Email marketing is not dead - quite the opposite in fact. Offering a means of directly and purposefully reaching a pool of consumers who have demonstrated some form of interest in your brand or products, email marketing can be a highly effective way of engaging and marketing… you just have to make sure you’re doing it right.

The issue that many businesses face is that attracting and engaging a new subscriber to their email list, or customer for their products, is much more expensive than speaking to an existing one. Finding and attracting new customers requires ad spend, giveaways, and more - whereas retaining existing ones simply requires an engagement outline that we call your retention strategy.

Email can and often does fulfil both roles, with specific campaigns designed and rolled out whenever a new customer shows an interest in the brand or products. They will be drawn into an email funnel which aims to market a specific solution to them via engaging content and compelling techniques - with the outcome being a long term customer on your database or a clean slate to try again.

If all goes well and they decide to stick around, they become part of your email list and are subject to email marketing - a tool that we here at Social Loop love using for indirect marketing, valuable content sharing, and generally engaging with and getting to know our customers.

Here is how to build a great email list. After all, if you’re going to spend so much time creating the content, you want to make sure it’s being sent to people who will care.

Tips for growing a captive and engaged email list

Without further ado, here are just a few of our top tips on building and growing a captive email list of people who are more likely to open, read, and even engage with your emails.

1. Make it clear and easy

There is no easier way to secure sign ups for an email list than with a giant Call-To-Action that invites website visitors to do so. How you frame this as part of their website experience is up to you, and could offer some free advice, exclusive access to new products, or company updates. It can be worded with humour, with humility, or with practicality. It can be colourful or plain, and it can be specifically programmed to pop up after a deliberate amount of time spent browsing.

Whatever it is, a CTA pop up on your website is one way of capturing customers’ attention and inviting them to join your list.

2. Connect it to a discount or giveaway

Some of the most compelling email subscriptions are those which offer something in exchange - for example, access to a free guide, an exclusive discount code, or early access to a new product. Simple but effective.

3. Create personalised CTAs for different blogs and webpages

Rather than a basic “Sign up to our email list”, how about something specific which relates to the webpage that they are on or the blog they are reading? Linking the ask back to what you know they’re interested in is a great way of demonstrating a connection to your audience.

4. Ask for signs up at checkout

Another super easy way to encourage sign ups is at the checkout of your website, creating an opt-in checkbox which customers can tick to become a part of your community through their purchase. Make it sound exciting if you want this to work, and assure them that they won’t simply receive spam advertising every day.

Make email marketing work for you

To cut a long story short, here at Social Loop we love email marketing. So much so that it’s actually one of the ways that we help our clients with their own marketing campaigns and efforts - injecting life back into bland email content and lists.

For more information on all of our digital marketing services, get in touch today!