Successful Business

12 Proven Ways to Build Your Email List

It makes a lot of sense to build your own email list. Visitors to your website will come and go and it is likely that you will not see the majority of them ever again. When you can capture their email address you will be able to communicate with them and get them back to your website.

An email list is a valuable asset. You can send out emails to your subscribers promoting products and services that are related to your niche and make a lot of money. Promote your own products and services or become an affiliate and promote affiliate offers for commissions.

Email marketing is still the most effective way to reach your target audience. As emails are personal, your subscribers are far more likely to open them and respond to them than with any other form of promotion. Follow the advice and guidance in this special report to build a responsive email list.

1. Create A Valuable Incentive

The first step to build your email list is to create a free incentive that your target audience wants. These days, your visitors are not going to give up their email address easily. They probably receive too many emails as it is, and they know that you are going to send them promotional emails.

Find out what your audience wants and create an incentive around this. Your incentive could be a special report like this one in PDF format. You could also create a video, or series of videos that provide valuable information. Identify the issues that your audience has in your niche and answer the questions that they have with your incentive.

Your incentive must be high-quality. When your subscriber reads or watches your incentive, they will form an opinion of you immediately. If your incentive is of poor quality then your subscribers will perceive that your emails will be low-quality too and they will want to unsubscribe from your list.

Give your incentive a powerful and enticing title. Create an image for your incentive such as an eBook cover. If you do not have the skills to do this then go to Fiverr.com and find a good freelancer to do this for you for a few dollars. Make your incentive the best it can be.

2. Sign Up To A High-Quality Autoresponder Service

An autoresponder service will allow you to create your email lists and add email sequences that will be delivered automatically when someone joins your list. There is also a broadcast feature with these services where you can manually create an email and send this to all of your subscribers whenever you choose.

We recommend that you use an established autoresponder service that has a good track record. Email deliverability is everything so you need to choose an autoresponder service that has high deliverability rates. If your subscribers do not receive your emails, they cannot respond to them!

In our opinion, the best autoresponder services are provided by Get Response and Aweber. Both of these services have high rates of email deliverability and many great features that you can use. With both of these services you will pay around $15 to $20 a month to get started. As your email list grows you will have to pay a higher monthly fee.

You may see a lot of advertising for cloud autoresponder services that are available for a one-off payment. These sound like a great deal until you realize that you need to use an SMTP service to send your emails and this can work out more expensive than a conventional autoresponder service as your list grows.

When you first use your autoresponder service you will need to create a list to add your email contacts to. Usually you can create as many lists as you want. Once this is done you will be able to create a web form or an opt in form that you can add to your landing pages to capture the email addresses of your visitors. This is all very easy to do.

3. Create High Converting Landing Pages

Your landing page is critical to obtain new subscribers to your email list. It needs to look professional and provide all of the benefits of your free incentive so that visitors to the page will want to get it immediately.

A squeeze page contains a headline, a sub headline, usually a bulleted list of benefits, an image of your incentive and your opt in form. When a visitor arrives at your squeeze page they will only have two choices:

1. Join your email list
2. Lave the page

You do not want any other distractions on your squeeze page. If you provide links to your terms and conditions and privacy pages (which you should), then arrange this so that they open in a new tab so that your visitor does not have to leave the squeeze page.

The best squeeze pages can provide very high conversions. If your incentive is what your audience wants and the copy you have used on the page gets them excited then you are going to have a lot of success here.

A landing page is different to a squeeze page. You will need to use a landing page if you are going to use PPC or social media advertising services which we will discuss later. Your landing page will contain your email opt in form but it will have a lot more content on it than a squeeze page.

It is a good idea to tell a story with your landing page and also you can provide statistics that will encourage your visitors to sign up for your email list. Your visitors need to relate to the story on your landing page. Maybe they are facing a problem in their niche and you tell them how you overcame the same problem. Full details are available in your incentive.

You can use video in your landing page if you want. People prefer to watch videos these days so create a video that tells the same story. Provide the story in text format as well for those that prefer to read and to keep the advertising platforms happy.

As with a squeeze page, you need to only give your visitor two choices which is to sign up for your email list or leave the page. You can find examples of these landing pages and squeeze pages online. It is highly likely that your competitors will have an email list and use landing pages to achieve these. Don’t copy what they do. Just use these examples for inspiration.

4. Test Your Landing Pages

Before you start to drive a lot of traffic to your landing pages it is best if you test them first. One of the easiest ways to do this is to create a pay per click (PPC) campaign with Google or Microsoft. In order to do this, you will need to perform some keyword research for your niche.

You can use the free Google Keyword Planner tool for your keyword research. Think about the main keyword term that describes your niche such as “make money online” and enter this as a “seed keyword”. The Google Keyword Planner will return many related keywords to this term that you can save in a spreadsheet.

To generate more keywords, change your seed keyword a bit. For the “make money online” example you could use “earn money online” or “make money on the Internet”. Having a list of niche keywords is always a good idea as it will help you to optimize the posts on your website so that you have a chance of them ranking on the first page of the search results.

Creating a new PPC campaign is relatively straight forward. You will need to create an ad and then enter your keywords in specific groups. Enter the URL of your landing page and then adjust your bids for what you want to pay.

With PPC ads you only pay when a search engine user clicks on your ad and ends up on your landing page. You need to measure the number of clicks that you are generating and how many of these result in email subscribers. This is your conversion rate.

You could do a test of 100 clicks and then pause your PPC campaign. If your conversion rate is low then take a good look at your landing page to try and identify why this is the case. Make tweaks to your pages and test again.

Your aim here is to get your landing pages to convert at the highest level so that when you start generating a lot of traffic to them you will get the maximum number of new email subscribers. It will not cost you that much to test your conversions with PPC ads. Microsoft Ads tend to be a lot cheaper than Google Ads so you can use these.

5. Create Engaging Emails

When your visitors sign up for your email list you want to ensure that they stay. You will achieve this by providing them with engaging emails on a regular basis. There is no need for you to bombard your subscribers with several emails every day. This might upset them and they could unsubscribe.

But you do need to keep in touch with your subscribers on a regular basis. If you don’t, they will soon forget about you. With new email subscribers we recommend that you send them at least one new email every day to start with. You want them to get used to receiving emails from you.

Use your emails to prove to your subscribers that you are an authority in your niche. When they perceive that you are an expert, they will trust you a lot more. Gaining trust with your email subscribers is critical. A subscriber that trusts you is far more likely to follow through on anything that you recommend.

Plan your emails in advance. It is essential that you provide your subscribers with value and not just send them promotional offers. People do not like to be sold to and are likely to unsubscribe fast if all you do is send them offers.

When you are promoting an offer make sure that it is high-quality. If you promote a low-quality offer, the subscribers that take your advice and purchase it are not going to be happy with you. They are going to blame any bad experiences that they had on you as you were the one that recommended the product or service.

Pay careful attention to your subject lines. Don’t use the same subject lines that everyone else does. These days it is common for product vendors to provide affiliates with email swipe files. Everyone else that is promoting the offer will have these swipe files as well, so change the subject lines to increase your chances of your subscribers opening your emails.

People tend to receive a lot of emails these days so you need to stand out from the crowd. We recommend that you always ask your new subscribers to provide their first name with your opt in form. When you do this, you will be able to personalize your subject lines and emails for your subscribers by inserting their name.

Providing value to your email subscribers is of paramount importance. You do not have to include a promotion in all of your emails.

6. Promote Your Incentive On Your Website

Make sure that there is a link to your squeeze page or landing page on every page of your website. When your visitors arrive to your site you need to tell them about your incentive and the benefits of joining your email list.

If you are using the WordPress blogging platform for your website then you can add an image of your incentive to the side bar. An alternative to this is to create a footer with the benefits of your incentive that appears on every page.

Visitors are coming to your website anyway so this is a free method of promoting your incentive and email list. When you publish new content on your website be sure to add a call to action (CTA) to your squeeze page. Tell your readers how they will benefit from receiving your free incentive and also being a subscriber to your email list.

7. Run A Contest And Get Involved With Giveaways

People like to win stuff. You can run a contest on Facebook or another social platform or even your own website. In order to enter your contest, your visitors must sign up for your email list. If you make the prize attractive enough, and spread the word wide enough, you can get a large number of email subscribers quickly using this method.

A giveaway event is different to a contest. With a giveaway event, every one that signs up for your email list will receive something valuable. In some niches, such as make money online, there are always giveaway events that you can participate in throughout the year.

The good thing about joining someone else’s giveaway event is that they take care of all of the event promotion. You can help them with this by promoting the event on your website and also using your social profiles to let people know about it.

Your giveaway gift needs to be high-quality just as your free incentive is. It needs to meet the needs of your audience and you need to write compelling copy so that visitors to the giveaway will really want it.

This may be an opportunity to provide something different to everyone else. Certainly, in the make money niche most of the participants will be giving away a document in PDF format in exchange for an email sign up. So, why not create a video training series to be different?

8. Create A Signature For Your Incentive

You probably send out a lot of emails most days. By creating a signature in your email, you can persuade recipients of your emails to visit your landing page and sign up for your incentive. This will work better if you are in a popular niche such as making money or losing weight.

It is a good idea to be an active member of forums related to your niche. Check the forum rules to see if you can add a signature to all of your forum posts. This signature will contain a link to your landing page the same as your email signature does.

9. Create Your Own Facebook Groupe

Social media is great for generating traffic to your landing pages. By creating your own Facebook group, you set the rules and you can basically publish what you like as the owner of the group.

We recommend that you create a “members only” Facebook group as this will help to encourage more email signups. The group will be related to your niche and if you give away a lot of good information here it will not take too long to build a large membership.

You can run contests in your Facebook group and give your products away as valuable prizes for example. A Facebook group is a great way to build a community. Even those members that do not sign up for your email list can be informed about new products and services you are launching or affiliate offers that you recommend.

10. Get Free Traffic From Pinterest

Pinterest is an excellent social platform for marketing. With over a billion visitors each month now you should be able to drive a lot of traffic to your landing pages. A lot of marketers shy away from Pinterest as it is a visual platform, but creating pins is very easy.

You do not have to be a whiz with Adobe Photoshop to create appealing Pinterest pins. There is a free service at Canva.com that includes templates that are the right dimensions for Pinterest pins and you can easily use images and text to create attractive pins.

There are a lot of boards on Pinterest that cover most niches. You can post your pins on these boards to drive traffic. It is not that difficult to build a good following on Pinterest. Regularly post pins and participate in related boards to attract followers.

11. Create Videos For Youtube

Video marketing is a great way to drive traffic to your landing pages. Create videos for your niche that provide value to the viewers and add a link to your landing page in the video description. Talk about this link in every video that you upload.

You do not have to create Hollywood style videos to be successful with YouTube. There are many tools available now to help you to make professional looking videos that your audience will appreciate. We recommend that you make a personal appearance on some of your videos (or all of them) as this helps to build trust with your audience.

YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world after Google. It is essential that you optimize all of your videos correctly so that they will show up in the YouTube search results for relevant keywords.

12. Use Paid Advertising

We have already discussed the use of PPC ads to test your landing pages. You can run inexpensive PPC campaigns to drive traffic to your landing pages after you have tested them for conversions as well.

Social media ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram can produce good results too. With Facebook and Instagram ads, you can specify your target audience in advance, and only these people will see your ad in their news feed.

Native ads are worth a try if you are in a popular niche like weight loss or making money. These ads appear on high traffic websites and are designed to blend in with other content so that they do not look like ads.

If you are in a niche where solo ads are available then these can be worth trying. A solo ad is an ad provided by a person or business that already has an email list in your niche. Always check the reputation and track record of a solo ad seller before you go ahead.

Conclusion

We have provided you with 12 proven ways to build your email list in this special report. It is very important that you build an email list as you will create a valuable asset. So, please follow the advice in this special report and start to build your email list today.

Bertrand Allard