Do you want to grow your email list? If so, you’re not alone. Business owners around the world use email marketing as a way to build their brand, increase engagement, and boost their sales.
One of the biggest problems people face when they decide to start using email marketing is lead generation. You can have an expert strategy in place once someone subscribes, but it won’t do you any good if no one is signing up for your email list.
Similarly, if you don’t know how to optimize your emails once people start subscribing, you may see a dramatic shift in your engagement, traffic, and sales. An initial growth spike can quickly fizzle out if you’re not adamant about engaging with your customers while working to improve their experience with your brand.
Today we are going to address this problem and show you four marketing tips you can use for explosive growth. Our tips will cover various parts of your website, social media accounts, and email campaign.
The first aspect of your campaign we are going to explore is your lead generation strategy. After showing you how to generate subscribers, we are going to explore different ways you can optimize your emails.
Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
Create an Appealing Lead Magnet
Lead magnets, in a nutshell, are a value proposition you make to the people visiting your website. The goal is to convince the lead to accept your offer by signing up for your email list. When a new person lands on your site, there’s a slim chance they will instantly give you their personal information for nothing in return.
When you add a lead magnet to the mix, you’ll see an increase in email subscribers. People love to feel like they are getting a deal, and if you have an exceptional magnet ready to go, you can bet that many people will accept your offer.
There are many different kinds of lead magnets to choose from, and your choice will vary based on your industry and marketing goals. Here’s an example: a social media marketing firm may want to offer consumers a checklist on building their first business social profile. If someone is on their site, there’s a good chance they are new to this style of marketing and will likely sign up in exchange for the lead magnet. Let’s look at an example.
As you can see, the value proposition here is straightforward. Once the user realizes that they need to grow their list, they are far more likely to accept this offer and sign up.
Online storefronts that sell physical products can use discounts and promotions as a way to get subscribers to sign up with an account. Let’s say a store sells exercise equipment. When a consumer lands on their site, they might see a popup that encourages them to sign up to get 20% off of their first order.
If you’re already on the site and thinking about buying something, why on earth would you turn down this lead magnet? The truth is, not many people in that position will turn away such a good offer.
You can increase the odds of getting consumers to subscribe by showing social proof on your magnet. Some businesses list quotes from prominent figures praising the company; others list how many people use their product or service. These tools help build trust and can encourage even more people to subscribe to your list.
Gamify Your Marketing Strategy
Gamification marketing is an excellent strategy that’s used on websites, as well as social media, to generate more engagement and email subscribers. It’s a strange concept to imagine at first, but games and marketing merge well when appropriately implemented.
Ideally, consumers will enjoy their experience with your business, which results in more traffic on your site. When people have a good time with your brand, they are more likely to remember your logo and name long after they’ve navigated to a different page.
It’s important to remember that brand awareness is the first step in the sales funnel process. Consumers have to know you exist before they can become customers.
Spin-to-win wheels are extremely popular with consumers, regardless of your industry. These games appear as popups when someone lands on your homepage. Once the popup loads in, they will see a spinning wheel that they can stop by clicking a button. There are various prizes on the wheel, including discounts and free gifts. Once someone clicks the wheel, they have the option to enter their email address to claim their prize. It’s not hard to imagine generating thousands of leads annually using this tactic.
Now let’s talk about how to gamify your social media strategy. The most common way to reach a large portion of the over 3 billion people on social media is with an online giveaway.
Before we explain, let’s look at an example.
The contest above us is for a free annual subscription to a premium WordPress plugin. People on social media love contests and games, and you can see countless people participating in contests on social media every day.
Notice the different ways to enter. Do you see the last one? By simply signing up for the email newsletter, participants are entered into the giveaway. Imagine adding an entry option where you encourage people who join to tag three friends for another entry ticket. If only one of their friends enters and tags their friends, you can see how your social reach and subscriber count can potentially snowball.
People love playing games, especially in social settings. Gamification will help you generate more brand awareness while growing your lead list.
Make Personalization a Priority
The digital boom over the past decade resulted in an online marketplace that manages to be both wide open and crowded. Let us explain. It’s possible to open a business from anywhere in the world, selling anything you like, which makes it an open market. But that same freedom resulted in a flood of companies all selling the same thing, making the market crowded.
Consequently, consumer patience for a business that doesn’t cater to their needs is basically zero. Why? Because they know there are countless alternatives out there. People generally won’t engage much with a brand that doesn’t actively work to build a personalized experience.
Personalization marketing is a strategy where you’ll use information you have to create customized emails for your subscribers. Sending out targeted emails that use this technique resulted in a staggering 26% more opens.
Implementing this strategy starts with your email signup form. If you don’t have one, invest in a form builder plugin that is capable of handling conditional logic. Personalization requires learning more about your target audience, and forms that change with your consumer’s responses will set the standard for personalized offers in the future.
For example, if you wanted to personalize emails for your online store that sells exercise equipment, you might ask people what their fitness goals are when they sign up. You can use a checkbox to let them choose between various styles of weight training and equipment. The conditional logic form will guide them through a couple more optional questions for an even more personal experience.
Now that you know what kind of content they want to receive, you can start segmenting your leads and delivering personalized content to their inbox. Let’s say someone said they were interested in fat loss articles; you would exclude posts about bodybuilding because that’s not what they want to see. Personalizing emails means consumers are more likely to open, read, and engage with your messages.
One more note here — don’t forget to create personalized subject lines when you’re creating your email campaigns. You might be surprised to learn that 33% of people open emails based on the headline alone. If you can include the name of the subscriber in the subject, you’ll drastically increase your chances of getting your message opened. Alternatively, you can customize your subject to reflect the consumer’s interests on your site through retargeting.
A/B Test Your Campaigns
Finally, we are going to talk about A/B testing. If you’re not familiar, A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the process of changing your lead magnet or email slightly. The goal is to see if small changes yield big results in the number of people that subscribe to your website.
The changes vary depending on your marketing goals, software, and willingness to test. In most cases, calls to action, text copy, colors, and positions are swapped for half of your subscribers or website visitors. You can compare the results from both campaigns and determine if the change had a positive impact on your business.
Let’s look at how a split test would look on your lead magnet.
The change above is very subtle. The color of the CTA box is now orange and absolutely pops off the page. As you can see, this small change resulted in a nearly 30% increase in conversions.
When you’re testing your emails, you have plenty of options you can tweak. The most common changes marketers make are to the subject line, images, and call to action. A simple change, such as adding an emoji to your subject line, might be just the thing you need to boost your engagement rate.
It’s important to remember that A/B testing is a waiting game. You can’t make a change, wait a week, and make a determination about your variable. We advise keeping the change in action for at least a month so you can compare measurable analytics data.
Back to You
Email marketing is, without a doubt, one of the most valuable tools you have at your disposal. Now you know how to generate more leads for your list, and fine-tune UX for your customers. As you start building your list, you should continue thinking about ways you can personalize emails for your subscribers, and encourage them to engage with your website through gamification. A/B testing various aspects of your emails and lead magnets will help you make guided data-driven decisions and overall improve the quality of your marketing strategy.