How to Effectively Grow Your Email List for Free

The dream of every digital marketer is to build a reliable email list. With time, this list becomes a very valuable asset for email marketing campaigns. The bigger the size of the list, the more valuable it is particularly for segmented email-marketing activities. To build this list, marketers must pay special attention to opt-in and opt-out rates. If the opt-in rate is higher than the opt-out rate, the list grows. This means marketers are getting more email subscribers than they are losing. Generally, many marketers always tend to get more subscribers than they are losing. To sustain this, they usually explore many ways to boost their opt-in rates. Many of these ways are simple, free and quite efficient to grow email lists. Here are some of such ways.

Happening Online Events/Activities

The internet is awake, active and alive 24/7. Meaning, there are important events happening online around the clock. You can take advantage of these online events to share your knowledge and better connect with your audience. Doing so presents excellent opportunities for you to invite subscribers to your email list. You can share valuable knowledge by way of eBooks, webinars, conferences, YouTube shows and podcasts. To get these values, you can invite email subscribers to your list as a direct channel to get the values across to them. Your email list grows freely from these efforts.

Regular Auditing of Email Subscribers Lists

The more credible an email list is, the more valuable it is. Even as you strive to get more subscribers, it is also essential to ensure that your older subscribers remain credible and valid. The reason there is a need for regular auditing of the list. That you have a large email list is not sufficient guarantee of email marketing success. A healthy, credible and reliable list is what guarantees that. Auditing your email list regularly helps to remove misspelled or risky email addresses, removes data decay, removes poor-quality contacts, and enhances the deliverability of your email messages.  Removing old and risky data this way, is the best way to ensure your emails are making it to the inbox of your subscribers. That greatly enhances the credibility and reliability of your email list as well as its value. Expert marketers recommend two main ways to handle email data decay and to enhance the credibility of your email list. It is EITHER:

You use an Email Verification Service, EVS, to validate your list in bulk. This helps to scrub bad emails periodically particularly when the list is growing very fast.

OR

You add an Application Programming Interface, API to your Signup Forms. The API helps to verify all of your new subscribers in real time and rejects addresses you don’t want on your list.

Pay Special Attention to Your Signup Forms

This is hugely important as a first very important step to build email list. Before embarking on promotions to get sign-ups on your email list, be sure the sign-up forms are in a very conspicuous place on your landing page where every visitor to your website can easily find them. Use a very attractive and inviting opt-in phrase on the forms. Sign-up forms perform very poorly when they are located in obscure places on your website or their messages are not enticing enough. You can do well to avoid these two scenarios. Sometimes, one sign-up form may not be enough. In that case, you can consider adding a few more, including at the bottom of every blog post you write. All told, always make sure you stick with your promises and send your very best marketing tips according to your schedule. That helps your email deliverability and fosters healthy marketing engagement.

Be Very Active on Social Media

This requires posting very valuable content consistently on social media. The huge popularity of social media is now like a marketing goldmine for digital marketers. If you post valuable content regularly, your friends/followers list grows rapidly. Generally, as organic reach on social media is declining, it is smart for marketers to create a strategy to get more friends/followers on their lists. One very simple and practical way to get that done is to post about your emails consistently on social media. Promise value and be sure to send it. If you do so, many of your friends/followers on social media will always be willing to send their emails to get this value. That’s how the email list grows. As an added tip, always be sure to place a link to your opt-in form on all of your social media profiles. Some of the most popular social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to do this in your account description on their sites. If you use the space wisely, many social media users can easily find their way onto your email list free.

5 Business-Boosting Digital Marketing Tips

No matter how experienced you are in digital marketing business, you still need digital marketing tips to boost your business. Digital marketing is an ever-evolving business in tandem with the deepening of the internet and the advancement in digital technologies. Some new strategies and tactics still emerge from time to time that serious digital marketers must keep abreast with. Digital marketers always look for great opportunities to boost their businesses. Some of these ways include changing their business models, marketing strategies, and adapting their businesses to the changes in consumer-behavior and shopping.

These here, digital marketing tips and tricks, are very handy in all these.

1. Have a Marketing Plan

You cannot have a good traction in digital marketing without a plan. Without a good plan, you may end up expending valuable time and money into marketing strategies that may not deliver good results. First, you must spare time to draft a detailed marketing plan to drive your business forward. This plan will emanate from a thorough market research of your business niche, your competition, challenges, opportunities, environmental threats, and changing technologies particularly Artificial Intelligence, AI, the economy and consumer behavior. The comprehensive insights gleaned from these sources will help you to design and build a strategic plan to meet your marketing goals.

2. Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing may be “old school” marketing strategy but it is still hugely effective. To derive maximum benefit from email marketing, you must first build a credible email list over time. With the list in place, you can begin to send regular emails to the segmented list to boost your business. Doing so allows a marketer to target specific subscribers with communication they’ll find valuable. Such messages elicit better responses/results from the email subscribers. Even if you are looking to promote a new product/service or you are running a promo/competition, or even if you are just creating useful content for your customers, an email campaign helps you to reach your goals better and faster than many other digital marketing methods.

3. Create a Captivating Landing Page

The landing page of your website is the first port of call where online surfers first come in contact with your business. That is why it must be attractive and captivating enough to arrest their attention. What your landing page looks like is usually a key element of your digital marketing strategy. For this reason, marketers must ensure the landing pages of their websites contain very strong headlines, interesting GIFs, attractive products photos, a CTA, Call-To-Action button and a content body that strongly motivates visitors to make a purchase. It is with such an engaging and enticing landing page that allows the marketer to make better impact and sell well online.

4. Invite Testimonials/Reviews

Many digital marketers now know that there is a very strong correlation between the number of positive reviews and sales. The reason they can no longer afford to underestimate the power of recommendations to boost business. Reviews and testimonials from satisfied customers act in many ways to support the quality and suitability of products on sale to prospective buyers. Many buyers even make their buy decisions based on product reviews. It is smart marketing therefore, to if convenient, directly invite reviews after making a sale. Doing so helps marketers in very many beneficial ways to boost their businesses because products with positive reviews usually outperform products lacking reviews. Good reviews must however not be forced out of, or coerced from customers. It should always be a voluntary and free will thing.

5. Take Advantage of Social Media

Because of the huge popularity of social media, it has become a very effective tool for marketing businesses no matter the size of the business. Social media marketing is cheap, affordable, and easy to use for most digital marketers. You can directly target specific demographics with promos and campaigns on social media. Marketing info on social media can easily go viral within a very short while.  If you effectively combine social media and other digital strategies in your marketing plan, the results can be very quick and hugely encouraging. What matters most however if you want to market on social media is to be sure to always create valuable content for sharing on a consistent basis. If posting valuable content on social media frequently is too demanding on your time, you can take advantage of automation tools to help save time. These tools can release your posts at programmed scheduled intervals. Some of these automation tools can also provide key marketing metrics that help you to improve on the performance of your promotional efforts.