Email marketing has always been a very important and effective form of communication. Especially, when it comes to B2B marketing, its effectiveness becomes unrivaled. You can not only connect with people directly and make your interaction more personal but also update them about your products and increase your business. So, let’s get started with this guide to creating valuable email lists for effective multi-channel marketing campaigns to achieve better results.
Building email lists takes a comprehensive approach:
- Ask people you already know
- Promote your business on social media
- Purchase ads to direct traffic to your website
- Create a marketing persona of your users
- Invest in content marketing with strong SEO tactics
Ask people you already know
They could be your family, friends, or colleagues. Ask them if they would like to receive emails about your latest newsletters, products, or services. Do not shoot emails to people in your contact list without their consent
Promote your business on social media
This is where potential subscribers spend most of their time. Men are more active on LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. Women are more active on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest. Promoting on different platforms allows you to maintain a consistent social media presence and build brand awareness
Purchase ads to direct traffic to your website
LinkedIn ads are viewed by professionals seeking to enhance their career or expand their network whereas Facebook’s audience is quite different. By using Facebook’s segmentation feature, you can target your ads to a much narrower demographic
Create a marketing persona of your users
By creating a persona, you filter your target audience and obtain a clearer idea of their work, aspirations, challenges, and how you can be useful to them. It can look something like this:
| Name | Sarah James |
| Age | 40 Years |
| Gender | Female |
| Job Title | Senior Editor |
| Job Description | head of the Creative Team |
| Employer | XYZ |
| Location | Bangalore |
| Salary | 12 Laksh / Annam |
| Goals | Increase the readers on e-newspaper |
| How we can help | Private suggestion and tips |
Invest in content marketing with strong SEO tactics
Attract users to your website and then entice them to sign up to receive your emails in the following ways:
- Provide content upgrade: Make sure to offer your readers something valuable in exchange for their email. Create a blog post and include a link within the blog to download either a cheat-sheet containing a few tricks and tips, or an e-book related to the topic in a pdf format.
- Offer lead magnets: Give your audience an incentive to opt-in to your email list. Offer freebies such as whitepapers, newsletters, e-books, infographics. Users do not have the time or patience to read through 100 pages or to watch an hour-long video. So, keep your content short and easy to consume. Use attention-grabbing headings, relevant images, bulleted information, and conduct A/B testing.
- Create gated content: Present webinars or free trials that require users to fill a registration form. Organize quizzes or surveys and allow the users to win a gift card or a coupon if they provide their information.
- Build a sense of urgency: When you set a time limit, the users know they don’t have much time to sign up. Host contests with limited spots; start a countdown for a special discount; arrange a webinar on a first-come-first-serve basis with a restriction on the total number of seats.
- Keep the form simple: Using too many fields in the initial stage of registration is off-putting. Ask for only those fields that are essential (such as name and email id). The details (card credentials and physical address) can be filled in when the user has reached the decision-making stage (payment page).
- Inject humor: Instead of using plain options on the CTA such as Yes or No, use humorous ones that seem as though the users will be losing out on something valuable if they don’t subscribe to your email list. It makes the user pause before taking a decision. It can look like this:
- Get the Beginner’s Guide to Building Email Lists
- Yes, send me the guide
- No thanks, my email list is perfect
Segment your Email List based on certain criteria
You have a higher chance of retaining your subscribers if you personalize the emails you send them. Breaking your email list into smaller groups makes it easier to write subject lines that cater to the recipients genuinely interested in your content. The criteria could be the following:
- New subscribers: Send an email to subscribers who have just signed up and welcome them with introductory offers.
- Preferences:Subscribers who want to be notified about blog updates and latest newsletters vs those who want to hear only about special offers.
- Incomplete payment: Remind subscribers that they haven’t finished their purchase.
- Inactivity:Reward your active subscribers with exclusive offers. Send a reminder to subscribers that have been inactive for a while.
Track your email performance.
Make sure to measure the impact of your strategies and identify the top-performing content. Keep a record of email open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. Refresh your email list periodically and remove those subscribers that haven’t engaged with your emails in the past 6 months, either because they have changed their email address or because they are not interested in your services anymore.
Conclusion
Email marketing is not just an act of sending commercial messages to people and increasing your sales. It involves building an authentic relationship with your audience, personalizing your interactions at every step, and curating your services to meet their interests so that they enjoy using your products and eventually become regular customers.
Source: optincontacts