Why You Need An Email List
If you want to grow your business online then email list building is a must. Email is the fastest, easiest, and least expensive way to reach your audience with valuable information, new products, and special offers. But long before you make your pitch you should build the relationship, especially if you plan to close a sale.
Here’s the issue: People don’t tend to like giving out their contact details. They know that this is going to mean they receive marketing messages and very often, that will be considered to be spam. So how can you persuade your visitors to change their mind? Incentives.
What is an Incentive?
One common practice is to get around this problem by offering an incentive. It means providing some kind of free download in exchange for joining the mailing list in many cases – but you need to be careful how you go about this.
For example, let’s say that you have a fitness brand and you’re trying to collect emails. Very often you might then do this by offering a free ‘report’ or even a free ebook for every new person who signs up.
People love getting free things and if you tell them how your product can help them to lose weight, build muscle or feel more energetic for free, then they’ll often make the decision that it is worth parting with their email address.
But there’s a problem with this strategy, which is that it can end up attracting the wrong kind of subscriber – the kind of subscriber who is just looking for something free and who won’t be interested in buying from you in future. Often people will take the ebook and then never read another email from you. They may choose to unsubscribe immediately.
How to Attract the Right Kind of Subscriber
Your job is to try and avoid letting that happen so that you’re attracting only the right kind of subscriber. How do you do that?
One option is to make the emails themselves into the incentive. You can do this for instance by creating an e-course a newsletter series that provides real value.
Talk about everything your email series will deliver results, what it will include, what your new subscribers can expect – this can be enough to encourage people to subscribe and to keep looking out for your messages.
A similar method is to enter your subscribers into a prize draw. By saying that a winner will be announced each week, you have created an incentive to sign up to your emails and to keep reading them.
You can even include special offers and discounts in your emails. That way people are signing up with the prior knowledge that you will be selling to them.
Of course it’s also important that you actually keep up your end of the bargain. It means means making sure that your emails really are engaging and high quality so that your visitors want to keep reading them. Effective copy and a smart content marketing strategy is something you’ll want to invest in to make the most of your list building effort.
