Email marketing is a term with which most people engaged with digital marketing are aware, and not only people in digital marketing are aware of this term but also of the amazing benefits that email marketing provides.
Most beginners in digital marketing are unaware of how to do email marketing effectively, and most importantly, its basic part, which is to build an email list.
You must have heard the term that money is the list, it is a reference to an email list, but the problem is, who do you get that email list which has money?
A huge part of sales generated by big companies come from Email marketing, if you are subscribed to the email list of some digital marketing companies such as Getresponse or to Neil Patel’s blog, you will see that they will regularly engage with you through emails, they will be putting in the efforts, that’s because they know that email marketing is the key and they have been getting results through it.
How can you also do effective email marketing like these companies have been doing? well, a huge part of success in email marketing comes from making a quality email list that is based on very targeted email addresses and that is what I am going to teach you in this article.
I will show you the different ways through which you can build your email list, the ones which are best for beginners to the ones which are a little complicated but provide good results and i will make them simple for you.
I will also mention the ways through which you can use the money to skyrocket your email list and get quality email subscribers fast but there will also be a lot of ways through which you will be able to make a great email list without paying out any money.
Lead magnet
Creating a lead magnet and then using it to make a quality email list is one of the best, of most popular, and most traditional methods for collecting emails.
You might ask what do I mean by a Lead magnet? well, you can refer to the Lead magnet as something valuable that you will make for your target audience which means that it will be focused on how a particular audience can get benefits from it, then you will offer your target audience that Lead magnet and in return, you will ask for their email.
That is simple, just a resource that you will be using to get emails for an audience b providing them the resource and in return asking for their email.
When creating a lead magnet, you will need to focus on multiple things.
Your target audience
First, you will need to figure out what your target audience is, because if you do not know what your target audience is, how will you build a lead magnet which can be proved valuable to them and in return ask for their emails?
Commonly used lead magnets
After figuring out what type of audience will prove to be a targetted customer for you, then you will start to think that what type of lead magnet will they be attracted to? If you want some idea then usually, People make ebooks that have detailed guides in them, some courses for free or some content upgrades as a lead magnet to collect emails.
Make sure that whether you will be using an ebook, a course, or something else as a lead magnet, it is valuable because it might seem valuable but if it is not to the users they might unsubscribe to your last.
Another thing that you can do to make really effective and quality lead magnets to collect emails is to offer free tools to people.
You might be worried after hearing about using tools for collecting emails if you do not know to code, but do not worry as you can go to Codecanyon and from there, you can purchase a PHP script which will be a tool of your choice and then you can provide that tool to people in return for their email.
Also, you might think that such tools will be a lot expensive, however, that is not the case as most of the tools on Codecanyon are not expensive, costing between 20-50 dollars and you will only need to pay once, with no monthly fees but you’ll be able to collect emails with that tool forever.
Exit pop-up forms
Using pop-up forms for collecting emails on a website has been a very common and very easy method.
Pop-up forms are easy to apply on your website as to design them, you do not need to do much effort as you can use tools that will provide you with ready-made templates, and then, you will just need to change the color and text of the template and your sign up form will be ready.
There are a lot of tools that you can use for making sign-up forms for your website, both paid and free as well.
With free tools, you can make Pop up sign up forms for your website completely fine but you will not be able to do a lot of customization with the appearance of your sign-up form with paid tools, obviously, since you will have more features and functions inside the tool, you will be able to have more customization with your sign up form and you can have a better chance of personalizing your sign up form.
If you want to know about free tools for creating sign-up forms, then you can go and create a free account on Mailchimp.
in the free account, Mailchimp does not only offer you to build sign-up forms for collecting emails on your website but it will also let you build landing pages for collecting emails for free as well, and you can also send and manage your marketing campaigns with it.
There is hardly another service that will provide you with such features in the free version, so do not ignore it.
Other than Mailchimp, you have really good options such as Hellobar which is personally my favorite for making pop up sign up forms because, in its free plan, it offers more customization for making sign-up forms, you can decide in which way your sign-up appears on the site, when should it appear and also where should it appear.
Other basic features like usual, you will get tracking features to see how many people have seen your sign-up form and out of them how many have signed up, which will help you in calculating the conversion rate of your pop up sign up forms and if it is low, you can make it better.
You can use Convertkit and Sendinblue as well as they also have a free plan which offers features for making pop-up forms for free.
If you want to have even more features for making pop-up forms than the ones you get in the free versions, then you can purchase the premium version of Hellobar, it will provide you with even more advanced features.
You can check out this article for the best tools for making pop-up sign-up forms.
Where should the pop-up appear?
When you will be in the process of making your landing page, you will be asked about where on your website will you like to show your pop up sign up form to your visitors, in the middle, in the top, in the bottom or you can even build sticky sign up forms which will stay in the sidebar, in the header or in the bottom of your website all the time without taking much place.
Personally, I like showing the pop-up form in the middle of the website, I just think that I get more attention from the visitors, however, you can test different positions from yourself and see which one provides you with the best results, and then you can continue with it.
When should the pop-up form paper?
By this, I am talking about how much time should pop-up form appears on the screen of your visitors after they have visited your website, in the beginning, after they have spent some time or when they are about to exit your website?
This is very important as choosing the wrong time can make the User Experience bad, which can cost you conversions.
The best way or the best time to show the pop-up sign-up form is when the visitor is about to exit your website and it has a lot of logic behind it.
Let’s compare it with the other options, if you show a sign-up form in the beginning right after the visitor has visited your website, the user might not like his and exists your website.
If you show when the user is in the middle of the website, then the user might not sign up because he is currently focused on something else on your website such as the content that he is reading.
The last option is showing it when the user is exiting the website because then you will not be losing anything, the user will exit your website anyway so showing a sign-up will not hurt rather you will be benefiting from a user who was about to exit your website, even if it bothers the user, you will not be losing anything because the visitor would have exited the website anyway.
Guest blogging
Another really effective strategy for building a quality email list without needing to wait for a huge amount of time is by doing Guest blogging.
If you are not familiar with Guest blogging or you do not clearly understand what it means to guest blogging, Then guest blogging refers to writing a blog on someone else’s website as an outsider.
Simply, in guest blogging, you will be writing content on some other blog or a website that comes under your niche and has an audience that can relate to your content and your website.
When you want to guest blog on a blog or on a website, the first thing that you will need to do is to find a blog on which you will be guest posting.
Finding blogs that accept guest blogs
First, find a blog that has an audience that will be able to relate to your content and which can also be a target audience for your email list.
After that, you will need to find out those blogs from the blots that have your target audience that accepts guest posts.
This is because not all blogs accept guest blogging, so after you have found blogs with your target audience, it will not be enough as you will need to separate the blogs which accept guest blogging gout of the other blogs.
Then the blogs which will have your target audience and will also accept guest blogs, you will need to contact those blogs and request them for letting you guest blogging on their website.
You might be wondering how you will be able to find such blogs which not only will have your target audience but they will also accept your guest blogging request, well then do not worry as there are really easy ways of finding such blogs.
Using google for finding blogs for guest blogging
One of the ways for finding such blogs is by using google, just go on google and then put in the keyword which you think will be related to the niche of the blog that you are looking for and also will be relatable to your target audience, for example, if is m looking for blogs which are in the digital marketing niche, i would put in the keyword digital marketing
After you have entered the keyword, Google will present you a list of blogs that will be related to that keyword that you entered, now you have found the blogs with your target audience and with the same niche as you.
The next step will be to now find out those blogs which will accept your guest posts, for this you will need to go to each of the blogs and see their guidelines and then from the guidelines see if they accept guest posting or not.
Using Buzzsumo for finding blogs
Another way of doing this is by using Buzzsumo which is a very effective tool for doing digital marketing research.
It has a tool that you can use to find blogs that accept guest blogging, just on to the tool, then select guest blogging and put in the keyword, it will represent you with the top blogs related to that keyword that will accept guest posts.
After you have found those blogs which will be ideal for you to guest post on, now you have to contact those blogs and request them whether you will be able to guest post on their blog or not.
Read guidelines
It will be a lot better if first, you read the guidelines for guest blogging because they are different for every blog.
When you will be reading out the guidelines, you will find out what type of guest posts the blog wants to have and what type of guest posts they want to stay away from.
That is because every blog has its own different taste of content for what their users come to the blog and they do not want to ruin that.
If you are confused about what type of content you should post on a blog then do not worry, you can just read other blog posts and see what type of blogs are, and in which way they represent the content they are talking about.
Focus on headline
Another thing that you will need to make sure of is the headline of your guest post because since you will be posting on another blog, that audience will not be familiar with you, so you do not have to take another blog’s audience as the audience of your own blog.
If your headline will not be good enough, you will not be able to utilize well your guest post.
It will not matter how well you have written your main body of the article, how good fo facts you presented, how good strategies you mentioned, or how helpful it is, if the headline is not good enough, it will most probably go in vain because if no one will click, then who will read the article.
That is why you should focus on the headline first and then on the main body and as Neil Patel says, if you cannot find a good headline then just do not start writing.
To find good headlines, you can use tools and you can also make multiple headlines and then decide which one works better.
You can also make multiple headlines and then show them to other people and ask them which headline will attract them more it will be a good way to find the best headline out of all the ones that you have created.
Usually, headlines starting with how-to guides, or why is this or that important work better, and other similar headlines but you can always test your different headlines and see which one works better.
Have quality in your guest post
Also, focus on the main body of your article, write a detailed guide that should be attractive enough that it should drive most of the readers to the end of the article, and at the end of the article when you will be mentioning your bio you can include a bonus content or content upgrade for your readers and when they will click on it, they will have to provide their email in order to get that content upgrade and in this way you will be able to collect a lot of quality emails by Guest posting.
Make your sign-up form simple
Just like in other fields like science, in religion, there are also debates in the marketing world as well because unfortunately, there is something that has not been proven whether doing it will have a good effect or a bad effect.
It is accepted by everyone that the more simple your sign-up form is, which meant the easier it is to subscribe to your email list, the more emails you will get which in return increases conversion on collecting leads.
But on the other hand, if you add some necessary fields in the signup form such as the first name, it will, later on, be very useful to increase the conversion rate of your email marketing campaigns s you will be able to personalize your emails which is an effective strategy for getting more sales.
but here comes a problem if you add a field for the first name in addition to the email address field, it will decrease the conversion rate for collecting leads.
That is why a lot of marketers consider it better to not ask for the first name when collecting emails so that you can get more emails, but in my opinion, it is a trade between lead conversion rate and your email marketing conversion rate.
So, if you want to collect more and more emails as fast as possible, only include on-field which will be for the email addresses.
also, remove any other kind of distractions from your sign-up form or from your landing page such as sharing your sign-up form on social media platforms, such buttons are a distraction that can decrease the chances of collecting a lead, just focus on one thing and that is to get the user to enter their email address and click on subscribe button, do not include other things if you want to collect higher amount of emails.
Ask your email subscribers to share your newsletter
Another unique and easy way of growing your email list is just by simply using your current email subscribers to get new subscribers, at least it sounds unique.
In this strategy, when you will be sending out a newsletter to your email subscribers, you will also ask them to share your newsletter with other people as well to whom they might think it will be helpful.
By doing this, you will be able to get your newsletter to a whole new audience without making much effort.
However, there is some work remaining that you will need to do in order to execute this strategy properly.
One thing will be that you should include a way that the people o whom your newsletter is forwarded, can sign up for your email list.
Second is another important thing as ignoring this may cause this strategy to have a negative effect on your email list.
That is to remove the button for unsubscribing from the newsletter which is sent to new audiences by your current subscribers if they click on unsubscribe, actually, the one who forwarded the newsletter will get unsubscribed from your list.
Use your Social media following
A lot of people take social media marekting as a competitor to email marketing and prefer doing social media marketing over email marketing by saying that email marketing is n longer useful in 2022.
While it is wrong that email marketing is no longer useful as it is one of the best digital marketing strategies with one of the highest ROIs, you should think about using these two platforms to increase your reach on each platform
Instead of focusing on social media marketing separately from email marketing, you can actually use social media marketing to grow your email list which will provide you a way to better communicate with your audience.
Ask your social media following such as your Instagram followers and your Facebook followers to sign up for your email, in this way you will be able to get a lot of your social media followers into your email list.
In this way, you can use your social media audience to make your list which will be much easier than it is to make a new audience for your email list.
Give a preview of your lead magnet behind sign up form
Earlier in this article, I mentioned lead magnets as a very useful and popular way of collecting emails but this strategy can be made more effective.
When users will be signing up on the sign-up to get the lead magnet, you can actually show the highlights of the lead magnet behind the signup form in a transparent way.
In this way, the people who will be on the sign-up will also be able to see what type of ebook, curse, or digital tool they will be getting after signing up for your email list, this will encourage them, even more, to sign up for your email list.
This method has already been used by successful digital marketers such as Neil Patel, for example, if you go to his website and sign up for his email list, you will see that in the background, you will see videos of the content that you will get after signing up and this has worked really well for Neil Patel.
This can be very useful especially when you are using a digital tool to collect emails because then you show how your tool works and how will the tool benefit them after they sign up, even if you are providing a course you can show highlights of your course, they will see what type of content they will be getting which can be an additional point in increasing the conversion rate.
conclusion
Just like any other way of marketing in digital marketing, email marketing is also not just done by a single click, it has many benefits but you will need to put in many efforts to do so and its basic requirement email list is also a thing for which you will need to apply different strategies in order to make a successful, big and high-quality email list.
In the article, I have mentioned a lot of different strategies for growing an email list from the ones which have been used for years now and work great to the ones which are not used very often but have shown really good results to the ones who have tried them on.
The email list is the backbone of your email marketing campaigns and without an email list, your email marketing is incomplete, in fact, it is the first thing that you need to start doing email marketing.
After applying these strategies, not only you will be able to collect quality emails but also quickly as well so that you can start getting results from your email marketing as possible.