As an online entrepreneur, you have probably already heard about the importance of having an email list to grow your business. It’s definitely a good way to stay in contact with your audience and customers potentially for years to come. Here’s how to grow your email list.
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How to Grow Your Email List
Email marketing is still one of the most effective marketing channels out there. It’s undeniable that it’s better to have an email list than not, and it’s important to maintain that list over time. You should be able to communicate with your audience and keep them engaged with your brand.
The Importance of Having an Email List
Social media is a great way to grow your online business or blog, but at the end of the day, you don’t own your social media accounts! Algorithms change, social media goes through updates, Google SEO changes, and in the long term, platforms often become “pay-to-play” like what happened to Facebook’s organic page reach years ago. Building an email list gives you an asset that YOU own and control in your business.
Never base 100% of your business on someone else’s platform. (Trust me, I had to learn this one the hard way ?)
An email list is a great way to build a community of people who like your business and brand. It’s also a great way to communicate with your customers and grow your business. You can use your email list to send updates about new products, new services, and new content.
Your goal in using social media or SEO should be to get people onto your own website and then ultimately getting people to sign up for your email list where you can continue to nurture the relationship.
How Do You Set Up an Email List?
In order to set up an email list, you’ll need an email marketing service like Flodesk, Convertkit, Mailchimp, etc. You are not allowed to simply mass email people from your personal email.
If you’re looking for a free option, Mailchimp or Mailerlite have free versions to start (up to 2,000 or 1,000 email subscribers respectively). But my personal favorite at the moment is Flodesk, and you can read my review in this other blog post:
Related Post: My Honest Flodesk Review (and a discount!)
How to Get People to Sign Up for Your Email List
But, how do you get people to sign up for your email list in the first place? For starters, you need to dedicate some time to building your email list by creating free opt-in offers, which is basically some free incentive for someone to sign up for your list.
There are three main ways to grow an email list of people who are interested in your brand and what you have to say:
1. First, give people in your audience a reason to subscribe.
2. Make it easy for them to do so.
3. Give them a freebie in exchange for their email address. This is also known as an opt-in offer or a subscriber incentive (it could also be a “content upgrade,” which is usually a specific opt-in offer in an individual blog post).
Not sure what opt-in offer to create? Check out our list of 25 Content Upgrade Ideas to Grow Your Email List.
You can build an email list by placing email sign up forms on your website and on a dedicated landing page, and then link to the landing page in your social media bios and at the end of every blog post.
What to Send to Your Email List
The first thing you should send is a welcome email. This email should thank your new subscriber and give them a quick intro to your business and what they can expect to see from you. And, of course, you’ll want to actually give people the freebie you promised them. (An automated welcome email or sequence is usually a feature you can set up in most email marketing services).
When you send out an email, you can use it to communicate new content that you’ve posted on your blog or social media, but you can also use it to promote your products or services
When you’re building an email list, it’s important to send your audience a wide variety of content. It’s not just about sending your audience sales pitches for your products or services, it’s also about giving them valuable content that they’ll find interesting and useful.
If you’re a blogger, you should send emails to your subscribers based on what you’re writing about. If you’re writing about fashion, then send an email with some fashion tips. If you’re writing about fitness, then send a newsletter with some fitness tips.
For one of my blogs, I use my email list to simply send out blog posts to subscribers each week. Alternatively, for Katie Harp Creative I currently send out exclusive weekly free samples of our stock photos.
Other people will write entirely new content for their emails, but that also requires quite a bit more work and content creation, so I prefer to repurpose content in different ways.
I hope you enjoyed this post about how to grow your email list! 🙂