How to Grow Your Email List 10x With This Simple Hack

Even today, email marketing remains hugely relevant.

There are approximately 3.9 billion email users worldwide, 52% of whom check their inbox every few hours, making it arguably one of the most powerful marketing channels at our disposal. In fact, email has a reach 3x greater than Facebook and 15x greater than Twitter.

And according to Hubspot, 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months. As a result, ROI for email marketing campaigns has skyrocketed, with an average $42 return on every dollar spent.

But to have an email marketing campaign… you need emails!

Whether you’re a retailer or a blogger, having a strong email list – meaning high quantity AND quality – will empower you to send targeted messages straight to prospective customers’ inboxes.

What is an email list?

An email list is simply a collection of email addresses of current or potential customers that businesses can use for marketing purposes. Email attrition is real and you have to be proactive in dealing with it; with time people will naturally unsubscribe or change their email address, which is why you should always be collecting emails and growing your list.

Now that you understand what an email list is and why it’s important, let’s dive into how you can actually build one.

Building vs buying email lists

There are different ways to go about getting those emails, but they’re often slow, expensive, or time-consuming.

You might be tempted by the quick and easy solution: buying a list. But that’s not advisable, you rarely get a true guarantee that the emails won’t be old and inactive, and therefore hurt the health of your email marketing program because of spam complaints, instead of bringing leads to your business.

Furthermore, it’s even rarer that you are able to buy a list tailored specifically to your business needs.That is to say that the list you buy, even assuming that the emails are valid, might be full of people who are not interested in your business, simply because they are the wrong demographic.

The best option is to build an email list. It might be more work, but marketing to those people will be so much more effective because they’re actually targeted to your business.

If you’re going this route, a popular solution is to install a pop-up subscribe box on your website. While this can be a good foundational strategy, the problem is you miss out on a ton of people that automatically ignore those pop-ups, so building a sizable list goes very slowly.

The fastest way to build quality email lists

Imagine if there was a way you could simply get the email addresses of people that visited your website – no subscription form required, no need to blindly trust that the people on the list you’re buying are actually relevant to your business.

Well, there is. It’s called GetEmails and it’s the cheapest, simplest, and most reliable way to grow your email list with high-quality leads (they were on your website, after all).

It uses a simple script to pull info from a database of more than 300 million opted-in emails and connect those unknown visitors to a robust profile that includes data such as name, email, postal address, and more.

B2C businesses can use it to identify up to 35% of anonymous traffic on their website and then engage those potential buyers with an email marketing campaign. This process is called email-based retargeting.

What is email-based retargeting?

E-mail based retargeting is a new category created by GetEmails. It’s a hybrid between retargeting and remarketing.

Retargeting is when you identify users on your site that have taken action and then you target them with digital ads. Like when you look at a shoe online and then it keeps following you around, popping up in display ads on your Facebook, Instagram, and around the web. These are ads you didn’t opt in to. It works really well for eCommerce because a lot of us will eventually cave if we see that product over and over again.

Remarketing, on the other hand, is reaching out and re-engaging with current and past customers, usually by email. In this case, you bought a shoe and the brand then sends you an email to try to sell you another pair of shoes – or maybe a matching bag, you get the picture. Generally, the user has opted in somehow.

Email-based retargeting is a hybrid between the two. It’s identifying anonymous people on your site and then instead of showing them display ads, or in addition to showing them display ads, you send them an email. They have not specifically opted in to receive your emails, but they have opted into your network to receive emails from your partners.

What to send – 4 tips

#1. Be quick

The most important thing is to contact these people immediately upon receiving the data.

We’ve noticed that in 2020 people are not bothered about getting an email from a brand they recognize – especially if they were recently browsing the site.

What they are bothered about is getting emailed by a brand they don’t recognize, which is what happens when you wait a week to email these contacts – and that can lead to a lot of complaints.

If they hit your site once and then leave, they won’t remember who you are unless you email them straight away.

#2. Thank them for stopping by your site

Now that you’re fresh in their mind, start off by thanking them for stopping by your site – then continue with valuable content. This is a great example from Twin Cities Summer Jam:

#3. Offer a clear way to opt-out

Offering an opt-out link is compulsory, but rather than putting it as a footnote in small print, try being forthcoming about it with a clear opt-out button.

Take this example from publisher Marin Magazine which does a great job at first thanking the visitor for visiting the site, and offering them a clear chance to opt-out if they aren’t interested in receiving further newsletters.

#4. If your company does eCommerce, offer a discount and add them to a “best practices” welcome series

We’ve seen many examples of eCommerce companies putting GetEmails’ contacts directly into their normal welcome series and seeing prolific success.

Standard eCommerce best practices typically are:

Welcome + Discount → Discount + Meet the Team/Brand Story → Discount + Best Sellers

Here’s an example of a welcome series that worked for LuckyShot USA:

What about the open rates?

You might think people would find these emails intrusive, but the stats suggest otherwise: average open rates are over 20%, and complaint rates less than 0.1%. Not only that, it’s 80% cheaper than social and you can even get 500 emails for free.

What kind of results can you expect?

To give you an idea, Posh Puppy Boutique – an online retailer of luxury dog accessories – spent $906 on GetEmails over a six-week period and saw a 180% increase in ROI during that time.

CEO and Founder Jennifer Kirk had previously hired several Facebook marketing agencies, but they never seemed to be able to efficiently acquire customers for a business as niche as hers.

With GetEmails, the team collected between 75 to 100 contact records per day and they now own those contacts forever, which will also represent a substantial lifetime value. Furthermore, the GetEmails open rates were 21.2%, vs. 9% for their newsletter.

How to get started with GetEmails

The good news is, the setup is extremely simple and takes under 60 seconds. It’s also extremely affordable.

All you need is a website with enough traffic (over 1,000 unique visitors per month) and an email marketing app. Copy the GetEmails script, paste it on your website, then integrate with your email marketing software with one click, and you’re good to go!

Then you can log back in after 24 hours and pick a monthly plan. Contacts populate every day at 11am EST, so you’ll know what monthly plan to pick after a day. These plans start as low as $19 per month.

The bottom line is: don’t wait, grow your email list now! No matter what industry you’re in or what kind of business you have, that list will help you turn visitors into customers. And the better that email list is, the more conversions you’ll get and higher ROI.

Guest author: Adam Robinson is a tech entrepreneur and Amazon best-selling author. He has founded two tech startups, first Robly Email Marketing in 2014 and most recently GetEmails, which he launched in November 2019. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The post How to Grow Your Email List 10x With This Simple Hack appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/how-to-grow-your-email-list/