Without an email list, there’s no real foundation you stand on. Email marketing is the lifeblood of a business and for every dollar spent brings $40 back in return.
With high conversions, email marketing is the staple of your business.
Act quickly to create your mailing list and collect emails from the beginning. The longer you delay, the more number of leads are slipping by.
What good is email? Email is the biggest and best way to educate online visitors about your products that you’re going to release, events you’re going to be part of and almost anything. It’s a quick way to create an instant bond.
Email marketing is important because most of your visitors are never coming back. Take a quick look at the data on your analytics. Odds are it says that only 1% of your visitors came back. That’s the truth of running your site. Most people aren’t coming back. But you can solve this alright?
How? By turning these visitors into email subscribers you give them reason and a way to keep coming back to your website.
When you build your audience and keep at it for a long while the number of subscribers skyrocket. This is good news.
Over time if you keep building your list, you will have a broad audience who trust you, follow you and keep running your business no matter what happens to your website.
By having an email list you have multiple means of generating traffic and revenue to your site. And that’s the best way a business is built.
With this guide you’ll know how to establish your business and your future.
Get signed up with an email marketing automation platform
An email marketing platform or service gives you a place to store the contact details of the people who signed.
That’s a rudimentary definition. An email marketing platform wraps in so much. With it, you can set up forms to collect email ids, some have a landing page builder too, it’s a destination to manage so many email subscribers. You can send mails to subscribers from this place.
You can create autoresponders to welcome people and send more emails to your target audience based on where they are in the marketing and sales cycle.
Also you get to do a lot of advanced stuff like tagging subscribers by behavior, fashioning segments, creating a marketing funnel and drip feeding emails.
You get control over the marketing message subscribers see.
Which platform to choose?
There are scores- ranging from converkit to mailchimp, to Aweber, to Getresponse and new ones popping up daily.
Just go with one and see if it fits the bill. If you’ve not got a clue I recommend signing up to Mailchimp because they offer free subscription for up to 2000+ email list subscribers. You pay only when you outgrow this.
It’s a powerful tool. You can grow and scale the business as you grow.
It’s a powerful channel to automate your marketing.
As you grow the pricing moves up as well which means you shell out more but you also earn more with your email list at the time, that it looks like a drop in the bucket.
Sign up to one, create and name your list and start attracting subscribers to it.
Create an automated series of emails
With your email marketing platform, you have the option of automating the set of emails people receive and read. The first in this series is the welcome email that gets sent automatically as people subscribe and confirm their emails. This might include a bit of an introduction on whoyou are and what you do. Trust me when I say this-people quickly forget why they signed up for. And with automation this email gets triggered and sent automatically to anyone who signs up.
It’s important to welcome subscribers as soon as they sign up. That forms the foundation of your relationship. It creates a great first impression.
In the welcome email it’s best if you don’t send any affiliate promotions or try to make money off them.
Hi,
It’s nice to meet you. I am George and I will be guiding you throughout your blogging journey.
Trust me I have over 8 years of experience running successful blogs.
In that spirit, this blog is my platform to teach you all my strategies.
Get started today.
Meanwhile if you have questions/problems reach out to me and I will try to solve them as best as I can.
I hope we can journey together.
Thanks for being a loyal subscriber.
In the coming weeks I will send out more tips and tricks.
George
This is the welcome email.
Few others send an x part series of emails designed to nurture and educate an audience online.
For example, let’s say you’re a fitness freak who runs this awesome fitness blog. As people sign up you promise them a series of newsletters that will help them get rock solid abs in 3 months flat. The newsletter can be a 6 part series with pictures. Or a ten part series sent over 10 days.
Make it byte sized with enough actionable information. Don’t overload subscribers with information at this stage.
Tell subscribers who you are and create emails with a sense that educates and informs them rather than sending something that comes across as off-putting.
Beyond that there are multiple ways you can set up your auto responder to send the correct emails.
You could set up to send new posts via email with a short blurb, you could sequence product promotions, you could talk about your new course or anything else you’re launching.
One or two emails a week is a good frequency. And this way you’re not overdoing it. An email platform is a great way to sell both your products and set up affiliate promotions. You can choose it to go either way.
Use a landing page builder
There are several landing page building tools you can use say Unbounce.
The tools are great for setting up subscription forms, optin forms and adding lead generation forms on the side bar in between blog posts and everywhere else.
With a landing page builder you can create attractive forms that help captivate readers.
You could choose unbounce, optinmonster or any other tool to create these optin forms. Adding popups and welcome mats are a great way to increase the number of leads you generate- especially adding an exit intent popup.
Use content upgrades
Content upgrades are a must-have bribe to convince readers to subscribe.
With content upgrades you can get the email ids of your subscribers in a more targeted way.
Let’s see how this works.
Let’s say you wrote an article around dumbbells. The guide covers all possible angles around dumbbells, their pricing, features, reviews, top selling products and so on. It’s a buyer’s guide.
But people reading the content aren’t primed to come back, as we saw earlier. So, ultimately if 100 people visit the post, 5 to 10 convert. You’re losing at least 90 people who were interested in the said product.
However, if you write a guide on 10 best dumbbell exercises—what are the odds that people reading the content would find it so useful that they’d be willing to give you their email id in exchange for the said guide.
This highly targeted bonus content is a content upgrade that gets you email addresses. Studies show that 5 to 10x the usual number sign up with highly relevant content upgrades.
The plain vanilla call to action like subscribe to get updates, or get my new post in your email don’t work. Period.
People need something very valuable.
For Sleeknote, adding a content upgrade improved their number of leads by over 23%.
At the start of their email marketing strategy, Sleeknote went about creating content upgrades for every post they wrote. And they wrote tons. A bad strategy I’d say.
Ultimately having burnt out and failing to see the value of so many content upgrades they decided they needed a new strategy.
What?
They figure most of their posts were either in one of the four categories below
Conversion rate optimization
Email marketing and optimization
List building
Growth marketing
So… they started by clubbing together posts in these categories and creating a category specific content upgrade they could use on the blog posts relevant to that category.
So from dozens of upgrades they now had only a few.
Every time an article on email marketing went live they used the shortcode for the upgrade around email marketing, copy pasted it and voila they had their customized upgrade ready to drive leads.
This way they create highly targeted upgrades and drove highly relevant leads. And they din’t have to create new ones, write copy and images for them and hope they worked.
With very few resource usage they were able to instantly improve their number of leads.
Bribe them with a lead magnet
Content upgrades are great. The downside? They don’t really work everywhere.
Content upgrades are a nice bet if you use them on high traffic blog posts. Otherwise the whole effort of a content upgrade on a post that barely gets 10 readers isn’t going to justify the efforts.
So, what else can you do?
Use a lead magnet. Instead of asking people to subscribe to updates ask them to subscribe so they get a list of 100 niche ideas or 100 exercises that they can do at home or how anti oxidants are bad for them. You get the idea. Something that’s a core problem in your industry and something that you can solve with your lead magnet. Such pdf downloads attract people.
You could also send a series of educational emails. A set of training emails and so on. This incentive lets them join your list.
Use quizzes
The quiz above gained thousands of shares and is in the format of celebrity type quizzes. The most popular New Yorker article in 2013 was not an article. It was a quiz. Come 2020 quizzes have completely flooded the market.
There are several types of quizzes you can use
For example on social media- Which (blank) are you? This one is a popular quiz format on social media channels. Or use celeb type quiz.
They tap at the ego of the user by asking, which disney princess are you? Or which popular actor are you? Or your face resembles who. We all have an innate desire to be popular and these quizzes tap at that.
Figure out a template you might want to use and once done you will be able to customize that based on trending topics or based on your niche.
You could ask a personality quiz where you tap into personality biases. We like to hear good things about ourselves and this is where such quizzes find a place.
These encourage people to participate.
This is how you generate leads from social media.
Where to place optin forms
On your website not every place is equal when it comes to placing optin forms. Some places are better than others. Some worse.
You could place the optin on your about us page which is generally the second most visited page on any site
- Or below content
- Above fold
- Between posts
- On the sidebar
There are huge number of triggers to choose if you’re popping up pop up forms.
You could trigger them at the start say 5 seconds of a visitor’s visit.
Or 35% scroll
You could trigger exit intent popups or welcome mats that take up the entire page. And so on.
Conclusion
Ultimately when it comes to generating leads, there’s no one size fits all solution you can use. You can’t succeed with this in a single day. It takes time and lots of patience.
Create great content and relatively good upgrades.
Use some of the tools I mentioned in this post and above all use a good lead magnet to drive leads.
Content upgrades combined with lead magnets put together are an infallible straetgy to genertae leads and sign ups.
Building and growing an email list is a must do process that you shouldn’t put on the back burner.
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