal address.
8. Do you have a snail mail list without emails? Send them a direct mail (use a postcard) offer they can only get if they sign up to your email list.
9. Include newsletter sign up or other “link bait” opt in forms on every page on your site.
10. Use exit popup windows – When someone attempts to leave your site, pop up a window and ask for the email address in return for “link bait”.
11. Include a forward-to-a-friend link in your auto responder emails just in case your recipient wants to forward your content to someone they think will find it interesting.
12. Include a share, post and forward-to-a-friend on every page of your site.
13. When telemarketing, don’t let your callers hang up until they ask if they can add them to your newsletter.
14. Trade newsletter space with related businesses, include a link for their opt-in form and ask them to include yours in their newsletter.
15. Put a fishbowl on your counter and do a weekly prize giveaway of your product – then announce it to your newsletter. Add everyone who put his or her card in on to your newsletter list.
16. Host your own group on Facebook, LinkedIn, Biznik and other social networks and invite people to it and post new links and invite others to do the same. You can also promote your own newletter list as long as you don’t over do it.
17. Post your blog and a link to your newsletter into Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks.
18. Have newsletter and “link bait” sign up applications on your Facebook Fan page and other social network sites.
19. Tweet your content (link bait) and newsletter topics to get sign ups.
20. Put an offer on the back of your business cards to get people to sign up for your newsletter.
21. Offer a birthday club where you give something special to people who sign up.
22. Tradeshows – Bring a clipboard or sign-up book with you to tradeshows and ask for permission to send email to those who sign up.
23. Join your local chamber of commerce, email the member list (if it’s opt-in) about your services with a link to sign up to your newsletter.
24. Trade shows – Collect business cards and scan them into a spreadsheet. Make sure you ask permission to send email to them, then mark the card.

What did I leave out?

Email Marketing Is Going Social

Engaging tartet customers in your content and getting viral traction is one of the tougher aspects of marketing in the social web. As social marketing continues to mature and mainstream, new tools are constantly emerging to help make this task easier.

Share-to-Social is the next generation of the ‘forward-to-a-friend’ forms found on many websites and email campaigns. This will be cool when it becomes mainstream.  Why? Because share-to-social functionality enables an email recipient to share your content with their entire social network.

New Products To Test

Tons of new products are coming to market in the viral sharing space. Here are two that we are looking at that specifically address email marketing.

• Exact Target rolled out a suite called Social Forward in April

• Silverpop also introduced new share to social functionality in the last few months.

Both companies provide a way for marketers to incorporate the icon of a social network such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn in an email. Subscribers can then click the icon and share the contents of the message with their online networks.

These products do two things. First, engage prospects and customers to virally spread content to their social graph. Even better, these tools also can track your “campaign” as it travels virally through Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks.  For example, Silverpop’s Share-to-Social feature tracks which social network the email recipient posted the message on, and which achieved the most pick up. So you can tell what content is getting the most play in various social networks. This provides great feedback for understanding your target customers better and targeting messages as well as content.

The net is if building our list is the “holy grail” of our marketing efforts, this becomes a very nice capability to help us maximize the value of our list and activate our customers and prospects to spread our messages.  That’s email ROI…

Case Studies

Studies show these tools can be very effective. One study, by Silverpop (you can get the case study on the website), discovered that the average social sharing rate is 0.5% – compared with the less than 0.1% rate realized by earlier-generation forward-to-a-friend campaigns.

Other findings from the report:

• The life of a shared message is about one week.
• Email messages generate clicks on sharing links for an average of 6.8 days
• Despite inclusion of links, 35% percent of email messages studied generated no social email clicks.
• Facebook dominates among social networks.
• On average, an email will collect an additional 1% of views when shared on networks, a number Silverpop expects will grow as social sharing moves into the mainstream.
• Shared email has a powerful “multiplier effect.” Using conservative numbers, the Silverpop model estimates a posted email message has an average increase in reach of 24.3% (based on original emails delivered), but it also expects this figure to increase exponentially when sharing becomes mainstream.
• There is not any consistently in click through rates based on placement or other variables measured.

Social sharing is still relatively new and not adopted by mainstream (does your Mom or sister use it yet?). Email and instant messaging are still the most popular way to share web conten.  This is going to change quickly and it is one of the places you can get ahead of the game and get and edge on your competition. We will be testing these new tools in the GenNext Social Media Lab over the next few months.  You should too…

Let’s compare notes.

5 eMail Marketing Guidelines To Unlock New Revenue From Your List

Let’s face it, the effectiveness of  email marketing can make or break your business profits.  You’ve spent the time and treasure building your list of customers and prospects. This is your biggest asset. But unless you are able to effectively tap into your list and regularly active new revenue, all that effort is lost.

The name of the game in this new marketing normal is lowering cost per lead and increasing the lifetime value (revenue) of your customer and prospect base. If accomplished, you will have more profits than your competitors and be able to dominate your market.

Here are 5 key email marketing guidelines to make sure you are maximizing the opportunity:

1. Keep the attention on your subject line. Make sure you have a “remarkable” subject line that causes your prospect to open the email and then deliver on the subject line quickly in the body of the email.
2. Create a cohesive mix of promotional and informational copy to maintain your readers interest.  If you are only selling, readers will loose interest quickly, and worse, not open your emails in the future.
3. Engage your readers. You have a good deal of information about where your prospects are in the buying cycle. Hopefully you segmented your readers into different lists so you understand their emotional and product needs very well. Tap into their emotional state, let them know you understand what they need and service that need.
4. State your call to action clearly. Be direct and lead your prospect to the next action…they will follow you if you are clear and appear to be motivated to help them solve a problem.
5. Take on the role of your reader.  Step into the dialogue going on in your customers head and understand, and anticipate, what their needs are (emotional and physical).  This will also help you figure out the right sequence of products and services to offer over time as you continue your relationship with them.

Make sure you are measuring everything so you can fine tune your email marketing campaigns over time. The biggest thing, just do it.  I cannot tell you how many businesses I have worked with have large lists and do nothing with them.  Many have the sophisticated autoresponder capabilities but treat email marketing as an afterthought.

Don’t make that mistake. It will cost you market domination!