Marketing

15 List Building Tactics to Consider Adding to Your Marketing Strategy in 2020

Email marketing is all about building a targeted audience that is clamoring to get what you have. They want to hear from you, they want to know what you know, and they can’t wait to do it. But, building an email list takes a lot of work today. Audiences are smarter than ever, and need encouragement to sign up for your email lists in new and inventive ways.

1. Content Upgrades – When someone comes to your website and reads a blog post, it’s important to ensure that they see more of your content. There are numerous ways to do this. A very effective way is to place a sign-up box under your blog post, but an even better one is to deliver (via pop-up) an offering of free content such as an eBook or report (PLR works for this) that’s related to the content they just read. This works great on your popular content, turning readers into subscribers.

2. Use Surveys – Some survey software being created now (like Survey.com) offers the ability to survey your website visitors. The survey itself works with your email marketing software, so that when people answer they are moved to a special list if they’re already on your email list, or added to the right list if they’re not.

3. Optimize Confirmation Pages – You have no choice but to do the double opt-in in most cases, but the big issue is that fully 25 percent (HubSpot.com) won’t confirm the opt-in so they’ll miss out on your freebie. The best thing you can do is optimize the confirmation page so that it’s very clear about what happens and what they’re going to get when they finish opting in.

4. Ask Silly Questions – It can seem difficult to be creative on an opt-in form, but you can by using creative questions and creative words to get them to sign up. Instead of always saying “sign up for my newsletter and get this freebie,” say something like “Yes! I want to 10X my income now.”

5. Demonstrate Social Proof – Your website should have testimonials and words from other people that show that you have a following and that those people like you. You can collect screenshots from social media, email snippets, and you can ask your audience to fill out a testimonial for you as well. Whatever you do, that needs to be on every single landing page you create about that product.

6. Create a Social Squeeze Page – You should have many landing pages on your site. One that you should create is a social squeeze page that shows your social proof, plus offers something free and collects email addresses to move visitors to your list. Link to it from your highest performing blog posts and social media sites.

7. Leverage LinkedIn Groups – When you create a LinkedIn group, you get an opportunity to create a welcome message. That welcome message can include a link to your social squeeze page or a special landing page to get your LinkedIn audience to sign up for your email list. This is a great way to cross-promote other social media networks too.

8. Add Excitement to Download Boxes – Those boring sign-up boxes are hard to get right. Instead of saying “sign up for our newsletter now”, you could say something that really grabs their attention such as “I Want In!” or “Yes, Please!” or “I’m Ready For Change.”

9. Reconsider Your YouTube Strategy – YouTubers far and wide know that the description box has a horrible click-through rate. Most people just don’t look at that box. Therefore, if you tell them during the video to look in the description box for a free give-away link, you’ll improve conversions.

10. Make Them Feel Included – Tell the visitors to your site how many visitors you have daily. A good place to do that is in the author box or the sign-up box. “Join 5,000 satisfied subscribers” makes your viewer want to be included.

11. Entice Your Twitter Followers to Sign Up – You can use the freebie idea to get your Twitter followers to sign up. Think of something amazing to give them away free, then advertise the tweet and ask everyone to share too.

12. Keep Your Subscribers Happy – Don’t forget about the people you’ve already moved to your email lists. These people can also unsubscribe anytime they want to. That means you should deliver what you promised, with amazing content and information that makes a difference in their lives.

13. Activate Their Fear of Missing Out – Whenever you are trying to market anything, using scarcity works for those who are on the fence. It’s hard to use that idea for list building, but you can. Make the freebie offer limited. For example, you can give them a freebie book but say you’re only giving it to the first 50 people who sign up. You can always create another one.

14. Use Pop-Ups – Yes, many people dislike pop-ups but the fact of the matter is that pop-ups work. Pop-ups increase conversions by 22 percent according to HubSpot. You cannot ignore stats. Having said that, you do need to consider your audience before using them and you should try to use them carefully.

15. Add a Sign-Up in Comments – You can also add a sign-up in the comment area of your blog. If you get a lot of good discussions going in the comment section, this is a great way to increase the size of your list.

Don’t just consider one of these ideas; consider using them all if you can. The reason is that they work. Even though you may have strong feelings about one of them, such as using pop-ups, studies show that pop-ups do work. The great thing about the internet is that you can try one thing and if it doesn’t work, you can try something new.

If you have any questions, please ask below!