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How To Get More Subscribers Without Selling Your Soul!

How To Get More Subscribers Without Selling Your Soul!

Every eager E-Commerce business owner and marketing professional is keen to grow their email subscribers lists. But using the correct methods to grow your list won’t just see more people subscribe. It’ll also improve the quality of your list by weeding out anyone not interested in engaging, and bringing in more people who are.

Every eager E-Commerce business owner and marketing professional is keen to grow their email subscribers lists. But using the correct methods to grow your list won’t just see more people subscribe. It’ll also improve the quality of your list by weeding out anyone not interested in engaging, and bringing in more people who are.

The key to a successful campaign is growing an email list that’s actually willing to engage. That’s why we’ll be covering the best methods to grow your list for businesses who are currently testing the water with their email marketing strategies, as well as those who want to optimise the success of their current campaigns.

email subscribers without selling soul

The 4 Best Ways to Grow Your Email Subscriber List

  1. Your Opt-In Form Should Be Front And Centre
    When someone stumbles across your website, making the subscribe form prominent is a perfect way to ensure you don’t just grab their attention while they’re browsing but for months, or even years to come. Sure, social media fans and followers are important, but information and updates soon get lost in the constant stream of media that your readers are overloaded with on a daily basis. Make sure you give your audience the best chance of catching your ‘Opt-In’ form by placing it upon the primary content window of your webpage. At the same time, do try and find a balance: your visitor came to your site to find content, contact details, or to look something up- not just to get bombarded by forms. Balance your form with genuine content.
  2. It’s Not All About You
    Don’t go on and on about how brilliant your brand or company is as a reason for them to hit subscribe. Show them what’s in it for them and they’re much more likely to sign up to your emails. The best way to tempt your readers to sign up is by offering exclusive deals and fostering that all-important feeling of ‘fear of missing out’. Not only that, but creating niche-specific content is another great perfect way to keep your readers coming back for more. At the same time, don’t make promises that you’re unable to deliver, or sound too good to be true, because this will damage the trust between you and your customers.
  3. Create a White Paper
    White Papers are authoritative guides and reports which helps readers to understand issues, solve problems and make informed decisions. To prepare your paper analyse the data from your social media marketing campaigns to look for the most popular posts that gained the most interest and engagement. If, say, the topic of your paper is ’50 ways to get more retweets’, then you would thoroughly cover all of the techniques and give at least some data on how they work. Show your readers the value of investing time with your content and you won’t go far wrong.
  4. Run a Contest
    Contests are another great way to really boost engagement with your followers, and convince more of them to sign up to your email list. There are many variations of contests that you can use to entice your readers into handing over their email address from trivia to content submissions and basic prize draws. This is also a perfect way of getting your readers to get their friends and followers interested too!

So then: with three different ways of growing your list, what about things that you should avoid?

The Top List Growing Techniques to Avoid

Unsolicited Emails
It’s rule number 1 for a reason. Sending unsolicited emails can not only damage your reputation as a sender, they can also have your emails blacklisted, not to mention that it’s non-compliant. Thanks to spammers, data protection has become a hot topic and upcoming changes (read: GDPR!) mean that organizations who are not in compliance could be charged with heavy fines from buying or obtaining email addresses without permission.

Popovers and Pop Ups
Now, this is bound to be controversial. Everyone’s using pop-ups and popovers these days, and there’s a reason for it; they do get results. But, at the risk of sounding clichéd, at what cost? The new trend of popups that draw a user back in when they move their mouse cursor away from the browser have to be among the most annoying things on the internet!

You have to think of it like this: say for example that of everyone who visits your site 10% will sign up, 50% of people will find what they were looking for and might come back, and 40% will never come back. With popups 20% will sign up, 20% of people will find what they were looking for and might come back, and 60% immediately blacklist your site in their heads and make a note never to return. That’s especially the case for the pop-ups that pop up before your visitor even has a chance to look at the page they’re trying to access. Do you like seeing that when you click through from a search results page? If not, do you think your traffic do?

You’re growing your subscriber list, but at the cost of the rest of your traffic. Maybe your list of subscribers is more important; if so, go ahead and use popups. But if you value repeat traffic, you’ll be better off without them.

Keeping Your Subscribers

Once you have a long, engaged mailing list the real work hasn’t even begun. Maintaining a mailing list of happy subscribers may seem like a pretty daunting task but with these simple tips, you’ll reduce that itch to hit the unsubscribe button:

  • Keep content relevant by segmenting personalising your automated email campaigns.
  • Ensure consistency of frequency when it comes to your emails, find the perfect balance of emails to send in a specific time period using A/B testing.
  • Make sure your emails work over all devices to accommodate for mobile phone email readers.
  • Routinely clean up your mailing list, check for common typos in the email addresses, and remove dormant subscribers.
  • Write clear and concise subject lines.
  • Give your subscribers reasons to stay such as exclusive offers, discounts and early access to sales.

It really is fairly simple—most of the above tips are common sense. If you’re still not sure what exactly draws in subscribers and keeps them there, look at the emails you get from other businesses. Why did you sign up to their newsletter? And what makes you keep engaging with their emails? Think of it that way and you can’t go wrong.