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The following excerpt is from Susan Gunelius’ book Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing for Business. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | IndieBound
Email marketing doesn’t work unless you build a list of people to send messages to who are interested in your products or services. If you’ve captured email addresses from your prior customers, then you have a great head start. So let’s dig into the task of growing your list.
Here are three key steps to growing your email list:
Step 1: Develop Relevant Opt-In Offers
The first step to growing your email marketing list is to develop an offer with a high enough perceived value that your target audience is willing to provide their email addresses in exchange for it. Your offer could be an amazing weekly newsletter, a discount on a future purchase, a free trial or demonstration of your product, or a free tangible item, which marketers refer to as an incentive or lead magnet. If your offer isn’t valuable enough to your target audience, it doesn’t matter how much you promote it online and offline—no one will be interested enough to take action. That means not only won’t you get traffic to your online opt-in form, but you also won’t get any subscribers.
With that said, an opt-in form that doesn’t promise a special offer or free content as a lead magnet could simply promote all the great content you’ll share in your email newsletter. For example, your opt-in form could simply say, “Sign up now so you don’t miss the important news and tips you need to be successful.” You can get more specific with your promise with copy that says, “Subscribe now and get a critical tip to grow your business every week delivered directly to your inbox.” These examples demonstrate that you don’t have to give anything more away than the promise of useful and meaningful information to motivate people to subscribe to your email marketing list.
Step 2: Create Effective Online Opt-In Forms
You can create opt-in forms directly in most email marketing tools. It’s a very simple process, but there’s usually a problem: Most opt-in form designs offered within email marketing tools are very basic. You might be limited by the layout, colors, and even the amount or placement of copy. If you’re serious about growing your email marketing…
