About 100 trillion emails are sent and received each year. Whereas a substantial proportion of this number is spam, there’s no doubt that email remains an integral part of business and personal communication.
In the early days of the internet, email marketing was a fundamental (and often, the most important) pillar of digital marketing campaigns. Over the years though, internet marketing conversation has centered around SEO and social media marketing. Yet, email remains highly relevant not just because messages are relayed direct to the recipient’s inbox but also due to email having nearly double the conversion rate of social media.
Ergo, you shouldn’t only think about your company’s emails when your network monitoring software unearths a connectivity problem on your LAN that hampers communication. Growing those email signups is paramount. Here’s how to do that.
1. Don’t Hide It
Announcing your mailing list may sound like a pretty obvious thing to do but the reality is many websites treat their email subscription list as something secretive. Visitors only realize it exists when they stumble onto a form tucked away in a remote corner of the site. There’s no point in having an email list if you don’t go out on a limb to make it known. If the process for joining your mailing list isn’t visible, you’ll be missing out on potential signups.
Remember, some visitors to your site may not intend to return. If you can get them to sign up to your mailing list, you’ll have created an avenue through which you can lure them back. You can publicize your mailing list by adding a signup form on the website (a small popup form can be quite effective) or adding a subscription link to your email signature as well as social media accounts.
2. Show Quick Tangible Value
Let’s face it, the average internet user has likely run into hundreds of email signup popups. They will only sign up for a fraction of these because no one wants to have their email inbox jammed by hundreds of promotional emails every day. For your mailing list to stand out from the rest, you have to demonstrate immediate and tangible value.
Simply saying ‘Join our mailing list’ won’t cut it. Let visitors know that when they sign up they will receive valuable discounts, tips, how-tos and other incentives. People hold their email addresses dear. For them to willingly provide them, there has to be something in it for them.
3. Showcase Your Success
Narration and explanation is good but few things beat numbers when it comes to the power of persuasion. Numbers have a way of giving form to an otherwise abstract conversation. When your mailing list starts gaining traction, publish how many email subscribers you currently have. It will create a bandwagon effect.
People are drawn to success because it’s perceived to demonstrate authority, credibility and social proof. Visitors who were hesitant to provide their contact information may be won over by the perception of other people.
4. Build on What Works and Abandon What Doesn’t
The tips we share here are certainly important. Nevertheless, there’s no one solution that will work in every situation. Depending on the nature of your website, your target market, the product or service you sell, and a myriad of other factors, certain techniques will be more effective than others.
So as you employ the different tactics, find a way of measuring the performance of each method. You don’t necessarily have to abandon a technique that doesn’t seem as effective as you expected. Perhaps you need to make some small changes to how you apply it.
Adopt a culture of continuous improvement. Actually, even if you consider yourself to be seeing great success in your signups, do not rest on your laurels. You can never have too many people on your mailing list.
Email marketing can be a powerful tool for growing your business but only as long as you do it right. And it all starts with increasing your email signups.
