This week, I want to talk about a common problem that many practitioners face when building their online presence - growing their newsletter mailing list. As a practitioner, it is essential that you are consistently adding new email addresses to your database in order to create conversions and keep your numbers going up and to the right.
But why is email marketing so important? Email performance is a strong indicator of your overall marketing performance and one of the most reliable ways to maintain a connection with your clients. Let's look at the numbers: the Education sector in Australia has a 34.3% open rate (% of subscribers who open an email) and a 5.7% click rate (% of subscribers who click a link), making it one of the most profitable topics in email.
So let's take a look at 5 easy and unique techniques that will help grow your email database:
5 ways to build your email database
1. Incentivise customers with Freemiums
Motivate your website visitors to opt-in by creating a freemium service that is attractive and valuable to them. Many businesses offer free resources or tools which are only available after registering your email address.
For example, a practitioner may offer free consults to clients who register in the first 30 days of a new service. This type of "permission-based marketing" is highly effective as customers have actively signed up to learn more.
2. Keep your email list healthy
Did you know? Email marketing databases naturally degrade by about 22.5% every year!
This is because contacts may change their email addresses when they move to a different company or simply just stop using the email they used to sign up. This is why it's very important to track who is not engaging with your emails and newsletters anymore and why that is.
3. Utilise your Homepage better
Keep your email sign-up segment easy to find by creating a pop-up when someone clicks onto your website. On average, a good pop-up form has a 9.28% conversion rate. So, if 100 people visit your website, you could hypothetically convert 9 of them!
Another key place to place a call-to-action (CTA) is on your website's Contact Us page. By guiding visitors to the desired locations on your website, you can optimize its functionality.
4. Segment your mailing list
Segmentation is an email marketing technique where you split your general mailing list into smaller groups to send more targeted communication. By doing this, you can then send bespoke content which will ideally lead to a higher customer click-through rate as your emails are now catered to their specific interests.
5. Traditional Marketing "You know it works!"
Meeting customers in person is just as effective as the techniques we've talked about. Consultations, seminars, panels, and even your own conferences put you front and centre of a networking event, and customers who attend are often the most engaged contacts.
Take this opportunity to get their email addresses and organically grow your email database with real-time customers.
Let's take a look at how Buzzfeed achieves 1 million + subscriber growth to their various newsletters with Dan Oshinsky, Director of Newsletters at BuzzFeed.
"Our goal for nearly every email we send is to drive subscribers back to the BuzzFeed site where they can read the content and then share it with their friends and family.
Each email we send contains original content from the BuzzFeed site and we purposely only send a small snippet of each story along with a link to encourage people to click through to the site and read the full article.
It's also one of our highest growth channels. In fact, in 2016, traffic from email grew by 20% on a monthly basis.
When I first started, there wasn't much of an email list because it was almost impossible for users to subscribe to BuzzFeed emails. Over the past few years, though, we've been much more vigilant about promoting email subscribe opt-ins in various places throughout the site."
The key takeaway
Like all customer-driven processes, success in email marketing comes from understanding your customer. As practitioners, getting started may seem daunting but with these 5 tips, you will create a strong foundation for a healthy mailing list.
Originally published on Jun 17, 2021
