Email marketing is a part of digital marketing that plays an important role in strategizing a marketing campaign. You need email lists that are verified and updated for any successful email marketing campaign. An email list helps you to effectively connect with your customers and prospects. By inducing prospects to receive your emails through your cold emailing campaigns and then keeping them engaged is a part of your successful email marketing. This write-up explains ways to build your email list that can form the backbone of your email marketing campaigns.
What Is An Email List?
Most of us are familiar with subscribing to newsletters or free downloads on websites. Once you start getting your newsletters or your free e-books, it points to the fact that you are on the mailing list of that business website. So, understanding an email list and its usefulness in digital marketing is important for any business that wants to implement its email marketing campaign.
To put it in simple words, an email list is a collection of emails collected by marketing teams that use different lead generation methods. These methods include blogs, or via websites, and so on. In even simpler terms, an email list is a collection of the total count of subscribers in your data list.
What Is Email List Management?
You may have several lists of mobile or email contacts, but managing such lists takes some effort and time to keep organized. Email list management is a way that helps you to save time and send emails to specific segments. It enables you to get rid of messy excel files and allows you to optimize your email marketing efforts. A well-managed email database facilitates sending personalized campaigns and increases conversion rates.
Importance Of Email List Management
Marketers usually have in their email lists, contacts who subscribed to their newsletters or webinars because they are interested in what is offered to them. However, imagine a case wherein you have an unorganized email list, and you are unable to find and send an email to a specific contact from your longish Excel spreadsheet. Or, perhaps it might take you long to extract those contact details to reach out to.
As seen above, when your contact lists are unorganized or messy, finding a specific email can be a nightmare. That’s where proper email list management comes to your rescue – it simplifies your task to just a few clicks. Further, email list management apart from helping you to organize your contacts and also saves a lot of your important time.
Tips To Build Your Email List
Start-ups today are in a hurry to catch up with the larger players! Implementing segmented email lists can help them in their digital marketing strategies. Email marketing can help you to reach prospects and gain visibility. There are several ways in which you can build up your marketing email list. Some of the ways are discussed below.
Displaying CTAs at Multiple Locations
This is one of the coolest ways to gather email ids. It involves displaying your business website with multiple Calls to Action (CTAs) for your promotions or launches. A word of caution though, do not over-do it! Placing CTAs at different locations acts as a reminder to visitors who miss or skip in the first instance. Your homepage, or the sidebar of your blog post, or your contact page, or a pop-up page are the best places to display your CTAs. Double opt-ins can ensure the veracity of your email capture. Another way to capture leads is by automating and implementing live chats on your website. An example of a chat window that pops up when a visitor comes to a website is shown below.
Leveraging the Power of Social Media
Social media enables you to place your advertisements strategically. Further, social media outlets can help you to get more email subscribers. By displaying email sign-ups on social media or blog posts will enable you to capture relevant leads. Further, you can gain more by sharing freebies in return for visitor email ids on platforms like Facebook, or LinkedIn. These channels can indeed allow you to communicate with visitors casually yet entertainingly.
Creating Autoresponder Sequences
Businesses should interact with prospects continuously without a gap. Businesses should tap on the prospect’s excitement. Using services offered by email list providers, you set up auto sequential messages for sending emails to new sign-ups. These sequential messages are referred to as autoresponder sequences or an email sales funnel.
Autoresponder sequential emails involve sending three to seven emails spaced over a few days or weeks. The main idea of creating the autoresponder sequence is to get new sign-ups to return to your website, to engage with them, and encourage them to interact on social media channels. This goes a long way in helping to increase your Click-through-Rates (CTRs) along with nurturing an ongoing relationship.
Offering Incentives or Discounts to Subscribers
Collecting email ids can be done more quickly if visitors know the reason to sign up! To induce recipients to sign-up, you need to tell them the reasons – it could well be by offering them incentives. Doing this will enable you to be on course to successfully capturing email leads. Examples of incentives can be a coupon for a free pizza, or a discount code for their next online purchase online, or an e-book, and so on. The watchword is to offer incentives that give real value to your subscribers. Offerings can be made to prospects or customers by creating a landing page that pops up a window to capture their contact details as shown in the below image. Such methods can be used for subscribing users or asking them to contact you with their queries or requirements.
Email List Building Is An Ongoing Activity – Needs To Be Managed Closely
Email list building continues even after your email list is ready. That’s the reason why it is an ongoing activity. It needs to be managed and pruned accordingly to keep it updated so that it can keep down bounced email rates.
Managing your email lists can help to ensure generating higher conversion rates. You need to keep track and ensure that the unsubscribe levels are maintained low. The evolvement of marketing techniques compels any email marketing list to be kept updated and free from decay. You should take efforts to analyze your email list periodically, and strive to build a positive online presence.
A/B Testing
Split testing or commonly called as A/B testing in the digital marketing world, is a process that shows two variants of the same web page to different email segmented lists of website visitors at the same instance. It helps in comparing and analyzing which of the variants is more suitable for conversions. A/B testing is an important way to optimize your website’s funnel.
Sending Re-engagement Emails to Reactivate Inactive Users
There are instances when you might have worked tirelessly to improve user engagement by activating new users, and also kept in touch with them. However, at the end of it, you realize that all your efforts have been futile once you see them slowly disengage with your brand. This does not mean that your brand is bad or not in tune with the existing trends. You simply need to implement strategies that help you to get over the waning user engagement.
Removing Inactive Contacts from Your Email List
Once you have initiated the re-engagement process to activate inactive prospects, you needn’t shout from the rooftops about it anymore. Losing some users can be good for your business. People have their likes and dislikes, so does it go with any product or service. Once you are sure that a prospect is no longer interested in your brand, there is no point in pursuing and wasting your time. You can do about it, so put a full stop!
An Option For Quick Gains – Rent Or Buy Email Lists
A quick way to promote your product can be to rent an email list. By renting, it restricts you from seeing the email addresses to whom you devise your campaign. Instead, the email list owner or generator delivers your emails.
Another quick way is to buy a readily available email marketing list. In this case, you may experience low open rates and lesser click-through rates (CTRs). However, approaching a reputed data provider who guarantees verified and updated databases, can help you tide over this issue.
If you are a small business or a start-up and unsure about how to build your email lists, you need to hire an external agency or take expert advice.