No matter how much you prioritize email marketing in your business model, you need to use this important medium one way or the other. As a matter of fact, most business turning to digital marketing do so with the intent of reaching their customers through email.

Most internet marketers offer so much weight to email marketing that 33% say that building email lists is the main reason they are investing in content marketing.

The first thing that comes to mind when trying to increase email open rate is to drive more traffic to your money website. But there is no point of doing that if your website has a low conversion rate, to begin with. Trying to generate more leads from a website with a low conversion rate is like filling a leaking bucket.

Growing your email list

Building an email list is essential for the growth of any business.

Let me paint you a scenario. Would you rather have 2,000 visitors with a 1% conversion rate or 1,000 visitors with a 2% conversion rate? Shifting the focus from traffic to conversion will earn you the same amount of visitors at nearly half the cost.

A great way to grow your email list is by using handy tools that help you extract email addresses from Facebook and LinkedIn. ContactOut is a simple browser extension that helps you find email addresses and phone numbers of anyone on LinkedIn.

The image below shows the cost-effectiveness of email marketing as compared to other advertising mediums.

Acquiring a new customer is the most budget straining and difficult part of a business. This article will teach you how to effectively do email marketing in order to increase sales.

1. Lead Generation Offers

The best way to build your email list and lead generation is to offer a free giveaway that requires an email opt-in. Not only is this technique non-intrusive, but it also offers something unique and useful to the interested visitors, such as a free guide ebook or a research white paper. Your potential leads are worth a valuable giveaway so make sure it is worth their time and energy.

One of the most common practices in marketing is a quid pro quo. In other words, you have to offer a freebie in exchange for their email address. In technical terms, this offer is known as a lead magnet.  A lead magnet can be anything that is transferable over the internet e.g plugin, ebook, short course or a video series.

The goal here is to create an irresistible lead magnet that is valuable to your reader.  Something that is a painkiller to him. For example, you own a flower shop, and want to bring in more money, which of the below lead magnet will you prefer

• Insights into how to increase your business
• How to double your sales in a Flower shop

Just the wording of it makes all the difference. Most of you will choose option “B” as it is a painkiller specific to your domain.

How to create a perfect lead magnet

The first and foremost step is to figure out the pain of your readers. You can do this by communicating with them, encouraging them to fill out questionnaires or go through online forums or message boards like Reddit and Quora. Getting Referrals To Grow Your Sales is one another Lead magnet that is widely used

Figure out the best way your readers consume content i.e. video, audio, read books etc.  One way to achieve this is to see what your competitors are doing and try to replicate that in a more ingenuitive way.

Write a headline to which the reader is hooked on. A well-known formula goes like this

How to [Benefit] in [Time Period] Without [Pain] e.g.

How to increase sales in 3 months without spending money

Let’s look at a webinar announcement from Mr Michael Hyatt

All you need to do is to figure out what triggers your audience, apply to the formula above a viola!

2. Use Lead Generation Feature Box on Website

Even some of the most high profile websites can intrude the user experience with annoying pop up sign up boxes and still may not be able to win new leads. A non-intrusive and user-friendly way to do so is to use opt-in future boxes carrying one of the most prominent opt-in offers, which the reader can see without having their browsing experience interrupted.

A good example is a feature box shown below used by Drip. Drip is the first ECRM–an E-commerce CRM designed for building personal and profitable relationships with your customers at scale.

3. Email Registration for Business Events

One of the effective techniques of collecting email addresses from a large number of potential leads is to do it offline, especially during business events where doing so would not seem too solicitous. Registration for events is an easy way to do so. Apart from events, promoting offers for email registration on other offline collateral can also prove helpful.

The data shows that email will continue to play a very important role in the event organizer’s promotional strategy. According to the latest events industry benchmark report, 40% of marketers believe email marketing is the most effective channel for event promotion.

A recent study has shown how the major marketing strategies stack against each other.

The first 3 make up for 83% of the marketing budgets allocated to companies. Consider the fact that you can obtain email addresses of people coming to your events with the help of a simple event registration form. Now you can use these email is the 3rd most used marketing medium i.e. email marketing.

While attending the Mobile World Congress 2018, Contentstudio employed this strategy. We were able to get around 700 email address of VC, investors and other executives.

This brought a huge boost not only to our sales and marketing departments but also became the basis of our weekly newsletter and email marketing campaign.

4. Conduct an online feedback survey

Carrying out feedback surveys requiring email addresses to complete is one effective way to include potential leads to become a part of your email marketing target audience. Some websites also frequently use polls which require registration to show results are one way to build the email list.

4 pointers to keep in mind while designing a successful email survey are

• The reason behind the survey

The first thing you should do before designing a survey is to know the reason behind it. What’s the point you’re trying to prove. This will be the logic behind your questions and the type of questions you will need to ask.

• Research demographic

To pick the best way to design and distribute your survey, know who you are going to ask the questions to. Research the demographics of the people for which are questions are intended for. Have more than one demographic? You might want more than one survey.

• Increase your survey sample size

Healthy sample size can make all the difference between the success and failure of your survey. Estimating the number of people you need to have responded to your survey will make sure that any analyses that you run on the data you collect are a strong basis for good decisions. This “sample” of people needs to be big enough to be an accurate estimate of your target demographic.

• Pick the right moment to send your survey

The timing of your dispatch will determine who answers your survey. This could be a strain on your budget as not selecting the right time will influence the number of people replying. Not sure exactly when the right people might be around? Collecting survey responses for at least a week can make sure you’re pulling in a broad range of people and opinions.

5. Maintain quality and engaging email content

Finally, there is no point in building your email list if you have nothing substantial to talk about. Establish a quality email newsletter which should be populated with relevant and engaging content, and be regular with it. ContentStudio’s content discovery feature built using RSS feed reader helps you with the content ideas that will get more engagement than usual ones. Remember, you just cannot talk about promos and offers, or your built-up list will disappear faster than you would realize.

The more targeted the lead magnet is, the better your chances are to closing a sale. one way to do this is by providing your reader with a content upgrade. Another way is content curation of blogs that you think are worth reading and sharing to all social channels via social media management tools and it will get you engagement in lesser time.

A content upgrade is kind of a bonus which the reader shall receive once they have shared their email address. A content upgrade complements a piece of content on your site by giving the user a way to take action on a specific piece of content immediately. or is offered as an additional piece of content or tool that builds on the original.

Mr Brain Dean of backlinko was able to increase his conversation rate by a factor of 785% by offering a content upgrade to his reader. With his groundbreaking piece titled “Google’s 200 Ranking Factors”, he created a checklist to provide his readers with instructions on how to take advantage of the 10 most important Google ranking factors and added two CTA’s on the page.

First one

Second one

 

A good HTML email template can help you draft a good email body. You should construct the body of your email in a way that leads the reader toward the email’s call to action (CTA). Furthermore, your email copy should be concise to prevent the reader from losing interest.

How to create a perfect content upgrade

The first thing you need to do it to identify the piece of content that has generated you the most traffic. You can do this by going into Google Analytics and tracking the traffic on your blog posts. Now you want to upgrade it.

The most popular content upgrades include e-books, reports, video tutorials, and checklists.

If you choose a long-form blog post for content up-gradation, the easiest and by far the most successful upgrade is the checklist.

After that add your call to action buttons. The most suitable places to add CTA’s in a long-form blog post are in the beginning, middle and the end.

6. Email signup via text messages

On many occasions, companies do not have access to the email accounts for is to launch an email sign up a campaign via text messages. Easily accessible tools such as Textiful could be used for launching bulk text-to-join campaigns, which can effectively extract email addresses from a large number of customers and potential leads. Engage an established email marketing agency with the knowledge of local customers to make the most out of this technique.  

The downside is that you will have to pay for the service as well as the plan you choose. Sometimes startups do not have enough resources to hire an external agency for SMS marketing.  An easy point to start from is to send messages to everybody in your contact list and ask them for email id. Nowadays there are quite a few online tools available that can do it for you. Below is an example for your viewing

7. Adding a blog signup form

It sounds like a given but it’s amazing how many companies lack an email signup form for their blog on their website. Whether or not you are too proud of your blog content at the moment, there is no point giving up even a few potential subscribers who end up stumbling upon your posts when you would least expect.

8. Social media call-to-action features

One of the best things about social media is the convenience of access to information. Online readers are more likely to take action when the call-to-action is well placed with relevant content. Adding the “Sign up” button on Facebook, or putting down a call to action for an opt-in campaign in the cover photo of the social media pages could help interested users take instant action.

With the number of users engaging on social media increasing so rapidly, the need for a call to action on your business page seems ever so necessary.

9. Resurrect your dead old email databases

Sometimes online marketing managers are sitting on a pot of gold without even realizing it because often it is buried under the rubble of other unimportant things. While you should devote your resources to fish for new accounts, you should make sure that you drain every last drop of your old email database as well. Engage an email marketing agency and send out a re-opt-in message to old contacts, and perhaps up the ante with an offer, and who knows what results in it could bring.

Conclusion

A healthy and responsive email list should be one of the top priorities of any business. It is crucial to maintain a clean email list to ensure high deliverability with your email marketing efforts.

Working to increase conversions instead of traffic will lead to faster growth of your email list.

There are some really great tools in the market that can help you boost your conversion rate.

What techniques do you use to boost your email conversion rates?