Mastering email marketing.

Building an email list is an essential marketing tool that enables you to reach a wide audience when it comes time to sell. It’s easy to ignore the email list if you’re pouring your time into valuable blog content, but unfortunately it takes a proactive mindset to convert viewers into subscribers.

Master email marketing through this guide to building your email list, keeping it healthy, and keeping subscribers engaged.

You may also like to read: Email marketing dos and don’ts during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Building The List

With all the hype about email lists, you may be tempted to buy a list as a quick fix. Don’t! You’ll be paying twice with this strategy, firstly when you shell out for an email list and again when they all unsubscribe, report you as spammer and disengage.

A bought list forgets the most important element of email marketing – engagement. We’ll get to that, but first let’s look at how you can build your own email list from the ground up with genuine subscribers who are open to hearing from you.

You may also like to read: How to make more people open your newsletter.

Opt-In Incentives

The first step towards building your email list is getting people to opt in.

That means they’ve made a positive decision to hear from you and engaging them down the line will be a whole lot easier. To do this, I highly recommend offering an opt-in incentive (aka a Lead Magnet, aka a Content Upgrade!). This is a bit of bait you can dangle that’s going to encourage potential leads to take the first step and sign up.

If you’ve noticed something that stands out in what your subscribers ask of you, this can function as a great opt-in incentive.

For example, if you’re running a travel blog and people keep asking you how you can afford all, you can pull together your top tips for budget travel into a pdf format and offer that as an opt-in incentive.

An incentive doesn’t have to be complicated – a small offering is likely enough to get people on the list. Once they’ve signed up, you’re going to be sending them great content on the reg.

Opt-In Locations

The other key ingredient to building your email list is where you offer the opt-in.

If people don’t see a way to subscribe to your mailing list, they’re simply not going to end up on it! Try to find at least three or four locations on your website where you can plug the opt-in – once your website is optimized to produce these conversions, you’ll see your list grow by the day.

Putting an opt-in in the header of your website is the best and most obvious place for it. Everyone coming to your website sees this straight away, reducing any barriers to people signing up.

Beyond the header, consider a timed pop-up: don’t be afraid of pop-up hate because they simply work, and a well-timed pop up can be introduced unobtrusively.

Clean Your List

Big numbers are great for an email list but for a healthy list quality triumphs over quantity every time. That means that you’ll need to give your list a spring clean from time to time, pruning away those inactive or unengaged subscribers. There are plenty of handy email- list tools out there that will scan your email list and pick up common typos such as .con instead of .com that mean people are missing out on your valuable emails.

You should use these tools to figure out where emails are going unopened, so that you can start a reactivation campaign. Subscribers who have disengaged are still out there, just waiting to be won back with an offer of new content or a relevant reward.

Great Content

Of course, great content is essential to engaging your subscriber list. You’ve hooked them with your opt-in incentives, but subscribers ultimately tire of promotional content so you need your emails to add value to keep subscribers engaged. Find a balance between content and offers to keep subscribers opening emails.

Now you know how to build your email list and engage those subscribers, what are you waiting for? Go get ’em, tiger.