By Mark McDonald
Retention
June 22, 2022
Read time: 15 minutes
Introduction
Although email is one of the oldest digital marketing channels available, it is also one of the most effective, with strong conversion rates across various industries. In fact, the average conversion rate for landing page traffic sent via email is over 6% – a significant jump from the standard e-commerce conversion rate of 2.5% to 3%. Email marketing is also cost-effective: businesses can earn an average of $44 for every $1 spent on email marketing.
What Makes a Great Email List?
Every successful email marketing campaign starts with a high-quality email list. There’s no point in building advanced email campaigns with sophisticated designs, compelling copy, and special offers if your email list isn’t segmented and targeted correctly.
To build a great email list that drives sales, you should focus on three priorities:
Quality
Gather real and complete information from real people – don’t buy email lists. Bots, spam accounts, and abandoned email addresses don’t make purchases.
Relevance
It’s hard enough to convert leads who are already interested in what you’re selling. When building an email list, only target people who are genuinely interested in your products or services. Otherwise, you’ll see leads unsubscribe as quickly as they signed up.
Quantity
Once you’ve ensured the first two priorities, you can start focusing on growing your email list and expanding your reach to include new or broader audiences.
How to Easily Build an Email List
1. Add a Popup Offer to Your Homepage
While you shouldn’t train shoppers to wait for discounts, promotional offers can be a powerful tool to convert first-time website visitors before they click the back button. Using pop-up forms on the homepage, you can capture your email list and save a potential sale in the process.
If the term “popup” worries you, consider that the average conversion rate for popup forms is just over 3%, with the best popups converting at rates of up to 10%. Depending on your website’s overall traffic, figures like these can significantly increase the number of people who subscribe to your email list.
To start using pop-up forms to capture email addresses on your e-commerce site, initiate a popup when the visitor intends to mouse away from the page, which usually indicates they plan to navigate elsewhere. Using the targeting options in your chosen marketing platform, you can disable these popups for previous customers and visitors who are already on your list. This allows you to focus your messaging solely on new customers.
After visiting the “How It’s Made” feature from the Grovemade newsletter, I received an offer for 10% off my first purchase.
Since it’s difficult to recapture a visitor who has left before their first purchase, you should consider including some form of discount – as long as the math makes it reasonable. The total product price, profit margins, and potential offer will determine how viable different discounts are for your business.
2. Place a Signup Form in Your Site’s Navigation or Footer
One of the main reasons for acquiring new subscribers to your email list is to give visitors ample opportunities. Therefore, in addition to a popup on your homepage or product page, you should also consider adding an email signup form on every page of your website.
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Most online platforms place subscription forms in areas where shoppers are looking for additional information about your business, including headers, navigation bars, and footers. Since these forms are often discreet and located at the bottom of the page, your conversion rate is likely to be low overall. However, their contribution to building your email list over time can be significant.
To increase your conversion rate, be sure to add a strong call to action regarding the value of subscribing, whether it’s a coupon, exclusive content, or regular news and updates. As shoppers scroll toward the footer of your site to learn more about your brand, what offers might catch their attention and encourage them to subscribe?
Beardbrand describes their newsletter in terms of the value a reader can expect. It’s not just product updates: it’s a place to learn the art of grooming and personal care.
3. Collecting Email Addresses in Your Store or at a Physical Event
Face-to-face communication is still one of the most effective tools for converting potential customers into clients – even if the transaction doesn’t happen in person. Whether you have a brick-and-mortar store or you’re promoting your business at an event or pop-up shop, personal interactions can help you build your email list and increase digital sales.
Remember that forms associated with email marketing and lead generation can make the transition from a URL to the real world easy. For example, you can bring a keyboard and ask people to type their name and email address or, for better integration with the email marketing tool you choose, you could provide an iPad for people to submit their addresses directly. You can even include a call to action on your business cards to encourage email subscriptions.
Just as you do with your online forms, be sure to use a strong call to action to encourage personal sign-ups. For example, “Subscribe to our email list for a chance to win a $25 gift card,” or “Sign up for our newsletter to receive 25% off your first online purchase.” It’s also good to segment these lists by location or event, so you can send tailored emails to meet the needs of each audience.
4. Adding a Subscribe Button on Social Media
People follow brands on social media for many reasons, but the biggest ones mentioned in most surveys are to stay updated on new products. By adding an option on your Facebook, Instagram, and other social media accounts to subscribe to email updates, you can give your followers another way to stay informed about the latest developments while pulling them into more personalized email campaigns.
Most social media platforms support buttons or forms, allowing you to add a simple email subscription option on your page. For example, you could include a call to action button on your business’s Facebook page to encourage followers to subscribe to your email list.
For social platforms that don’t easily support links, like Instagram, consider alternative solutions to boost your email subscriber count. For example, you can use tools like Linktree to include multiple links in your Instagram bio: one for your e-commerce site and another directing visitors to your email list subscription form. You may want to consider segmenting new subscribers added through Instagram so you can track how it impacts your list growth.
5.
Building Personal Landing Pages
When it comes to convincing visitors or followers to provide their email addresses, there is no one-size-fits-all offer. Depending on where they discovered your business online and the stage they are in their buyer journey, different prospects will respond to different email subscription calls. With this in mind, you should plan to create multiple landing pages with subscription forms and promotional messages tailored to a specific segment of your audience.
To start utilizing personal landing pages, look at your eCommerce site’s traffic sources. What are Facebook users looking for? What about Amazon users or trade show leads? Whether you are creating a landing page for a regular audience or capitalizing on an event or holiday, make sure your message and call to action on the page are clear and consistent with the offer that inspired the prospects to click on your site in the first place.
The Shopify app store includes many tools with easy templates to help you design, test, and publish landing pages to generate more email subscriptions. While it will require an initial investment, customized landing pages will pay off in the long run: research indicates that personalized calls to action have a submission rate up to 42% higher than generic calls to action.
6. Include a Newsletter Subscription Option at Checkout
It’s no surprise that many online business owners overlook the checkout page as a marketing tool – after all, they’ve already secured a customer. However, the buyer’s journey doesn’t end with one purchase. In fact, many customers choose to complete the purchase without creating an account, which limits your future interactions with messages about their transaction. By encouraging users to subscribe to your email list at checkout, you can turn a one-time purchase into a lifelong fan and repeat customer.
The option to subscribe to the newsletter at checkout can be simply added by including a checkbox under the field customers use to submit their email for order confirmation. Be specific about the value subscribers will receive, whether it’s exclusive email discounts, educational content, or updates about new products. This will not only define their incentive to subscribe but also ensure that you comply with GDPR and other privacy regulations.
In addition to the checkbox or text field, you can also take your call to action at checkout to the next level with a pop-up window or banner on the order confirmation screen. By investing in a more engaging design, you will have a better chance of capturing the customer’s attention and earning an email list subscription.
6 Advanced Strategies to Accelerate Your Email List Growth
1. Use Bots to Interact with Prospects
While it is still reaching its full potential, bot technology already provides effective tools to help automate your messaging with website visitors. This can help you not only save precious time and effort in customer support but also create unique offers that generate email list subscriptions.
Shopify Inbox (available on all plans) allows you to create automated messages for customers and gain insights to focus on conversations that will convert. Messaging is a very popular way for consumers to interact with brands, and it can succeed where a standard capture form or landing page fails.
2. Leverage Third-Party Email List Growth Tools
There are many user-friendly apps to help you build your email list, some of which add smart touches to proven approaches. Shopify Forms is a free app that helps you grow your marketing list and convert new prospects. Here are some third-party tools you should also consider:
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Spin to Win is an app that can be used to collect email addresses on your website in a lucky wheel format. In an exciting and engaging spin, shoppers can win various prizes (such as discount coupons) by entering their email address. Be cautious and considerate about what it might mean if shoppers “lose” this game and miss out on an offer entirely.
Personizely includes many features to help you encourage visitors with a timely popup. What makes it appealing for merchants looking to build their newsletter is the built-in ability to use a traditional form or Facebook Messenger integration, allowing you the opportunity to connect with Messenger users in the same way you connect with an email list subscriber.
Many popup form tools, like Personizely, offer a variety of ways to convert casual readers into subscribers, whether through email or messaging apps.
3. Run Advertising Campaigns to Increase Email Subscribers
Since landing pages are usually designed with one outcome or conversion point in mind, they are often very useful for building your email list. By isolating landing pages for specific campaigns, you can not only craft a clear offer on a distraction-free page, but also measure your results accurately. Because of this, landing pages are also a great place to send traffic from digital advertising campaigns to your email list.
Whether you’re looking at social media, search, or any other advertising channel, there are countless options to increase your email subscribers using online ads. For example, you might place banner ads on YouTube videos related to your industry, or run targeted ads on Facebook to draw visitors to a downloadable guide related to your product (for instance, a recipe book for your kitchens).
Using the powerful audience targeting tools in Google AdWords and Facebook Ads Manager, you can create an offer with a specific audience already in mind, then adjust attributes such as location, age, gender, occupation, interests, and more to reach the right people.
4. Survey Your Target Audience
Building an effective digital marketing strategy is about gathering the right data. Through visitor surveys and questionnaires, you can collect valuable information about your audience’s wants and needs and their feedback while also capturing their email addresses for marketing purposes.
To take advantage of online visitor surveys, start by defining a specific goal, such as market research or even content for a participating blog. You can include a field in your survey to collect email addresses, then invite survey participants to subscribe to your email list at the end. Once you have a goal in mind, there are many lightweight tools and services available to create customer surveys, including Google Forms, Typeform, and SurveyMonkey.
Send your survey to friends and family, share it in Facebook groups, mention it on social media, and include a special offer for people who fill it out. For example, you could say, “After completing our short survey, you’ll receive a special code for 10% off your first online purchase.” You might even want to send out a survey before launching your product. This is a great way to start building your email list and bring friends, family, and potential customers on your startup journey.
5. Attract Visitors with Valuable Content
When building your email list, it’s important to remember that the actual product or subscription you’re offering isn’t the only value proposition. You started your online business to solve a problem or meet a need, which means you have some valuable ideas and solutions. By sharing those ideas in the form of blogs or downloadable content, you can create a lead magnet that adds value to your target audience and builds trust in your brand, generating more email subscriptions and ultimately more customers.
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Content marketing is a large and complex topic, and there are many content options that will inspire prospects to provide their email address, including podcasts, webinars, and videos. If you currently do not have a great understanding of the average subscriber value for your business, you might want to invest in an initial content marketing offer that requires an upfront cost but has no ongoing costs once the offer is completed.
A free eBook or guide, usually in the form of educational content or case studies or additional tips and tricks in your product category, is the perfect example. After the cost of your time (and yes, your time is very valuable!) or the associated writing and design fees, you can provide a strong incentive to join your email newsletter, and you will have no ongoing costs, aside from hosting the guide itself.
6. Organizing contests or giveaways on social media
Contests and giveaways can help accelerate email list growth by turning the sign-up process into an event that can be shared and won. The momentum of the contest can be particularly beneficial in the early days when your subscriber list is small, and you don’t have list traffic to leverage.
This strategy can be enhanced by partnering with other brands that sell to similar customers. With the right partner, your products will complement each other, making the offer more enticing than if you ran the contest by yourself.
Another option is to seek out influencers who are already reaching your ideal customers on social media platforms like Instagram. Since influencers often use contests for their purposes – typically to break through the noise and increase their following – you may be able to justify the cost of providing your product in exchange for their ability to kickstart your contest campaign.
If you want to create a custom landing page for your contest so there is a single destination that makes traffic tracking easy, you might try solutions like ShortStack or ConvertFlow.
Bonus: Marketing tools to manage your email list
As your email list grows from a few subscribers to several thousand, it’s important to invest in tools and platforms that help you manage, organize, and leverage your data. Here are some email marketing solutions to get started:
Shopify Email: If you need to build an email list for your e-commerce business, look no further than Shopify Email, Shopify’s email marketing solution. With Shopify Email, you can create, send, and track campaigns to grow your email list, feed key marketing moments with pre-built automated templates, and collect leads for free using Shopify Forms – all from your existing Shopify account. With the first 10,000 emails free each month and affordable pricing thereafter, Shopify Email is the perfect tool to help you get started using your email list.
MailChimp: MailChimp’s offerings start with a free plan that provides the ability to create basic email templates, as well as scheduling and automation options. With a paid subscription, you’ll gain access to more premium email templates along with advanced tools to learn more about your email list and campaigns.
Zapier: One of the toughest aspects of building and leveraging an email list is knowing how to integrate all the different platforms and technologies you use to run your business online seamlessly. Zapier allows you to create automated workflows that bridge the gaps between your tools without needing a software developer. With a Zapier workflow, you can pull new subscribers into your email database from social media, landing pages, survey tools, or live events, eliminating the manual work of organizing your lists.
Building
The email list is just the beginning
The two companies are not exactly alike, so it’s important to test different strategies for building your email list to see what works best.
Source: https://shopify.com/blog/16009092-why-you-should-be-using-popups-on-your-online-store
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