Building your email list is one of the best—and easiest—ways to generate leads. But, before you jump into a tech-heavy project to boost your e, take a look at what 12 founders from our council suggested as ways to gain more email subscribers without substantial amounts of coding.
Try Using SumoMe
If you’re running a WordPress site, try using SumoMe’s ListBuilder. I have yet to encounter anything as simple and awesome. It has an algorithm to ensure people are not prompted to sign up every time they visit your site. It can be installed in minutes, and it even gives you a conversion rate for the email pop ups!
– Henry Glucroft, Henry’s / Airdrop
Host a Webinar
We have found webinars to be a great way to reach our target customers, expand our brand and grow our network: all while providing useful, informative content that can be repurposed to amplify our messaging.
– David Ehrenberg, Early Growth Financial Services
Get Up Close and Personal
The more of your authentic self you reveal in your online presence — be it an e-newsletter, a blog, a social networking profile, or a general website — the more people you will attract. Not only do people want to hear your story, they want to follow it and see what happens next. The best tactic of all is to showcase your personality and style via video.
– Alexandra Levit, Inspiration at Work
Give Subscribers Something Extra Special
Offer people a free e-book or access to something special as a carrot for subscribing. Then, send your list consistently good content. When we started doing this at Contently, our subscriber list blew up!
Use Pop-Ups
We always assumed they were annoying, but the numbers told us otherwise. We worked hard to make them as unobtrusive as possible to maintain a great user experience, and our readers responded positively. So before you rule them out, run an experiment and see if yournumbers come out like they did for us.
Capture Email Info From Ebay and Amazon
Since part of our business is on Amazon, we include product inserts that ask customers to go to a product registration page to ensure their warranty is in place. We also created a free membership program where customers will be provided deep discounts on new product releases if they provide their contact info. This allows us to get customers off of Amazon and into our auto-responder series.
– Gary Nealon, The Rox Group
Send Valuable Emails
The best way to grow an email list is by delivering value to your current subscribers. If the content you’re sending is valuable and exclusive, subscribers will forward your content to friends, and your list will grow organically.
Use Rafflecopter
If you have a product to give away, consider partnering with a popular blog to do a Rafflecopter giveaway. We worked with a fashion blogger to give away gift cards to our online clothing shop. Readers could gain entries to the giveaway by pinning a favorite item, following us on social media or joining our email list. Rafflecopter takes care of all of these details.
Offer a True Consumer Benefit
The best way to gain and keep new email subscribers is by offering a true enhancement to your consumer’s experience with yourproduct/brand/service. Everything else is ultimately a short-term fix. You need to offer a simple call-to-action that demonstrates the consumer benefit for signing up for your email newsletter.
– Alex Frias, Track Marketing Group
Partner With Influencers
Partner with influencers to drive more email subscription sign ups. Influencers, like bloggers or Youtubers, have huge devoted audiences, so sponsoring a video or blog post is a form of partnership that will drive new awareness for your company. Consider adding an incentive like a giveaway or sales promotion to encourage consumers to sign up for your emails to hear more about your offerings, too.
Syndicate Your Best Content
Identify your highest performing articles and reach out to noncompeting publications within your niche to offer your content for syndication. If the story is any good, most publications will happily accept the opportunity to republish it. They may even be willing to let you plug a CTA at the bottom, which will drive subscribers to your own email list.
Add Hidden Gems
Provide your audience with original content, advanced insights, and an exclusive point of view that can only be found in your emails. Use a simple email sign-up form on your website with an explanation of what they can expect from your emails, as well as social proof (how many subscribers you have to date) to further incentivize a person to subscribe.
– Brian Honigman, BrianHonigman.com
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