Every now and then, I see an article that suggests email marketing is dead; however, this is far from the
truth. I’ve met many home business owners who say the majority of their
income comes from their email subscriber list. If your list isn’t producing
results, it may not be because email is dead. It’s more likely that you’re
using it wrong. Here are tips to growing and nurturing your email to increase
profits.
Growing Your List
Part of the success in email marketing is to have a list that is growing. Many people I’ve met who are
struggling with email marketing have a stagnant or shrinking list. Here are
some tips for growing your list:
1) Have opt-in forms on every page of your site.
For example, if you have a WordPress blog, have an opt-in list sign-up form in
your sidebar. You might consider having one at the end of your content as well.
2) Entice them to sign up. Offer a freebie
such as a report or video for signing up for your list. Let visitors to your
site know what the freebie will do for them. So many online businesses simply
have a form that says “Sign-Up to Get Updates,” which isn’t a compelling reason
to join. Some online business owners indicate what their incentive is, but not
in a way that entices people to join. Instead of saying, “Get my free report on
how to lose weight,” say, “Start losing weight today!
My free report will tell you how!”.
3) Promote your incentive on social media.
Most social media platforms have areas you can include information about your list and offer in the profile.
You can promote the list itself, but you’re more likely to get results by
promoting the free offer. Which would you respond to: “Join my list to learn
about saving money!” or “Get ‘52 ways to save $1,000 a Month’ free.”
4) Include information about your incentive in your
bios and emails. If you guest blog or appear on someone’s podcast or
website, make sure your bio includes information about your incentive. Every
email you send should mention your free report in the signature line.
Nurturing Your List
Growing the list is only one aspect of email marketing. Once they
subscribe you need to provide value or they’ll unsubscribe. Nurturing an email
list is a delicate balance of staying connected without overwhelming
subscriber’s inboxes. Even more important than keeping on the list, is having
them eager to open the email to see what
you have to share. Here are tips for making your list an effective marketing
tool:
1) Email often enough that subscribers remember you,
but not so often you annoy them. This number depends a great deal on
your home business. Most successful email marketers I know email two to three
times a week. Emailing even just once a week, may not be enough.
2) Be you. The most successful marketers
know that their effectiveness comes from selling themselves first.
Put another way, people will connect with and want to
buy from you because of who you are. Your subscribers have many options for who
to do business with, but if you can make a connection, build rapport and trust,
they’ll choose you. So don’t be afraid to share stories and true-life
anecdotes.
3) Give value. Whatever you email to your
subscribers should enhance their lives. Money always follows value.
4) Make list members feel special. People
who give you their name and email should be treated with the respect they
deserve. Make sure they know it by thanking them as well as giving them things
that no one else gets. For example, I provide a freebie every Friday that only
my subscribers receive. It’s my way of thanking them and acknowledging that
having their email is a big deal.
Getting out there and generating new leads for your business is all well and good, but those leads aren’t going to do much good if you aren’t able to close those leads. A smart business owner knows how to get the leads, and how to close them to make sales. It really isn’t as difficult as you might think. In fact, there are many ways that you can generate and close leads. One of the best ways is to use email marketing. Let’s take a look at how you can get more leads, and close more leads, by taking advantage of something that most people use every single day.
1. Set Your Goals
You need to know what you want to get out of your email marketing before you can actually begin. Without having a specific goal, there is no way you can get what you want, because you are not being clear about what you want in the first place. Think about who the emails are being sent to, the need of the email campaign, and when to send the email in order to get the best results. Once you set your goals, it’s time to start the email campaign.
2. Use Graphics
While you don’t want to overwhelm your potential customers, you don’t want to bore them either. A good email campaign includes graphics, video, etc. But, it is still not cluttered or busy. A good video will capture the attention of your readers, and it will help to draw them into your campaign. Be sure to send an HTML and a text version of your email, to make sure that your emails don’t get filtered and end up in the spam box instead of the inbox.
3. Don’t Overwhelm Potential Customers
When people open emails and they are hit right in the face with a bunch of different fonts, graphics, colors, etc., it does exactly the opposite of what was originally intended. It is recommended that you stick with two to three fonts, and keep things simple. Emails should be easy to look at, and not too cluttered. If it is busy, it is going to turn people off, and you won’t get the sales you want.
4. Make the Subject Line Compelling
If you want people to read the email, you need to give them an incentive to do so. This means that your subject line should be very compelling. “Converting subject line is very important. When we were doing email marketing for Opporty Inc. it was pretty tough because of its huge 15 million email database, so we created few subject lines for each subscriber’s category,” said Sergey Grybniak from Clever Solution.
5. Give Something
If you are simply advertising in your email marketing, you are going to lose the interest of potential customers pretty quickly. You need to give them something that they can be interested in, and in the case of email, that something is great content. Give them content that they are interested in, and leave them hanging so they will want to click on the link to learn more. Once they click that link, you are closer than ever to closing the sale.
6. Offer Incentives
A lot of people see email marketing as junk mail, so yours needs to stand out to get noticed. Offer incentives that will entice people into opening the email, and make those incentives so great so you can close the sale. For instance, you may want to offer a free product, a great discount, etc. This will keep people from deleting your emails, or marking them as spam so no more of your emails can get through at all.
Growing your email list is no easy task, but if you’ve been around bloggers long enough, you’ve probably heard just how important building your email list is. That direct communication and permission to meet a reader in their inbox is your number one mission whether you’re new to blogging or have been around the block a few times.
It’s in those personalized moments that you can send targeted, directed, and specialized content to urge your subscribers on a journey that hopefully ends in you making money. But before you can get to any of that, it all starts with that email list.
Eight lead magnets you can use to convince a reader to join your email list
It’s a great privilege for someone to allow you to pop up in their inbox, and you should treat it like the honor that it is. Most people aren’t just going to give you their email address. Sure there are people who love signing up for anything and everything because they either love information or just want to be a part of it all.
But more often than not, you’ll find a resistance, and rightfully so! Too many people have been burned by joining an email list and then receiving countless spam messages without the ability to unsubscribe. To break down those protective walls, you need some strategies to help you convince people to trust you enough to join your email list.
There are infinite tactics passed around on the subject of growing your email list. Some work, some don’t, and some are just super scammy. But you just can’t go wrong if you’re bringing readers into your fold by providing them with excellent content that solves their problems.
Whether you’ve heard them called lead magnets or incentives, these bonus materials are something you can give a reader in exchange for their email address. That way, if they’ve never heard of you before or are hesitant but still liking what they see on your blog, you can give them an extra nudge of confidence in you by giving them something completely free. It’s that extra step that helps you build trust with a reader and show them a little more about what you know about your topic.
Here are eight lead magnets you can use to convince a reader to join your email list:
Newsletters
Let’s get real for a second. If you’re going to offer a “newsletter” as your opt-in incentive, you better be one of the most interesting bloggers in the world. Your content needs to speak for itself if you’re going to use this as your call to action.
Newsletters are the old standby of email marketing. Whether you release them weekly, monthly, or just whenever you have something to announce, a newsletter (we call them Broadcasts) is the standard way for bloggers to directly connect with their audience right in their inbox.
While any blogger certainly has the ability to create their own newsletter and use it as an incentive, I wouldn’t recommend this channel as the end all be all to a beginner blogger. For a newsletter to really be worth the while of a new audience member, there has to already be a large amount of trust and authority between reader and blogger.
Newsletters will only work as a true incentive to opting into your email list if you are at the level of authority where people want to read everything you write. I’m talking Maria Popova, James Clear, and Marie Forleo level. That’s not to discourage you, but just to be clear: if you’re just promising content they could read on your blog, it needs to be great. So follow through.
If you’re a mere mortal like the rest of us, a promise of a newsletter probably won’t be enough of an incentive for a reader browsing your blog to hand over their email address. You still need to prove yourself worthy of their interest and time. For you bloggers that fall into this category, the rest of this article is how you can make it happen.
Downloadable giveaways
Readers signing up for your email list generally want something in return– it’s just the way the blog-o-sphere works these days. And one of the most popular means of incentives is the downloadable giveaway.
These free downloads can take many different forms. When deciding what kind of download to create you should consider what type of content your reader most wants from you, what your business is and does, and what content and assets you already have on hand. For example, if you blog about graphic design you can create a font bundle or if you blog about wedding cakes you can create a video teaching how to create flowers with frosting.
This form of incentive works well because you can capitalize on the fact that your reader is already interested in that particular blog post. By upselling and elaborating with more information on that topic, you’re giving your reader more of what you already know they want. Just make sure your upgrade is perfectly aligned with the original article and keep it evergreen so that a reader who sees that post months from now will see the same value as someone who sees it tomorrow.
To start implementing content upgrades to your blog, find the five to 10 most visited posts on your blog and think about what you can create to add even more value to that post. Would your readers benefit from a checklist of your actionable steps, a printable of your design to hang on their office wall, or a bundle of your stock photography images? Some more examples of content upgrades are:
To make your course as effective and beneficial as possible, make sure your number one focus is on your audience. What are they struggling with and how can you/your business help them overcome that struggle to reach their goal? The more valuable information you can pack in your giveaway course, the more likely your new reader is to trust you on your subject matter and buy your products when you pitch them later on, like a full course on the same subject.
Email course from TrainECommerce.comEmail course from 42yogis.com
Discounts for physical products
If you sell products on your blog, sometimes offering a discount is well worth the small dip in revenue. First, making your product more available to the reader is a sign of good will, but you can also exchange that discount for their email address. Often these discounts come with a limited time offer messaging to create scarcity and urge readers to act quickly.
They’re also a go-to for list growth because anyone who wants to attend your webinar must register with their email address. You can move those emails right on over to your list after your webinar and now you know you have a list of people who are interested in whatever topic your webinar covered.
Make sure to record each webinar as well to use as downloadable giveaways later on. You can keep them as a limited time run to create a little scarcity or turn them into an evergreen piece of content. Either way, you’ll have high-quality video you can continue to give your readers in exchange for their email address.
Personalized content deliveries
Everyone enjoys consuming content in their own way. We noticed this need in our own readers when we published our first issue of Tradecraft. Version 1 was available on the blog or through an email sequence, but we had so many people email in asking us to create a PDF version they could download and read when they had time.
By doing this, we were not only giving our readers what they wanted, we were also creating an extra way for us to gather emails. Just as we had previously done for sequences, we create forms on the blog for the PDF download so readers can opt-in for their personalized experience.
You can easily do this with the content on your blog as well. Whether it’s a PDF, an email sequence, a podcast transcript or even an audio file of you reading your blogs out loud, giving your readers a choice in what format they want most is a great way to incentivize them to join your list.
Contest/giveaways
Contests and giveaways are a great interactive way to grow your email list. When they’re constructed well with clear communication, ease of use, and exciting prizes, people are always happy to volunteer their email address to enter.
To enhance the contest for your list building benefits, make sure your prize is something that can help you validate readers. It should be niched down to something that your ideal reader is already looking for or wanting. So again if you’re blog is about wedding cakes, your prize or giveaway could be a set of high-priced piping tips. The more specific your prize, the more likely the people entering to win will stick around your blog after the contest is over.
Just be ware, there will be people who could care less about what your mission is and are just after the freebies. So when you’re considering a giveaway, either make sure that what you’re giving aligns with your mission and values to attract the niched down audience you desire, or don’t worry about it all and know that you’re going to get quite a few unengaged subscribers.
Delivering your incentives
Now that you have eight ways you can convince someone to join your email list, you can go out and start creating interesting and valuable content that blog browsers just can’t resist. But your job isn’t done when the reader opts in for your incentive. There’s one more major step to follow through on that can make or break your entire opt-in user experience– the delivery.
You have to make sure you can deliver on those promises. How quickly, easily, and efficiently your readers receive their downloads, discounts, and upgrades can either create a raving fan or stern critic. But if you’ve done your job well with creating valuable content on your blog and can honor your word to deliver, these exclusive pieces will continue to set you up as a trusted blogger and an authority on your topic.
Setting up an incentive email form
If you’re using ConvertKit, we’ve made delivering your incentives extremely easy! Here are some quick steps to upload your content:
In the Settings tab of your form, click on Incentive Email in the left toolbar.
Customize the content for your subject line and message. That can include what you’d like your button to say as well.
Upload your incentive by clicking the URL button to redirect your reader to a site you’ve set up or click the Incentive download and upload the file you created.
Click Save and you’re ready to go!
It’s as easy as that. Your readers can have their incentive and you’ll have a new email list subscribers in minutes.
Take the challenge
Choose one of these incentives and implement it on your blog this week. Think about what your readers are struggling with and create a valuable asset that they just can’t pass up. Let me know how it goes or if you have any questions about what type of incentive would work for you.
Newsletters
Downloadable giveaways
Content upgrades
Email courses
Discounts for physical products
Webinars/workshops
Personalized content deliveries
Contest/giveaways