Most business owners falsely believe that email marketing is outdated, redundant, or even irrelevant. That’s because nowadays there are faster and newer ways to reach customers and prospective clients such as social media and instant messaging apps.
If you’re one such business owner, I would encourage you to rethink. Email list building and email marketing help grow your online business. And email marketing isn’t outdated, irrelevant, redundant or anything like that. Instead, lots of small and large businesses continue to flourish because of email marketing.
So how does one go about building this email list to grow your online business? Actually, it’s fairly simple provided you’re willing to exert some effort. Follow these simple email list-building tips that can help grow your online business.
ADVANTAGES OF EMAIL LIST BUILDING
There are at least 10 distinct advantages of email list building for your business:
- Timely delivery of updates, recalls, discounts, and special offers.
- Emails can be forwarded easily by people to family and friends. This helps spread awareness and generate more business.
- An email indicates your business cares for its clients by adding a personal touch.
- Automated greeting for customers on birthdays, special occasions, and holidays is possible with emails and adds to the festive mood. This creates an excellent image of your business.
- Availability of software that automates your emailing process.
- It’s easy to create content for emails compared to other digital marketing platforms.
- You can easily conduct various kinds of surveys using emails.
- Emails are known to create a loyal customer base.
- An email list allows you to offer exclusive benefits to frequent or loyal clients.
- It’s easier to convert leads to customers using email marketing if you have an email list.
HOW EMAIL LIST BUILDING HELPS BUSINESSES GROW
You can easily leverage the advantages above to build an email list and help your business grow. Here are some useful email list-building tips that can help you.
Email lists help maintain interest
Before anyone parts with their email address, they’ll need to know what’s in it for them. Therefore, you’ll need a compelling reason to tempt people to register for emails from your business.
When you offer things such as timely updates about a product or service or upcoming developments, people are keener to subscribe. By offering regular and relevant updates on your products, services, or brand, you’re keeping that interest alive among customers and prospects.
And this interest often results in better conversions of prospects while enabling existing customers to get adequate and relevant updates. Hence, you can ask people to sign up for your email list by offering updates. And this helps grow your business.
Building loyalty with an email list
If you’re a member of Amazon Prime, you’ll perhaps understand this better. You can offer exclusive sneak peeks at new launches and special discounts to people that sign up for your email list. A lot of people love to be the first to try a product or buy it before it’s available to others. And they love discounts too.
You can build an email list by offering such sneak peeks, previews, and exclusive offers to email list subscribers to grow your business. That’s the way Amazon gets subscribers for its Prime offerings.
There’s another distinct advantage of building loyalty by offering sneak peeks and special offers or discounts. It encourages people to buy for their relatives and friends. This means, instead of a single order, you can expect two or even more orders from the person on your email list and grow your business.
Use chatbots to grow your list
Chatbots are part of Artificial Intelligence. And they’re finding growing use in digital marketing as well. But something very important to remember about chatbots: a prospective client or customer will use a chatbot only when they’re genuinely interested in your business. Or else, why would they waste their precious time and effort?
You can incorporate a chatbot on your business website too. You can have a chatbot that asks the inquirer for their email address. This is a very common practice among businesses that use chatbots because they want to ensure that it’s a genuine human that’s on the other side.
Inquiries through chatbots help you comprehend what exactly a client or lead wants from your business. You can build an email list with this information, and follow up the query by sending an email that answers all details that a person was trying to get through the chatbot. In fact, this type of email list that you build with the help of a chatbot enables you to respond almost immediately to a query. And this gives you that leading edge over other competitors. A lead or customer can get specific answers that address their query, and when you respond immediately, there’s an extremely high chance of converting the lead and bagging more orders to grow your business.
Incorporating a chatbot isn’t that expensive. But a chatbot works wonders for building an email list that helps grow your business exponentially.
Greetings develop a sense of belonging
A lot of companies whose emails I subscribe to send birthday and anniversary greetings. And their greeting messages add more fervor to the celebrations. These greeting messages are well thought and touch a person’s inner senses.
Understandably, these greetings are sent to all people that have a birthday or anniversary on a particular day. Yet, they do work wonders. And I continue to patronize companies that take efforts to greet me on my birthday or anniversary. Yes, these greetings are automated and the emails are sent automatically since I’m on their email list. However, they are always welcome.
When you greet people on their special days, it has a deep impact on your business. People tend to identify themselves with your business and since they’re on your email list, they help the business grow.
Alerts about new blog posts
If your business doesn’t already have a blog, I strongly recommend you get one as soon as possible. You can either open a separate blog or create one on your business website. The choice is yours. However, having a separate blog using a paid domain name and hosting has its own unique advantages. And it doesn’t cost much.
Nowadays, most people make decisions based on positive reviews and information they get from reliable blogs rather than advertisements. In fact, blogs present a lot of opportunities to grow your business. One of them is affiliate marketing.
When you have an email list, it’s possible to grow your business by alerting the subscriber of a new blog post. And when you provide an affiliate or eCommerce link on your blog post, it serves as a motivator for the client to make a purchase. Or, pass it on to someone that might be interested in becoming a customer.
A blog and an email list help you grow your business in synergy with one another. In fact, you can also create an email list separately with a blog. People that don’t sign-up for your email list on your business website might subscribe on your blog. And the two complement one another to build an email list that grows your business.
Compelling content that tells stories
If we look at the latest trends in digital marketing, you’ll clearly see that storytelling grabs attention like nothing else. And an email list makes it possible to attract people to subscribe to your blog or YouTube channel. You simply have to send them an email that gives the synopsis of a real-life story and provide a link where people can access it.
In fact, this is a very common tip for online jobs as well. You might wonder why it’s common. If you subscribe for email updates from any reputed newspaper, TV channel, magazine, or media outlet, you’ll receive a short email daily. This email contains only the headlines of the story. And these headlines tempt you to read the topmost story of the day- by leading you to their main landing page or website.
What happens next? Often, news websites ask for a subscription if you want to read the entire report. And if it’s a very respected news media outlet, people willingly pay. However, I assume you’re not in the news business. So, how does this help grow your business?
Here’s a simple tip: post interesting, relevant, and engaging content that speaks about consumer experiences with your business. Yours could be a Business-to-Business (B2B) or Business-to-Consumer (B2C) website. That doesn’t matter.
What matters are testimonials from your users. And surely, any satisfied customer would be willing to give testimonials. You can present this in the form of a short story on your website and send an email alerting people to your email list.
But the story doesn’t end with them reading the article or testimonial. In fact, you can lead them to several other pages on your business website or blog by inserting the “Also Read,” feature.
Flash deals on email
This is a superb strategy that you can deploy to create and build an email list to grow your business. Inform people that they can expect flash deals or lightning bargains when they sign up for your email list. This means you’ll have to slice off some cost of a select product or service to make this flash or lightning offer that’s valid for a few hours only. This is enough to tempt anyone provided you create excellent and compelling content that backs up your special offer.
Another advantage of flash deals through an email list? You can select the number of subscribers that get the special offer instead of sending it to everyone. Understandably, you might hope to gain more customers through such deals. But that can prove counterproductive since it becomes a free-for-all of sorts.
You can offer these deals and attract people to sign up voluntarily for email alerts. In fact, you can start by sending these flash deals to select people. And ask them to enroll others in your email list by helping their friends and relatives to use your flash deals. A flash deal never fails to generate business. And it never fails to attract more people to sign up.
Online email surveys
Online email surveys are a superb way to build an email list to help grow your business. Provide frequent and relevant surveys on your business website. Ask people to respond to surveys about your company, brand, product, or service.
And you can also send online surveys by email and ask subscribers to pass them on to their relatives and friends. People always have an opinion about everything. And you can capitalize on this human instinct to build an email list and grow your business.
Actually, good surveys help you in many ways. One of them is by helping you listen to customers and their needs. The second by innovating products or expanding the product line to suit several needs and budgets.
IN CONCLUSION
These basic tips should help you build that amazing email list you’ve always wanted. While some businesses purchase email lists, building one organically will ensure that the people on your list are genuinely interested in what you’re offering.
