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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Do you want to know how to grow your email list? You might think adding a simple signup form to your sidebar is the best way to collect email addresses. But, this usually results in slow growth with little encouragement for website traffic to stick around.
For more genuine growth, you must communicate the value of joining your list before people lose interest and leave your site.
In this article, we’ll share some truly genuine methods on how to grow your email list. And the result will be a list that grows faster with an engaged and interested audience and potential new customers for your small business.
An email list is a group of email addresses a business collects from customers who have opted in to receive email updates. Your email list can get smaller if people unsubscribe, but it can also grow larger through lead generation to reach your target audience.
If you don’t currently have a marketing strategy to reach potential customers and grow your email subscribers, you’re in luck. Here are some tried and tested list-building methods to increase email signups and attract new subscribers to your list.
An excellent way to grow an email list is by running a giveaway or contest. Giveaways have the power to draw hundreds, if not thousands, of new visitors to your site.
Having people sign up for your email marketing campaigns to enter a contest is a great way to keep in touch long after your giveaway ends. In the future, you can send them exclusive discounts and offers on new products, which will lead to more sales for your business.
The best way to run a giveaway on your site is to use the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market.
RafflePress lets you quickly build viral contests so you can:
To learn how to grow your email subscriptions with RafflePress, follow these instructions:
First, click here to get started with RafflePress, then follow this step-by-step guide on installing WordPress plugins to get up and running.
Once you’ve installed and activated RafflePress, hover over the RafflePress icon in your WordPress dashboard and click Add New to create a giveaway.
Next, you’ll see a screen where you’ll name your giveaway and choose a template. To grow your list with RafflePress, click the Grow Your Email List template.
Now enter the prize details for your giveaway as highlighted in this guide for running a RafflePress giveaway.
If you scroll down the widget preview area, you’ll see the template has automatically added an action for your giveaway. This action is called Join an Email Newsletter and gives people the option to sign up for your email content to enter your contest.
Clicking the action opens up the action settings editor on the left-hand side, as shown below.
Here you can set how many entries users get from taking this action, make it a mandatory action, and connect to your email marketing service.
Follow these steps to connect to your favorite email marketing integration:
RafflePress offers many other giveaway actions to help you reach your business goals. For example, you can ask website visitors to visit your Instagram bio, watch a YouTube video, follow you on LinkedIn, and more.
You can even run a referral contest to increase word-of-mouth marketing.
When you’ve configured your settings, click Save and publish your giveaway.
You can check the documentation for details on publishing your RafflePress contest.
Fantastic! You now have an awesome giveaway tailored to your email list growth.
As we mentioned earlier, many people believe adding a simple sign-up form to their sidebar or homepage is the best way to grow their email list.
But if you want more email opt-ins, you need to have more than one sign-up form and add them to multiple areas of your site. Doing so gives people more opportunities to see the forms and subscribe.
A great way to put this into practice is to combine a floating bar with your sidebar form. Or, you can use a popup plugin to make your opt-in forms stand out from the rest of your website.
Take advantage of the display rules in OptinMonster when building your forms so that they trigger at a specific time or action. This spaces out your forms so users don’t see them all at once.
For example, you can have your floating bar trigger when a user scrolls past your sidebar form. And, when they’re about to leave, your popup optin can kick in to draw their attention back to your site.
In the above example, Cosmetic Capital used multiple sign-up forms to increase leads by over 300%.
A similar option to the one above for growing your email list is to create lead magnets for your site. Lead magnets are incentives that encourage people to subscribe with their contact information, like their name and email address.
Lead magnets can take many different forms, including:
But the vital thing to remember is that they should offer extra value to visitors. If what you’re offering isn’t worthwhile, people won’t want to sign up to your email list. For more lead magnet ideas, take a look at this guide.
Related: 7+ Ebook Marketing Tips You Can Actually Use Today
Lead magnets work well, but they can take a long time to create, especially when you’re writing an ebook. So, you can try another way to grow your email list, like content upgrades, which are much quicker to create because you’re just adding content to an existing post.
Content upgrades usually take the form of an exclusive bonus in exchange for signing up to your list.
They’re also pretty post-specific, so it’s wise to create a few, maybe 3-5, and add them to your most popular posts that get the most traffic. That way, you can get many targeted subscribers interested in that content.
Why not check out this guide for using gated content to skyrocket your list?
Here are a few examples of content upgrades you can use yourself:
Take a look at these content upgrade ideas for more alternatives.
Content upgrades use psychology to expand your list. Because people are more likely to complete a task if they take the initiative to do it themselves.
So, when someone downloads your content upgrade, they’re more likely to complete the signup process because they took the initiative.
For a complete step-by-step guide on adding content upgrades to WordPress, check this out.
As we mentioned, using multiple signup forms on your site exposes visitors to more opportunities to join your list. But an exit-intent popup goes a step further by capturing visitors when they’re just about to leave for another website.
Exit-Intent® is advanced technology by OptinMonster for tracking the behavior of your users’ mouse so it can show them a signup form right before they leave. Combining this with full-screen welcome gates and other optin types can help convert abandoning visitors into email subscribers.
OptinMonster has many other features to improve your digital marketing efforts, including a/b testing, drag-and-drop campaign builder, precise tracking and targeting, and more.
Fastrack recovered 53% of visitors using OptinMonster’s Exit-Intent® technology. And Crossrope grew their email list by 900% every month with Exit-Intent optins.
Gated content is content created on your site that only certain people can view. In most cases, these people have joined your email list in exchange for VIP access.
You can lock access to your content easily with a WordPress plugin to hide it from users without special privileges. Once they enter their email, the content is unlocked and free for them to browse.
This wasn’t as easy to achieve in the past and used to harm search engine rankings (SEO). But now, with JavaScript technology, modern methods of gating your content won’t have the same unfortunate impact.
You can learn how to lock content in WordPress with this step-by-step guide.
Sometimes the offer of a discount or coupon can be just the thing to get people to take action. Since we’re all about growing your email list today, why not offer a discount to people who subscribe to your list?
Creating a discount isn’t tricky either. WooCommerce users can go to WooCommerce » Coupons page to create a coupon. Then you can use the success view in OptinMonster to reveal the code when people have successfully subscribed to your list.
For more valuable tools for eCommerce websites, look at these best WooCommerce plugins.
Something easy to overlook when learning how to grow an email list is the option for people to subscribe from your Facebook business page. These buttons are featured under your cover image and stay visible as you scroll down the page.
Adding a subscribe call to action button to your Facebook page is straightforward. Let’s show you how.
First, head to your Facebook page and look for a blue button that says + Add a Button.
Then a popup will appear with Step 1 asking what you’d like people to see. Click the Contact You tab to expand it and see more options.
You’ll want to choose the Sign Up option, then click Next.
Step 2 opens up next, asking where you’d like people to go when they click your button. Click the Website Link option to open up a field where you can paste the URL of your signup form, as shown below.
Click Finish to save your changes, and you’re all set!
Buttons like this are the ideal next step after users click a Facebook Ad. For instance, after collecting email addresses, you can send subscribers a welcome email with a discount for opting in.
You might not have realized it, but your contact form is an excellent opportunity to ask people for their email addresses.
They’re already entering their details to contact you about something, so adding a checkbox to subscribe to your emaillist is an easy way to save asking for their email twice.
WPForms is the best option for adding contact forms in WordPress. You can connect your forms with some of the most popular email marketing services and build forms with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder. It even lets you build smart multi-step forms to make completing your forms easier.
Check out this detailed guide to learn how to use a contact form to grow your email list.
The header area of your website is the most prominent to visitors when they land on your site. This is because it’s above the fold, which means above the point where they need to start scrolling.
Placing important information and CTAs (Calls-To-Action) in this highly visible area can lead to higher conversion rates. So adding an email opt-in CTA to this area is an excellent way to collect email addresses.
Header CTAs are best used in WordPress themes with a large header area. Thankfully, most modern themes these days come with this feature. But if you’re stuck, you can use a page builder to create a custom page layout with a header tailored to fit your needs.
Gamification isn’t just a fun way to pass the time; it’s also a great way to boost user engagement. Something else you can do with gamified campaigns is to use them to increase newsletter conversions.
MonsterInsights has a beautiful example of using a Spin the Wheel gamified campaign to grow its email list and boost eCommerce promotion conversions.
But if you want to learn how to add a coupon wheel optin to your site, this guide will tell you how.
You can also see this guide for more WordPress gamification plugins.
Twitter Ads is another social media platform that offers ways to grow your email list.
The Website clicks or conversions option is a great way to direct people to your list and get more traffic. You could even build a landing page, especially for this purpose, and have a signup form in a prominent position on the page.
In this example, Barclays uses Twitter Ads to promote a test people can take to see if they can spot a scam.
Remember to use an interesting description, a powerful image, and a clear call to action to encourage people to click when creating your ad.
At first glance, webinars might not seem to be a helpful way to grow your email list. But they’re surprisingly effective when you look into the benefits.
To encourage people to subscribe to your email list with webinars, you can:
Webinars convert well because live events have a high perceived value.
Something easy to overlook when growing an email list is the opportunity to ask your audience for feedback.
You can add a survey to your site asking people what they like and dislike about a product or service and ask for their email during the process. People like to feel valued, so asking them how they feel about something is a great way to encourage engagement and a sense of community.
To entice them further, you can automatically enter people into a prize draw as a reward for taking the time to comment. And to increase survey responses, check out this guide.
While we’re on the subject of offering value, it’s important to note that people often ignore static signup forms because they get in the way of what they’re doing on your site.
A great way to get their attention without harming their browsing experience is to use a slide-in scroll box form.
This type of opt-in form does a great job of keeping out of the way while people read your content. But once they scroll down the page, it slides in to divert their attention and encourage them to act.
As we touched upon earlier, social proof is an effective way to highlight what your visitors might be missing out on.
Why not use social proof to show how many people have already subscribed to your email list? TrustPulse offers a super-easy way to do this with their social proof popup.
You could create a social proof popup for each new email subscriber, encouraging visitors to join your email list for high-quality email content.
You can check out their documentation for creating and editing a TrustPulse campaign here.
If you’re looking for even more ways to collect email addresses, here are some bonus tips:
And there you have it.
We hope this article helped you learn how to grow your email list. And if you’re thinking about using our first suggestion of running a giveaway to skyrocket your list and content marketing efforts, this list of contest promotion ideas will help you spread the word.
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