Growing your email audience

A primer to start building your email list easily and effectively

When I was a kid, I was cursed with the summer birthday blues. When my July birthday hit, I’d be ready to celebrate, but since I didn’t have a classroom to share the news (or the cupcakes) with, I didn’t get any of the attention that’s lavished on those lucky enough to be born during the school-year months.

It’s a frustrating feeling to have a great announcement to make, but no audience to hear it — just ask any business owner who’s just beginning to build their email audience list. Your news may be more about software updates or new product lines than cupcakes, but the challenge remains: If the classroom doesn’t come to you, how do you find the right folks to share in your celebration?

Fortunately, there are plenty of ways to find the right audience members and play well with Emma’s permission policy, too. With a little advance planning, you’ll set yourself up to share your brand with the right folks — and engage them from the start.

If you’re new to email marketing and not sure how to attract subscribers, follow these tips to get your program up and running:

1. Create a strong signup form. Your signup form is the perfect place to gather all the subscriber information you need to know. Make a clear distinction between what you must have (mark it as required) and what can be shared at your subscribers’ discretion. You might need to know their zip codes to send them accurate info about a store in their area, but you don’t need to send birthday coupons to everyone — just the folks who choose to fill in their date of birth. Remember, subscribers may abandon your form if they feel that the process is too long or intrusive. Also, let your subscribers know what to expect as a new member of your list. Will you be sending daily, weekly, monthly or on some other schedule? Will they see promotions along with newsletters? Can they pick and choose the news types they want to receive?
2. Identify all of your customer touch-points, and get used to asking folks to join your email list. Think beyond your website for a moment. Does your company send transactional emails? Do you tweet? Have a Facebook page? You’ll reach the biggest audience by making your email signup forms as visible as possible in as many places as possible, so identify your points of contact. And think beyond your online presence. Put a fishbowl near your store’s register so customers can sign up by dropping in their business cards. Encourage your sales team to bring up your newsletter in their daily calls or demo classes. Even include a link to your signup form in your own email signature. Every interaction is an opportunity to build a relationship.
3. Create a welcome trigger. Catch your subscribers when their curiosity is piqued: right when they sign up. Your automatic welcome emails can net four times the normal open rate and five times the normal click-through rate. A welcome email is the perfect time to reinforce the benefits of your newsletter, give subscribers a discount on their next purchase or simply thank them for signing up.
4. Ask subscribers to share your emails with their networks. Then, provide unique and entertaining content so they can’t help but do so. Incentivize the share, too. Reward those who share with a special coupon or unique content from your brand. That’s a built-in loyalty program!

Give a little thought (and a lot more action) to these four tips, and you’ll be growing your email list in no time.

This is part one in our blog series on audience growth. In our next installment, we’ll talk about more ways to maintain a healthy, engaged list.

++++

Want to read more?

• Learn how to create a smart signup form
• Meet your customers where they are (and ask for their email address)
• See a few welcome triggers that work
• Read about Emma’s Social Sharing feature