In 2023, owning and engaging with an active email list is the best way to engage with your clients and prospects, and it is integral to ensure you have an email list strategy in place to ensure that it is successful. Here are simple and actionable strategies you can employ to build a strong email list.

In my experience, a lot of small business owners do not know how important it is to have an email list, but further to that they often do not understand how to grow their email list. Two important strategies that could help grow their business. 

Before we cover the best email strategies to grow your email list, it is important to understand the qualities that make a strong email list. A successful email campaign starts with quality and relevance. 

Quality: Real, complete information about a real person. Bots, spam accounts and inactive emails are not valuable to you and your business. Will an inactive email purchase your product or service? No. So ensure that you are communicating with real people who will engage with your product or service. 

Relevance: When building your email list, target those contacts who are actively interested in your product or service. Why target those who are not interested or at the stage of buy in? If you are targeting them, you will likely see an increase in unsubscribe rates. 

Now that you understand what attributes make a strong list, you can focus on growing your list. 

Collect Emails In Person

For many B2B businesses, trade shows, conferences and presentations are a part of the sales process, so why not take this opportunity to collect the emails of attendees to help grow your email list. You can do this easily by adding sign up information to the end of a presentation, sales deck or even having a tablet or computer available at your tradeshow booth making it easy for attendees to sign up. 

Add a Pop Up

Adding a pop up to your home page is a great way to grow your email list. A well designed, and properly timed pop up can lead to conversion rates of upwards of 60%. Depending on the amount of traffic that you get to your site, this could be a great lead generation tool for your business. 

Add a Signup Form

Why not take advantage of your website’s footer to grow your email list? This space is often underutilized, and the footer can be a great place to add a link to a sign up form. When you give your visitors various options to find and subscribe to your newsletter, the more likely they are to subscribe. You can also add signup forms across your website, placing them in side panels or even in the navigation bar in addition to adding a pop up. 

Include a Call to Action

Ensure that you are adding a strong call to action (CTA) when you are prompting visitors to subscribe to your newsletter. Can you offer an added value for signing up? A free demo? Exclusive content? White Paper? Offer a piece of content that they want in exchange for their contact information. This not only helps you give more information to the potential customer, but it is a great opportunity to showcase how your product or service can help solve a problem that they might be experiencing. Remember to make your CTA captivating to ensure that they share the correct information. 

Add Email Signature Opt-Ins 

Consider adding a hyperlinked email signature that can lead people to sign up to your mailing list. If you have a prospect on email already, why not have them subscribe to your mailing list. This is an easy and natural next step in relationship building. 

Use Social Media 

Social media is a great way to grow your email list. Consider adding specific calls to action in your social media copy, such as “Access our white paper on Website Best Practices” when you subscribe to our newsletter. Adding gated content or offers is a great way to grow your email list. Additionally, depending on what platform your business is on, you can add specific newsletter buttons to your profile. For example, if your business is on Facebook they offer a specific “Sign Up” button that you can add to your profile, where on LinkedIn, you can include a link in bio or in a pinned post. As with most marketing strategies, when it comes to email it is important to consistently revisit your list to assess its quality and look for new ways to grow the list. If you already have some of these strategies in place, do your due diligence and look at the data that you have access to to ensure that these tactics are optimizing and working for you. If you have a form embedded on your site, but you are not seeing any action, perhaps it’s time to move it to another spot on your website. A newsletter strategy should never be a set it and forget it strategy.

These are simple and actionable strategies that you can use to grow your email list, while utilizing offers, and content that you already have access to, but if you find that you are still struggling to grow your email list, connect with us. We can work with you to grow your list in a way that increases quality and relevance, while bringing in qualified leads that will help grow your business.