Expand your email's audience
You spend time thinking about the content of your email, but shouldn't you also think about your message's audience? Of course! A message's relevancy is key to its success. Tailoring your message to your audience's interests is of utmost importance. But what about the size of your audience? Growing your email list is another component to a successful email marketing program. Here are some ways to add to your email's audience:
Sell the subscription button: Don’t bury the subscription button on your website – put it in the top or bottom navbar and/or the home page. Also, make the most of your pay-per-click (PPC) and search-engine-optimization (SEO) campaigns that are driving traffic to your homepage at significant cost by ensuring that you at least have a chance to acquire visitors' email addresses by promoting and marketing the subscription button. You would be wise to position another subscription button in the center of your homepage—which is likely to be seen by all site traffic.
Optimize your landing pages: Use a landing page to sell the idea of registering & highlight the benefits of signing up. Manage a subscriber's expectations up front by telling them the content - and frequency - of your emails so they'll know what to expect when they share their email address with you.
Promote subscribing: Don’t limit yourself to promoting the newsletter online – put it in all marketing collateral.
Giveaways: Give recipients something in exchange for their agreeing to receive your emails, such as a coupon or a whitepaper. This is only good for building your list as some recipients will only be interested in the offer, not in receiving messages from your company on an on-going basis.
Once doing the above, here are some do's and don't for building your list:
Do: - Include a coupon or special incentive in your welcome message as these messages have the highest open and click-through rates.
- Keep the opt-in process quick and simple – only collect the profiling attributes that are most important to your business.
- Let your subscribers know you won’t sell their information to a third party – post your privacy policy online.
Don't: - Purchase lists – unsolicited messages have the highest complaint rates and could ruin your reputations.
- Automatically add the recipients who have been forwarded your messages by their friends to your lists – instead, include an easy way to subscribe to your email lists in the forwarded versions of the email.
Share your message via Twitter?
Unless you've been living under a rock, you've likely heard of Twitter. But if haven't, it's a free micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users' updates that are 140 characters or less.
How does this relate to email marketing? It's a great way to expand the audience for your emails. Here are a couple of ways to use the service to the advantage of your email marketing program: - MailChimp has recently integrated the ability to post a link to your Twitter account to share your email campaigns. Here's a blog post that tells how you can use their service to do that.
- The Email Marketing Voodoo blog has a how-to for another way of leveraging Twitter with your email campaigns.
Within Twitter, if you follow either of the above, you'll be asking readers to click on a link and should want to know the click-thru percentage. This can be tracked via a tool like Tweetburner.
To use Tweetburner, paste in either the link MailChimp gives you or the "view in browser" link at the top of the email mentioned in option #2.
Got Something to Say?
Send me your feedback. Good or bad, I'm listening. Send it to sandi@isendyouremail.com.
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About I Send Your Email
As a freelance email marketing manager for companies of all sizes, I Send Your Email is a resource for organizations that are either beginning an email marketing program or have an established program that needs additional resources. |
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