Your website is one of the most effective means for getting email addresses and building your list. Visitors who have taken the time and expended the effort to find and visit you online have demonstrated an interest in your product or service. These folks should be considered qualified leads and getting them to give you their email address for future contact is a top priority.
Build Your Email List On Every Page
Make sure you provide all your visitors the opportunity to opt-in to your mailing list at every opportunity on the pages of your site. Your subscription form should be prominently displayed on your home page. In the website world “prominently” means visible on the initial page view without having to scroll down to see it. You should also use graphics and color to draw attention to your subscription form and catch your visitor’s eye.
7 Proven Ideas For Building Your Email List Online
Incentives – The most important of these 7 ideas is to offer visitors to your pages incentives to sign up. Get this one right and you’ll get more bang for your buck from all the remaining 6 ideas. Write and give away a free PDF white-paper, offer access to special discounts, give away free shipping, offer a chance to win a contest prize etc. and you will increase the percentage of visitors to your site who sign up.
Your PPC Landing Pages – if you are using paid search to drive traffic to your site make sure your opt-in form or a link to your registration form is prominently displayed on the landing page associated with your paid search campaign. Note: it is also helpful to assign a dollar value to your leads and use it to cost justify your spend for your paid search campaigns.
Use Other’s Email Lists – Take a look around for similar businesses that your can form a partnership with. A company that has a similar customer profile to yours but who is not competitive is a perfect match. See if they are interested in sending out a “blind” outbound email promotion to their list on your behalf. and in return, you will agree to do likewise. IMPORTANT: make sure you have worked out some sort of “soft offer” to get the maximum clicks and traffic from the promotion. Focus on getting the maximum traffic and the email names... don’t necessarily go for the direct sale. Offer something free.
Links In Newsletters – look into reciprocal links or banners in email newsletters with complementary content that relates to the same target audience. For example. performance car parts would be of interest to readers of a NASCAR newsletter. This technique of swapping links has the least headaches when the company lists are about the same size. If you don’t have much of a list consider swapping a link on your home page in return.
Use Your House List – include a “forward to a friend” or “refer a collegue” as an option in your out-bound emails. You can generate a low volume of new opt-ins by asking current subscribers to end the email to a friend. Make sure to include a prominent opt-in link on the version of the email that is forwarded to the friend. Your email benefits from the implicit recomendation you get.
Be Social – if you have a social media marketing program offer the opportunity to opt-in to your list here as well.
Signatures & Footers – Add your sign-up link to the footer of every email you send. including personal emails send by your or other employees at your company! This can easily be set up as a default signature in popular email client programs like MS Outlook. Add “Get the latest news and special offers from company X by email” or “sign up for special offers here” to your employee signatures. This is especially useful for customer service and sales teams.