Email marketing only works if you have people to email. Whether you’re just starting out or attempting to grow an existing list, here are 13 things you can do to encourage more subscribers.
- Offer an exclusive report – write a white paper on an important topic in your field and offer it free to people who sign up.
- Automatically sign up all customers – when someone checks out on your website, include the email subscription as an opt-out.
- Promise future discounts – launch a discount program exclusively for email subscribers.
- Introduce a loyalty program – rewards programs that incentivize future purchases should include an email signup process.
- Promote your list on social media – use your company’s social media presence to ask people to sign up.
- Pay to promote your list – Facebook ads are a good way to pay to promote an email list, especially if you know email subscribers’ value to your company.
- Put your signup form front and center – don’t hide the form on some low-level page of your site. Let them signup from any page.
- Encourage sharing and forwards – your subscriber’s friends and colleagues might be perfect targets, so give them tools to share and forward your emails.
- Free trials/samples – can you offer a free trial of your service or a free sample of your product in exchange for an email signup?
- Develop partnerships – are there other companies or websites that you might partner with who can promote your email registration to their members/users?
- Create better content – low subscriber numbers might suggest you need to come up with more engaging content that people will be more excited to sign up for.
- Make it easier to sign up – limit the amount of information you ask for from email subscribers or use a one-click option like Facebook connect.
- Don’t give up – growing a subscriber list doesn’t happen overnight. For many it’s a slow, gradual process that yields real results over time.