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.
