5 Great Ways to Build Your E-mail List

E-newsletters are great marketing tools – they are targeted, simple to create, and free to send out. Building your database of e-mails however can be a slow process. It’s always a balance of new subscribers versus those who unsubscribe. Here are some great tactics to build your e-mail database, and retain your existing subscribers in the process.

There’s a ton of e-mail marketing tactics to help boost your reach out there, here’s some that work:

1) Increase Your Exposure

Most websites don’t advertise their e-newsletter often enough, and in highly-visible positions.  Think of your sign-up as an ad for your company.  Give it prominent placing on as many of your webpages as is practical.

2) Make Signing Up Simple & Easy

Everyone hates filling out long forms – make yours short.  The most effective e-newsletter sign-ups have two fields: name and e-mail.  Improving your conversion rate may be as simple as reducing your number of fields.  To that point, if you have a “clear” button – remove it, it honestly causes more problems than it solves.

3) Sign-Up Incentive

Think from your subscribers point of view – why should they subscribe?  Providing your potential subscribers with some expectations of what type of information they will be receiving your e-newsletter is a good idea.  Offering exclusive deals, member-only products, or exclusive and unique content is a sure-fire way to build more subscribers and keep the interest of your existing ones.

4) Give something away

Offering your new subscribers a whitepaper, or e-book on an interesting topic is nice thank-you, with provides an immediate benefit.  Running weekly contest for new subscribers is also good.  This type of gift is great way to build new fans.

5) Consider Frequency & Content

Everyone hates spam – don’t contribute to this hatred.  Once a week is plenty, ensure you have your most popular and interesting content, and most importantly use a simple, to the point, engaging title.

Give these tips a try, and I’ll assure you a more robust e-mail database in the near future.