10 Top Tips to Grow Your Email List

Posted: 08 Dec 2013 12:51 PM PST

The rise of social media saw many bloggers join the race to build Facebook likes, Twitter followers and LinkedIn connections to grow tribes on social media. These all work well and provide a way for bloggers to distribute, gain attention and amplify their content.

As Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks kept changing the rules bloggers started to realise that one basic tactic had been forgotten that would give them more control.

The art and science of building an email list.

Growing your email list is something that should not be ignored by any blogger and should be included in your marketing tactics from day one.

Tips to grow your email list

So what are 10 ways as a blogger to grow your email list?

1. Provide an opt in email box

This is the most obvious and simplest. Provide an optin email box on your homepage. Put it near the top right corner or even in your top banner. Placing it down the bottom of your page will reduce its effectiveness.

2. Offer a free ebook

You need to provide an incentive for people to sign up to your email list and one of the best tactics is to give away a free ebook. It doesn’t have to be long. My free ebook is 10,000 words and over 50 pages. It can be 10-15 pages and just a few thousand words. Take the time to write and design a professional looking ebook.

3. Provide a light-box pop up

This is sometimes argued about as light box pop ups can be seen as intrusive. The reality is that they work and are used by many top blogs to great effect. You may find that by putting the settings to a pop up that appears after 3o-40 seconds may work best rather than hit them straight away after landing on your blog.

4. Do some guest blogging

If you are just starting out and don’t have any traffic then getting people to your blog is the first battle. Guest blogging can provide a platform to gain some attention and then when they go to visit your site after reading your guest article you can then sign them up by having the first 3 tactics in place ready to capture that important email.

5. Run a webinar

A webinar can be a very effective way to build your list. So invite a guest or run your own and build that email list by offering a free webinar.

6. Use annotations in your YouTube videos

YouTube has the option of providing annotations that provide a call to action to subscribe to your email list. Use every tactic at your disposal to build that list.

7. Use Slideshare Pro

Slideshare Pro is the premium version of Slideshare and offers a pop up box to capture emails and leads. Slideshare is often underrated but can be very effective for not only creating attention about your blog but capturing leads.

8. Offer a free video

If you don’t feel inclined to write an ebook put together a free “How To” video. Many people would prefer to watch a video to reading an ebook.

9. Add an email optin on your Facebook page tabs

Using a Facebook app like ShortStack can enable you to ask for people to join your email list on Facebook.

10. Provide a free giveaway on your Facebook page

To accelerate your list building on Facebook offer a free coupon, run a competition or provide a free giveaway as an incentive.

How to improve your email contact form conversion rates

Building the list is one thing but optimizing it so that you increase your conversion rates is another.

Singlehop put together an infographic after doing some research that showed some interesting insights into improving the conversion rates on an email contact form.

Here are some of their revelations.

Only ask for a name and email to improve conversion rates
The quality of your leads increases by adding more fields
Expedia increased its profit by $12 million by removing one field in their email contact form
Marketo saved over $10 per lead by removing one field
One company increased its conversion rate by 90% by changing the call to action copy tense from second person to first person

For more insights check out the infographic below from SingleHop.

What about you?

Are you building an email list? Are you offering an incentive? What works for you?

Look forward to hearing your stories and insights in the comments below.

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