How to Grow Your Email List — Best Practices and Solutions

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Did you know that email contact lists degrade by approximately 22.5% every year? You’ve got no choice but to do all that’s in your power to make up for the contacts you lose. 

Email list degradation happens due to multiple reasons. It can be because:

• People move from one company to another and change their email address to align with the company’s brand image

• Leads that are unqualified or disinterested opt out of receiving your email campaigns

• Contacts abandon the old email addresses that they’ve used for subscriptions

As a result, your email list will get smaller every year if you don’t manage to generate a steady stream of new leads. This is why it’s crucial to keep growing your email list constantly. You can do this by applying different list building methods and always looking for ways to improve your results.

In this article, we’re going to help you learn how to grow your email list through some of the best practices used by professional marketers. We’re going to cover the best ways to:

1. Make your opt-in forms prominent

2. Use exit-intent pop-ups

3. Run engaging contests

4. Offer content upgrades

5. Leverage user reviews and ask for feedback

6. Test your subscription forms

7. Make the most of offline marketing methods

8. Use email lookup tools

Make Your Opt-In Forms Prominent

Your subscription forms need to be as eye-catching as possible without hindering other pieces of content. They should be easy to spot and drive your website visitors to take action.

Plenty of marketers focus on social media icons. While social media followers are important, your email list is more valuable. The primary reason is that email gives you the most control over how you communicate with your contacts. Twitter’s feed is a long stream of posts where your tweets can get lost easily. Facebook filters content based on user behavior and decides who gets to see your posts in your stead.

Email enables you to grab the recipients’ attention with every message. You get to control every phase of your relationship, providing your contacts with emails aligned with every step of their customer journey.

Some of the most common placements for subscription forms are:

• Header

• Right sidebar

• Bottom of a blog post

Aside from landing pages, you should make the most of the different sections on your website. Instead of making your users dig around until they find the opt-in forms, you should incorporate them into pages where people are most likely to look for valuable information. This includes your:

• Homepage

• About Us page

• Products page

• Contact Us page

Even though you might want to collect as much information as possible, it’s crucial to make your subscription forms short and straightforward. People generally don’t like filling out forms with many obligatory fields. This is more likely to scare them off. Use the form to get the most important information, and gather anything else through contacting them.

Use Exit-Intent Pop-Ups

Many website visitors decide to leave without performing any actions. This is your chance to grab their attention with an exit-intent pop-up. Lightbox pop-ups are an efficient solution because they dim the rest of the screen and place the focus on your message. You can provide the leaving visitors an incentive to subscribe to your mailing list. Offer them a discount or a valuable piece of content they might have missed.

Even though some people find pop-ups irritating, you're not risking anything by presenting them to people who were already leaving your website. If they’ve decided that they don’t want to do business with you, they can click away easily. Otherwise, you have an opportunity to bring them back. According to the statistics, you can retain from 10 to 15 percent of your website users by using this method.

Run Engaging Contests

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A well-thought-out contest is a fantastic way to create a compelling user experience for your prospects. You can use one of the many effective solutions, such as:

• Polls

• Trivia

• Giveaways

• Content submissions

The primary goal is to ask every participant to register by using their email address. This enables you to add them to your mailing list and convert them through a well-crafted onboarding sequence.

To make this approach work, you need to offer something valuable in return. If you’ve created a photo contest, the participants will enjoy sharing their work with the community and receiving praise for it. You might have to provide something more substantial in the form of a prize.

Don’t be skimpy when it comes to the prize. Offer something that people are going to appreciate, such as a substantial cash award or a free promotional product. Not a lot of people will be interested in participating if you’re offering a small discount.

The contest needs to be as relevant to the participants as possible. You need to make them receptive to your email campaigns by making the contest revolve around your products, industry, or company. You should spark their interest in getting to know more about your business and becoming your loyal customers in the long run.

Offer Content Upgrades

Content upgrades are an effective marketing method based on providing your users with exclusive content in return for subscribing to your mailing list. According to Hollerwp, this approach helped them increase their list by 49.9%.

There are many different types of content that you can use for this strategy. Depending on your business, you can offer:

• Show notes and transcriptions of your podcasts

• Video and audio recordings of your webinars

• Cheat sheets and checklists based on your blog posts

• PDF downloads of ebooks and case studies

• Infographics that sum up your content

Content upgrades work because of two primary reasons. They are:

1. Relevant

2. Valuable

Content Upgrade Relevancy

Content upgrades are, as the name suggests, crafted for particular content pieces. This makes them highly relevant to the subject. 

Let’s say that you’ve created a blog post discussing the best ways to use email marketing software. A marketer visiting your website might be drawn to read your post because it’s relevant to their profession. If the article provides plenty of information that they can learn from, they will gain value from it. A content upgrade offering a detailed guide on how to apply a marketing method mentioned in the blog post is the perfect next step.

Content Upgrade Value

Your content upgrade has provided the website visitor with valuable information they can use to improve their marketing efforts. When you send them a newsletter with links to other related articles, they are more likely to check them out. 

By providing them with more valuable content along the way, you’ll build a strong relationship and boost the chances of them converting when you present them with your sales pitch.

Leverage User Reviews and Ask for Feedback

Customers often need encouragement to make a decision. They might be interested in a product but feel unsure about whether it’ll provide what they’re looking for. Customer reviews are one of the best forms of social proof that drives people to take action. You can say a lot about how your product is the perfect solution for a particular problem, but it’s a whole other story when your satisfied customers do that for you. 

You should add user reviews to different sections of your website. This is particularly the case with your landing pages because their main purpose is to generate conversions.

You should also establish communication with your customers by asking them to provide feedback. People enjoy sharing their thoughts and experiences with businesses that they’ve gained value from. 

We at Sell Saas have got solutions for both of these practices. You can try our:

1. Social proof notification widget

2. Chatbot solution for capturing leads

Social Proof Notification Widget

The social proof notification widget lets your website visitors know whenever someone does business with you. If a user is unsure whether they should trust your company, the social proof notifications can improve the chances of them subscribing to your mailing list.

Chatbot Solution for Capturing Leads

Our chatbot solution can be integrated into your website easily. Set it up to answer your visitors’ most frequent questions, encourage them to provide feedback, and ask for their names and email addresses. This is an effective method for passive lead generation.

Test Your Subscription Forms to Grow Your Email List Properly

When it comes to growing email lists, there is no space for guesswork. You need to test your subscription forms and determine which elements produce the best results. There are two types of tests that you can perform:

There are two most common ways you can perform these tests on your opt-in pages. You can use:

1. Google Analytics

2. A/B and multivariate testing tools

Google Analytics

Google Analytics enables you to redirect visitors’ browsers to different pages that contain your subscription form variants. Your users will be redirected to the appropriate page almost instantly and probably won’t even notice it.

A/B and Multivariate Testing Tools

Instead of sending your visitors to different webpage variants, A/B and multivariate testing tools alter the way your subscription form is presented in the users’ browsers dynamically. Many testing tools enable you to measure the performance of your subscription forms in terms of conversion rates. You can try tools such as Optimizely and Convert Experiences.

Make the Most of Offline Marketing Methods

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Offline marketing methods can complement your online list growth efforts. There are various opportunities that you can use to collect email addresses in person.

You can present your newest product or service at a trade show and collect signup information from interested parties. This is a fantastic opportunity because you’ll have access to a primed audience. After the event, import all the data you’ve gathered to your database. Before you start crafting your email campaign, send welcome emails confirming that the contacts have been added to your mailing list.

You can host events on your own, such as panels, seminars, and conferences. This will enable you to put your business under the spotlight. The audience will consist of even more qualified leads because they will all come to an event hosted by a company they’re interested in. Gather email addresses from any attendees that are willing to exchange their information for whatever you’re offering at the event.

If you’ve got a physical store, you can create opportunities to collect email addresses from your customers. Discounts and special offers work the same as online, and many visitors will exchange their email addresses for the chance to save money on products they like. You can also start a loyalty program that customers need to sign up for via email. This is an efficient method for customer retention.

Use Email Lookup Tools

Using email lookup tools is an essential practice for growing your email list. They enable you to scrape a wide range of sources for thousands of email addresses that you can add to your contact list. This includes domains, yellow pages, company databases, and social media channels. 

Plenty of email finders provide email verification features, helping you ensure that you’re sending your campaigns to existing email addresses. Some of these tools allow you to track your emails and determine their deliverability rates. You can also use advanced search filters and look up leads based on a wide range of parameters, including:

• Name

• Location

• Industry

• Company

• Job title

• Revenue

Why You Should Try Our Tools for Email List Growth

Our Sell SaaS software bundle contains an assortment of email lookup tools with different features. You can choose one or combine their capabilities. The tools we’ve got to offer are:

How You Can Benefit From Using Our Email Campaign Creator

Besides our email extractor software solutions, you can try our email campaign creator. Use it to create top-notch email and newsletter campaigns via its user-friendly online editor. The tool comes with an autoresponder feature that enables you to schedule email sequences and set up triggers for automated responses.

Upload the email list you’ve created by using any of our email lookup tools and create the perfect customer journey for your contacts. You can also use the tracking feature to assess your email campaign results in terms of deliverability rates.

You can subscribe to any of our tools’ monthly plans, and use them with unlimited access to all of their features.

What makes our offer special is that our software bundle consists of white-label digital products. This means that you can both use and resell our tools at a price that suits your business needs.

Add your company’s name, logo, and colors, and use our SaaS solutions to create an additional stream of revenue. You needn’t worry about any additional fees. Partner up with us, and you’ll earn between 60% and 80% of all your sales, depending on our partnership level. The rule is simple — the more you sell, the more you get to earn.