The only way customers will be interested in the received emails is if they are interested in the products and services your business offers. Therefore, it is extremely important to send emails and target the right audience.
This article will review the Top 7 Special Tips to Build a Successful Email List that will work. If you follow the tips mentioned here, your email list will be efficient and bring you the needed results.
So, if you are ready, let’s start.
Why do you need an email list?
Before we start, let’s figure out the major benefits and reasons why you would need an email list. First of all Email List is an electronic mailing list where you must-have emails from your targeted audience who are going to receive a newsletter about your products, services, etc.
So, why building an email list is important?
- Easy to reach a large number of customers: According to statistics, over 3.9 bln people use email daily. So, when you use email marketing as part of your marketing strategy, you gain an incredible opportunity to reach wider audiences.
- Personalized communication solution: Personalizing communication may be hard; however, email communication allows us to personalize communication.
- Complete control over the list: You have complete access and control over your email list, and you will be able to categorize them accordingly, depending on the purpose of a particular campaign.
- Faster and higher conversion rates: email marketing helps you to generate leads faster due to higher conversion rates than any other form of marketing.
- Can help you launch a new product or service: When your business has a new product, it is extremely important to work on its promotion.
Learn 25 ways to market and promote your online courses.
#1 Add content upgrades
Content Upgrade is a lead magnet that is created specifically to grow an email list and generate leads. Content upgrades are incredibly useful in terms of helping to boost email conversion rates.
Here are some content upgrade ideas for you:
- PDF Blog Posts: This is one of the most popular and easiest ways to offer a content upgrade. You can write a how-to article and just publish it in PDF format on your website.
- Cheat Sheets: This one is another content upgrade that can be easily created and efficiently used in the right context. For example, if you have a “How to” article about boosting website traffic, you can offer a free cheat sheet full of tips, tricks, and tools for better SEO. And users will have to register to get that cheat sheet. Afterward, it will be useful for them and beneficial for you because you will get their emails and add those to your email list.
- Checklists: These can be based on “How to” articles as well. They can be short checklists of steps people have to complete to achieve a specific result or goal. You will be amazed how many leads can generate, especially if the article is on a popular topic. Also, you can offer printable checklists.
- Ebooks: Those are amazing because customers who love to acquire new knowledge about the industry will definitely register to get it. Therefore, you will know that the emails generated have high quality. This means that people will most likely purchase your product if they are interested in the eBook related to it.
- Video or Audio recordings: Those work on the same principle as ebooks. Suppose your customers are interested enough to sign up for those, then you will get high-quality leads that will bring you high conversion rates.
- Guides and infographics: You can also offer multiple free guides and infographics in order to generate leads. Just make sure that you use good designs that improve visual communication and motivate users to register to get those.
- Free trial run periods: When you offer a new product, a free trial run period is a must for customers to trust you.
- Free Course: You can create an introductory free course in order to generate leads. People love free products, so if they find you have some valuable knowledge to offer for free, they will register for the course. After registration, you will collect their email. Next time when you offer a paid service/course, you will be able to send news about it to those who have already registered for the paid ones. Therefore, they will be aware of your teaching style and most likely to purchase the product. That is why it is important to offer high-quality materials.
#2 Include newsletter boxes
What are newsletters? Basically, those are the most common type of email marketing. Email newsletter contains updates and news. The main purpose of newsletters is to keep the existing audience engaged. The crucial part of email marketing is not only the generation of new leads; it is also the development of new strategies aimed at keeping the existing audience. However, the best part of newsletter boxes is that they work great for both existing audiences and generations of new people.
Why would you need to include email newsletter boxes?
- Increased Traffic: Email Newsletters usually contain news, updates, or useful tips and how-tos. And with all of those, if written correctly, you can increase traffic to your website. E.g., put a call to action at the end, such as: to read/download the complete guide, click here (website link).
- Positive Experiences: If you do not spam your customers’ mail but occasionally send them Update Emails, they will associate your brand with a positive experience. They will be sure that you care about them and want to directly share the new products’ information with them.
- Sales: Newsletter boxes are quite useful when you want to increase sales of a product. First of all, if you have a new product, you can launch an email campaign, where your contact will receive the “News” about the product. If your copywriters and marketing specialists do a good job writing high-quality sales copy, it will drive traffic to your website and that particular product. And all of the things mentioned above eventually will lead to conversion rates, and customers who remain interested will purchase the product.
The basic Email Newsletter structure is presented down below:
- Template - choose a ready-to-use template; you can use Mailchimp ones
- Design - you also can design a template from scratch or adjust the one you have chosen
- Copy - copy-paste the marketing/sales copy
- Subject Line - make sure to include a subject line
- CTAs - include Call-to-actions to increase traffic or sales
- Sender’s Name - make it personal so that our customers won’t think some bot is sending all the emails
#3 Organize webinars
The organization of webinars will benefit you in many ways. First of all, you will be able to share your professional knowledge and increase your brand’s awareness. Besides, online webinars help you to create a reputation as an authority on the subject matter.
There are a few steps you have to complete in order to hold a successful online webinar.
Step 1 - Recruit the right speakers and Support Team members
It is essential to recruit the right people for your webinar. The speakers or speakers must know what they are talking about to create a professional impression.
Also, your support team members must be well aware of the technology and have Plan B for any unexpected events during the webinar. Make sure to recruit responsible, productive, and flexible people for those roles.
Step 2 - Create high-quality visuals
Visual Communication is everything nowadays. First of all, you must realize the fact that most people are visual learners and use it in the way that will most benefit you. Your online webinar must include at least a presentation. There are some rules about making a good presentation. Those are:
- Choose contrasting colors
- Avoid “Handwritten” fonts
- Prefer fonts that look solid and are easily readable
- Use images
However, if you want to completely transform and edit your visuals quickly with easy-to-use software, consider using Picsart. Using AI Background, Picsart's feature, you can eliminate any noise cluttering up your photo with a single click. You can also use their other AI tools, such as the automatic photo editor, to instantly improve the quality of any image.
Step 3 - Create an agenda for the webinar
Have a webinar agenda, especially if it is a webinar created to generate more leads. In this case, you have to put extra effort into creating high-quality material. Include themes and topics that are going to be covered during the webinar. Also, give people additional resources and materials that will help them better prepare for the webinar.
Step 4 - Have a practice session
Before the real webinar, you should hold a practice one; it will first help you understand the overall structure and readiness to present the webinar to your real clients. Secondly, the practice session will point out all the weak points that negatively affect the quality of the webinar. Therefore it will provide you with an incredible opportunity to improve.
Step 5 - Set up registration
Decide what tool or platform you are going to use for the webinar, such as - Zoom, WebEx, or others. Some online tools have built-in registration options.
To have the list of new emails and registered people, you can create a form with Google Forms or Quiz Maker and have the required email field. Afterward, you will collect all the emails and set up an email marketing campaign where everyone registered within the form will receive an automatic email with all the details. Also, make sure to share the link to the webinar for the registered users alongside all the instructions they will need to follow in order to participate.
This all is simple when you use Uteach. With Uteach you don’t need a webinar platform and survey software. You just need to add webinar details and prepare your content on your teaching website: Uteach will do staying.
#4 Make course discounts or deals
One of the best working strategies is to build an email list to offer different discounts and attractive deals for various products. This strategy will awaken the Fear of Missing Out, so most people will purchase the product. Using this strategy, you do not have to give away free products; you can just offer discounts and make some money alongside building an email list.
A few tips you can follow are:
- Include Call-to-actions
- Use vivid and contrasting colors - though take a look at the color theory beforehand to avoid mistakes that can drive customers away, instead of making the deal more appealing.
- Your marketing copy for social media about the discount should be short and to the point and play on emotions. Pointing out a problem, then giving a solution is one of the finest working strategies in writing a marketing copy.
- Categorize items that are under discount on your website to make the user experience better
- Encourage users not only to purchase the product and share the deal with their friends and colleagues.
What kind of deals can you offer as an online course creator?
- The First 100 people who register for the course will get it with a 50% discount.
- Bring a friend and get a 20% discount on the course
- Purchase one course and get the second one with a 50% discount.
#5 Create viral contests
If you are truly committed to creating a successful brand, you must understand the vitality of creating and maintaining an email list. Luckily, a contest is one of the easiest methods of growing your email list. Why do contests work? Truth be told, each of us has this instinct of a winner; all of us want to win, so you can use this fact in your marketing campaign.
Create a contest, and offer a prize that motivates people to participate in it. Also, to go viral, you can create interesting challenges and promote them on platforms such as Instagram - Reels and Tik Tok.
Here are a few tips on how to run a good contest:
- Have a specific goal in mind: Your main goal is obviously growing your email list, but what else? Goals should be SMART, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-specific. So, make sure you have a number of people you want to reach with consent; what do you understand by viral? Maybe 1000, maybe 10000. Afterward, create deadlines for yourself and for the contest itself, and keep a specific number of people you expect to have on your email list after the consent. When you have specific objectives, your actions will be designed to achieve those, which is why it is important to have them. Even if you do not achieve the expected results, you will better understand your weak spots and mistakes, so you will do a lot better next time.
- What is the prize? Participants are obviously interested in the prize, so you have to know what to offer to keep them motivated along the way. To offer the best possible prize, you have to know who your audience is. To identify a target client, you can conduct market research, and there are several methods. Also, make sure your giveaway is a service or product that you offer because otherwise, the generated leads won’t have any value. For example, if you are an online course creator, who teaches programming, but the prize you offer is a beauty box, you will attract people interested in beauty. This means that after the consent, those people will be gone or will just ignore any of your emails related to the course, new product updates, etc.
- Create Good Visuals and Choose the Right Platforms: We already talked about the importance of visuals. You have to make sure the post announcing the consent looks modern and minimalistic while still eye-catching. Also, you have to choose the right platforms to promote your consent on. Before publishing the announcement anywhere, conduct some research to understand which platforms your audience uses.
#6 Use social media
Another Special Tip for building a working Email List is connected to the utilization of social media. Luckily for all of us, there are millions of ways ho to do that. Let’s take a look at some:
- Lead Generating Facebook Ad: Facebook is an amazing tool, from the business suite you can activate paid ads, track down the results and target the right audience. Once you have set up your lead-generating Facebook ad, you can take advantage of the Facebook Ad Library to track your ad’s performance, analyze its metrics, and gain valuable insights into your competitors’ advertising strategies.
- Twitter chats: Twitter chats bring like-minded individuals together. You can host a Twitter chat, with regular questions and answers around similar topics. Chats will grow in the audience, and each participant can be your potential lead for your email list.
- Posts on different social media platforms: Post regularly on social media and keep your audience engaged. Occasionally you can do post announcements of free products, or discounted products and add a form to fill out. So, users, who want to get the product will have to register with their emails
#7 Engage your community
It is very important to keep the existing audience engaged, and work on the creation of a community. You can put some effort into creating and maintaining a healthy atmosphere in the community of people eager to learn and self-develop. In order to keep the community engaged, you can open multiple social media groups or even a telegram channel. Don't forget to make quick responses! When someone contacts you on any of these digital marketing channels it is very helpful to have customer service software that automatically creates a ticket. The ticketing system brings all customer conversations from various support channels into one interface. Support agents use these tickets to track and communicate with customers about their issues until they resolve them. In the mediums make sure to post regularly interesting information, announcements and generally polls and quizzes for the users.