As part of establishing your business online, generating leads from an online source is vital. It is necessary to create an engaged list of email subscribers.
In recent years, a large percentage of internet marketing professionals, have been predicting the demise of conventional email marketing, due to the sudden popularity of social media. However, it is a generally known fact, that 3/4 online business operators, still consider email marketing to be essential to their business.
Other studies reveal that:
- 9 out of 10 consumers use email at least once per day.
- More than half of mobile purchases are influenced by email.
These figures clearly paint the picture that maintaining an email list should be a part of your online marketing agenda.
To attract mail-list subscribers, you need to offer something of value to entice them to enter in their email addresses. Free blog subscriptions are just not enough anymore.
Besides a standard newsletter, here are some creative ideas to help out :
Offering special content through digital downloads
A digital download is usually, but not necessarily, a free giveaway that provides them additional content, typically a PDF e-book. A quick web search will show the available stand-alone applications and plug-ins for applications like WordPress for offering digital downloads.
Another form of email list opt-in incentive is the “free user toolkit”. A toolkit is a bundle of useful tools that your subscribers can benefit from. It can include things like worksheets, spreadsheets templates, recipe books any free items you choose. You can bundle all of these items together; offering it as a .zip or .rar archive file. It is more of a tempting than a simple eBook.
Free Email Course
Offering an email course, for free, in order to add more subscribers on your email-list. You then build the opportunity to convert them into sales leads through your expertise about a particular subject. Many bloggers, marketers, and freelancers use free email courses to attract subscribers.
People like email courses because they’re easier to learn from over time. Many such email courses last over 7-10 weeks; where list members receive 1 or 2 emails per week.
If you would like to set this up, with 1-2 weekly emails containing high value content.
Here is more information on how to set-up a mail course: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/02/how-to-create-a-self-paced-email-course/
Exclusive Content for Subscribers
If you produce a generous amount of content on your blog, you can then offer special selected content exclusively to your subscribers. Your public blog content will be open to all visitors, but subscriber exclusive content will create the incentive for those who will deposit their email address with you.
Magazine websites and news outlets often apply this strategy. Those sites typically display only the first paragraph of an article; requiring readers to log-in to be able to read the rest of it.
Offer a subscriber-only Case Study
Offering a downloadable case study is effective for creating subscribers, but it is also great for your website’s brand and image. A case study expressed as a success is effectively a detailed testimonial for your business. Case studies are basically eBooks in PDF format; add lots of graphics to make it more engaging and easier to read.
If you run a service based business, then case studies are especially useful - especially for a web development or graphic design or company. You can go into the problems your customer had before becoming your customer, and then detail how you were successful in resolving all their issues. Therefore case studies provide you another opportunity to market your services.
Summary
In maximizing your business’s web presence, building and maintaining an email list should be atop your, or your webmaster’s, priorities. Yet you can’t build a large or quality email list without first offering value-driven email incentives to your visitors.
The examples we have pointed out in this post should help you effectively achieve this goal. However, apply your imagination as well, as there can be a variety of unique ways you can create opt-in incentives. Based on the understanding of the needs of your visitors you can create something which can get them to leave you their email address behind.
If you have a WordPress (or other CMS) site, then make sure you check the plugins offered on their web portal (for helping build email lists).
Do you have any other ideas that we can add to this article? We’d love to hear from you. You can write us anytime at support*at*4goodhosting.com
