How To Build A Comprehensive Email Marketing List
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How To Build A Comprehensive Email Marketing List

Welcome to yet another mind blowing & insightful article for this week. I know we had not been engaging for the past 2-3 weeks. Thank you for staying engaged to this newsletter. Hope you're having a productive week.

What you'll learn in this article:

  1. When & how to ask someone to be on your email marking list
  2. How to keep the customers engaged
  3. What to offer them on you newsletter or emailing list
  4. Creating call to actions
  5. Building landing pages or signup forms
  6. Creating a content strategy for your newsletter or emailing list
  7. Legality of the campaign

Everyone can build an emailing list, go out there grab people's email and say I have a list. Yeah that will work might be a good initiative. Hopefully it works out, then you have prospects that don't respond or aren't interested in whatever you're trying to sell or offer them, nice work dummy. It doesn't work like that.

Imagine you’re at a wedding, and you're in your best suit or outfit. For example, I'm seated next to a stunning young lady who's dressed up to kill seems like someone I can have as my girlfriend and I can have as potential wife in the future. I really want you to picture yourself in that space but don't smile or laugh if your partner is next to you right now but just nod your head 😂

But then I wait too long to ask for their name or number then lose them in the crowd of people rushing to get food after the ceremony. By now you and me both understand how bad that feels and how it's going to affect us for some days right ? 

That's called a lost opportunity. Now, imagine this situation is about your business engaging with a new customer and you can't afford to have a missed opportunity. 

So at this point you know that If you don’t ask to keep in touch with the customer, you might lose the chance to reach out to them later as from my example with this beautiful lady at a wedding ceremony. 

However, if you ask for their email address at the right moment, you can add them to your email marketing list. But here is where most people do it wrong, you ask for their email you ask at the right time. Like looking good at a wedding was a right moment but I missed it. That's how it is with business, when you give the customers the best service or product, running a sale, and produced good content that customer are Interacting with etc. That's what a great moment looks like. So let's get more in depth with our topic on building an organic email list. 

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In order to leverage email marketing at its best, you need to build an email list of current and potential customers who’d welcome seeing your business in their inboxes. By this I mean those twenty people who have signed up willingly to your emailing list or newsletter. Those are the people who will open your email the next day or any other day that you send them and email. They're thirsty to consume your content or what you have to say or offer them. 

At this point most people are tempted to buy a built-up email list, you're welcome to do that but to my knowledge what you'll be doing is flashing money in the toilet hoping that it will accumulate from there it's never gonna happen. Here's why, buying a pre-populated email list might be tempting. But, think about how you feel when you get unsolicited emails from random people or companies. Not great, right? You most likely hit the Trash or Spam button isn't it ? That's how people will treat your email when you buy a pre-populated email list. The same list of prospects might be working for that business or company and they've welcomed it to send them emails but that's not you or your company that they given consent to email them. Apart from not liking your content or offers for that reason only they will not open your emails. 

For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you expect an average return of $42.

That's why you've head so many before you say email marketing is dead. That's because they thought email marketing is just a random game or just like some other marketing strategies, it's not. 

So, I don’t want my business to be seen as a nuisance and put on the dreaded spam list I don't know about you, maybe you prefer it this way. If you're like me, I recommend you to build your email list organically, get the people you engage with to say, “Yes, I’d love to hear from you again" through a sign up or subscribe button or your content, website, YouTube channel, TikTok or anywhere else your strength is. 

How Do You Keep People Engaged?

The content of your emails is a hugely important part of getting people to sign up and not unsubscribe. Emails are valuable when they’re useful, timely, or relevantly interesting to recipients. For example: exclusive discounts, holiday gift reminders, relevant tips and tricks, and in my case is sending you one of this powerful articles or podcast etc.

Offer Best Value

Getting people to sign up for your list is a bit like being a salesperson for your emails. You need to communicate their value quickly and persuasively.

Create Clear Call-To-Actions

What are the benefits of receiving your emails? How can you put those benefits into calls to action (CTAs) that would encourage sign ups? For example: “What’s for dinner? Get delicious, healthy, easy recipes delivered straight to your inbox" that's is if you're running a restaurant or selling food products of course. 

Make sure your CTAs stay true to your brand voice and personality, and try not to get too pushy, in my case we normally use CTAs like "learn more", "sign up today." Let people know that it’s okay for them to say no. Make sure you include both a “Sign Up” button and a “No Thanks” or “Sign Up Later” button. This will help you in a lot, for instance if someone doesn't see the value in what you're offering they wouldn't both signing up that's space saved on your list to add a real prospect that is interested in what you have to offer. 

Build a landing page or sign-up forms

Put the same amount of thought into the forms you’ll use to collect people’s email addresses. They can be a make-it-or-break-it moment for your email list.

Include a consent on all your forms, this is the most important part which most people neglect but it has great repercussions in the long run. This is the part where you need to get the customers grant you legal access to email them. This will help you align your campaign against the data protection acts. We'll talk more about this below.

Make it as easy and as streamlined as possible for people to give you their information. Instead of sending them to another page when they click your sign up button, let them enter their emails on the same screen as your CTA.

21% is the average email open rate. On the other hand, the average open rate for a welcome email is 82%.

Also, don’t ask for too much information. The more boxes people have to fill out, the less likely they are to finish the form. Yes, ask for their name and email address, but maybe leave out “What city do you live in?” and “What’s your totem?” Yes I belong to the Soko Phiri🐒totem but that might not be necessary to put on a form, unless you're getting customer totems to personalize or custom brand the products that they have ordered. That's the only exception but if not don't crowd the filling in process. Email list and newsletter managing tools that we use have form builders that you can customize and then embed on your site and other online properties. 

When you have your CTAs and forms ready, you can have them appear in a variety of locations and at different times, and then test what works best. You can apply them to so many locations such as your site’s homepage and product pages, a sidebar and splash screen on your blog, and your social media pages.

Also play around with the most effective moments for your CTA to appear. For example: when someone finishes reading your blog post, when they create a profile on your site, or when they complete a purchase. To get the insights on which mixtures of CTA message, location, and timing are most effective, you need to do A/B testing – which is pitting different combinations against each other to see which ones win out the metrics needs to be clear and simple such as (which one gets the most email list sign ups) or (which one gets most downloads on your ebook).

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Don't forget, you want to deliver the right message in the right place at the right time. Let people fall in love with you before you propose. A new site visitor may not understand your business’ value yet, so having your CTA appear the moment they land on your homepage might not be effective.

Here's some hard to chew piece of truth, your CTAs can only succeed if people are engaging with your site, blogs, and social media activity – which is where content strategy comes in. You can't leverage email marketing strategy without a strong content marketing strategy. So many people approached us wanted to have an email marketing strategy without a content marketing strategy and I've honestly told them that "sir/ma'am, you want us to help add to a numbers of failures who think email marketing does work and sorry take your money somewhere we can't help you do that" this is because we believe in results and doing things that are full filling. I get so happy whenever I run a successful campaign for a customer and all the metrics laid out on the onset are met or exceeded. 

Create a good content strategy to support your email Marketing Strategies

A good content strategy can draw people to your site, blogs, and social media profiles, help them appreciate what they see there, and encourage them to sign up for more which is adding prospects to your email list. 

By a strong content marketing strategy, I mean articles, posts, whitepapers, infographics, etc. Just like your emails, they should be useful, timely, or interesting to your audience. A smart strategy is to have your emails link to this content on your site or blog

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 You can also try social media strategies. Use social media to spread your content and get people interested. Then ask them to sign up for your email list. You can even embed an email sign up form into your social media posts.

Check to see the legality of your campaign

Without the consent of the subscriber or the customers your efforts are all for nothing. As a general rule, check with your legal department or a lawyer, in most countries they have data protection laws which vary in regulations and restrictions. So we urge you to do a research or consult a legal practitioner in your area, as for me I always check with Mrs Panashe Sagwete a very good lawyer and learned friend of mine who has a compelling and open minded when it come to her work. Do check with her to make sure you’re complying with email marketing laws in the country where your business is operating in.

The impact of email marketing can do more than just getting messages into inboxes. There's a lot of buzz surrounding email marketing and it's benefits.

What you need to do now

Like I mentioned before, email marketing can be fast and relatively easy to set up. Let us help you develop your email marketing strategy and a strong content marketing strategy.

That's it for this week, I hope you've extracted some insights from this newsletter and please subscribe to our emailing list for more exclusive updates and promotions from Digital Mate Inc.

Leon Mandigara is the CEO & Founder at Digital Mate Inc, & marketing consultant for so many brands and individuals. Want to schedule a meeting or call with him? click here.

This newsletter is a product of Digital Mate Inc. Get a free digital marketing consultation and analytic report.

Until next time, we are glad you have made it this far and would like to say thank you for reading this article, hopefully you drew some great value from this and we would like to here from you on the comments below, don't forget to like it and share it with someone whom you think should read it, or just tag their name on the comments.

Dr. M. Matinari (DBA, CDMS SM, CDMP)

Published Digital Marketing Researcher|Certified Search Marketing Specialist|Certified Digital Marketing Professional|Pharma/Medical Solutions Marketing

2y

This is amazing Leon. How can I get in touch with you for possible discussion

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