By reaching them directly in their inbox, email has the highest ROI of any digital marketing channel (averaging $40 for every $1 spent). And while landing in the inbox is great, it doesn’t beat SMS’ phenomenal 98% read rate (with 60% of customers reading an SMS campaign within 5 minutes). 

So it’s fair to say email and SMS are pretty important. That said, behind every great email or SMS marketing strategy lies one essential element: a powerful list of subscribers. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that your list and how you build it can literally make or break your campaigns. And by extension, your business.

The highest-converting lists are built with active, purchase-ready subscribers ready to engage with your campaigns. This is the closest you’re to get to having a licence to print money. Frustratingly for most merchants, their lists are far from this ideal.

That’s why we’ve put together this guide on how to build an email list that can drive millions in sales.

Steps to building high-converting lists

1) Focus on quality over quantity 

It’s tempting to focus on building your list as quickly and as large as you can. But you need to be selective of who’s signing up and qualitatively determine the filters that will be installed if you use tools such as sales navigator for lead generation.

That’s not to say that quantity isn’t important. All else being equal, a list with a million subscribers is going to drive more sales than a list with only a few hundred. 

But in their rush to build a list, too many merchants just slap together a basic popup overnight with an uninspired offer such as “10% off your first purchase” and try to pass it off as a lead magnet. 

Sure, this will get people to sign up, but it’s a safe bet a lot of them won’t qualify as leads. 

Instead, you should think about who you want on your list. Who do you want to be communicating with? Freebie-seekers? Or people who are your actual target customers and have the potential to become loyal, repeat purchasers? 

In other words, you want people who show purchase intent. Not only will it make your list more profitable, but your sender’s reputation will also remain intact thanks to a clean list. 

Which popup do you think will result in a higher-quality list?

Your existing customers are those with the highest purchase intent, as they’ve already converted. That’s why it’s essential you give people the option to subscribe during check out. 

Obviously you don’t want to limit yourself to just existing customers, that’s why the next step is all about where you get people to sign up. 

2) Think about where to find subscribers

The best way to build a quality list is to think about where and how people are signing up. 

We’ve already mentioned that the best subscribers are your existing customers, but the aim of your list is to scale your sales. This means growing your customer base by growing your list. 

There are two ways you can achieve this: organically, or through paid campaigns. 

Organic is nearly always better so it should be your main focus. 

Ways you can grow your list organically include making the most of your online store’s traffic and your social following. This is because the act of visiting your store or following your brand on social media is in itself a purchase intent signal. These are people interested in what you’re selling. Ideally, they’ll have visited more than just your homepage or a random blog article, but we’ll touch on that in the next section. 

Essentially paying for subscribers through paid activities such as social media campaigns is okay, but it’s definitely the lesser of the two options.  

While not perfect (the value proposition should take prominence above the ‘swipe up to join mailing list’ call-to-action), Bail Body does this reasonably well in the example below.

Whatever you do though, do not go purchasing lists. Only sending campaigns to those who have opted in is essential, unless you want to destroy your sending reputation and end up in the spam folder.

3) How to build an email list 101: Offer them something in return

Now that you have an idea of who you want on your list and how and where to find them, it’s time to think about the what. That’s what you offer them.

People are not going to hand over their email address or phone number for nothing in return. 

And what you decide to offer is going to impact both your conversion rate and the type of people signing up. Remember, you want to focus on quality over quantity. People who display purchase intent over freebie-seekers. 

So what should you offer? 

This is a classic case of it depends. It depends on whether they’re existing or potential customers and it depends on what stage of the purchase journey they’re at. But in general, here’s what we’ve found results in the highest quality lists: 

Tools and resources

This is anything you could consider educational. Think buyer guides, recipes, cheatsheets, even a collection of the latest trends in your industry as a source of inspiration. 

These resources are particularly enticing to potential customers early on in their purchase journey (in other words, at the top of the funnel) as they’re likely still trying to understand your products and which is best for them. 

That’s what makes the popup from Tile Mountain below effective: tiling is something you want to get right the first time, but unless you’re a professional tiler, you’re going to need a bit of help.

Ideally, whatever tool or resource you offer, it will encourage your new subscribers to use your products. You can bet Tile Mountain recommends plenty of its own products in its tiling checklist.

Quizzes

Quizzes are questionnaires visitors answer to get a specific result. They don’t work for every store, but for those they do, they tend to result in some of the highest intent, most profitable lists you’ll build. 

Quizzes work best when customers genuinely need recommendations to make the best purchase possible. Such as finding the right combination of supplements, personalized skincare routine, or what haircare product to buy like in the example below from Curlsmith. 

Deals

This is your quintessential ecommerce lead magnet. Think “free shipping” or “buy one, get one free” (BOGO). 

Yes, everyone does them, but there’s a reason for that: they’ll be the highest-converting lead magnet you’ll have. 

The trick to making sure you capture high-intent potential customers instead of freebie-seekers is where you make the offer. 

Don’t have it pop up on your homepage immediately when someone first visits. Include them on your product pages. Have them appear after your visitor has been on the page for a certain amount of time or has scrolled down most of the page. 

4) Matching your messaging to your audience

Copywriting is a crucial marketing skill, and there are few places where getting your messaging right is more important than your popup. 

The key to making your popup copy work (and where most merchants fall short) is making it relevant by matching it with the context. 

Has your visitor just returned to the same product page for the 9th time this week? Or have they just landed on your site for the first time and are reading a blog article? Is a major event like Black Friday just a few days away? 

The popup below does a good job of leaning into Black Friday with copy including “jump the queues” and the value proposition of getting early access. 

Recognizing that not all your visitors are the same and that time of year can play a big part too will help you write killer copy. 

5) Nailing the execution

Final step before you can launch: think about your popup’s execution. 

We’ve just mentioned that you don’t want your popup appearing immediately when someone lands on a page. We generally recommend a 3-5 second delay. 

Another factor to consider is the format: are you going to be collecting both email and phone number? If so, you’ll want to use a 2-step format where you just ask for email first as people are more willing to hand over their email address than their phone number. (Asking for too much info at the same time will hurt your conversion rate.)

When they get to the SMS step, you’ll want to offer something extra above and beyond the email offer as well. Otherwise there’s no reason for them to also provide their phone number. 

Once you’ve got a solid plan for execution, it’s time to launch! 

6) Test, test, and test again

You’re not finished yet, though. In fact, you’ll never be ‘finished’ if you want to build a high-quality list. 

No matter how much care and attention you put into every step above, you won’t have created the perfect popup. 

And even if you did, the performance of different strategies varies over time. What was highly successful last year might not convert that well this year. Especially in a fast-paced industry like ecommerce. 

The only way to keep your offer fresh and enticing is to continually optimize it. This means running a split test, then another split test, and another (you really should not stop testing). 

But don’t just test things randomly. Approach your split tests in a methodical way by testing one element at a time and tracking the conversion rate closely. Test your offer, then your messaging, then your design, then your execution, and repeat. 

Learning how to build an email list is just the beginning

A high-converting list can make or break your future email and SMS campaigns. But it’s also simply the foundation of your campaigns.

Following the strategies we’ve just covered, such as focusing on quality over quantity and being conscious of who’s signing up, will put you on the right path. What will bring in the actual sales are the campaigns you send to your list. 

Now that you know how to build an email list, check out our blog for strategies on sending killer email and SMS campaigns. 

The post How To Build an Email list & an SMS List That Drive Millions In Sales for Ecommerce appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

In fact, the average person spends four hours a week opening, reading, and responding to emails. 

And while Facebook has increasingly moved towards paid advertising and away from organic, email can still get you in front of customers without requiring a hefty ad budget.

But when it comes to cold emailing and other forms of sales email, your success rate is always going to be linked to the strength of your list. You can craft the best content in the world, but if half of your emails are bouncing and the other half are irrelevant to the recipients, you’re just wasting time, effort, and money.

Email marketing databases degrade by around 22.5% each year as contacts change jobs, opt out, and abandon old addresses, so it’s vital to regularly clean your email lists to ensure your content is reaching real people – and the right people. Fortunately, email list verification tools make this a super easy process. 

Keeping your list fresh means constantly working to grow it by adding new email addresses. 

Here’s how. 

Use incentives and clearly state benefits

If people are going to give up their prized personal information – in this case, their email address – they need to know they’re getting something worthwhile in return. One of the simplest and most effective ways to do this is by ensuring your new subscriber is going to see value in exchange for filling out a form and sharing their email address. 

This means making your emails worth receiving and reading. Where relevant, consider offering exclusive discounts for mailing list members, free trials, or early access to sales, or run regular competitions via email. This should be pretty easy to set up via your email marketing software.

No one wants to end up with an inbox full of junk or irrelevant content. That’s why it’s essential to clearly state what benefits customers can expect to receive when signing up to your email list. 

Ensure that the signup form lists the benefits of subscribing. Let them know if you regularly offer exclusive sales, free trials, or discounts to customers, or if you run competitions. This should incentivize the right people – those interested in your products and services – to part with their precious contact details. 

Create great content

Another way of offering value via email is by creating genuinely useful downloadable gated or bonus content in exchange for email addresses. Consider what expertise you have in-house that your target audience would find useful enough that they’d be willing to part with their email address. 

To prevent high levels of unsubscribers, high-quality content should be offered throughout your email campaigns. This is particularly important where email addresses were initially exchanged for access to content – it’s already been proven that providing similar content will continue to hook in these recipients. 

Tips for elevating your content include:

• Conducting exclusive qualitative and quantitative research, offering novel insights into topics important to the customers on your email list.
• Using visuals (but be careful not to overdo it). Visuals can make content more engaging, but stuffing your content full of graphics that don’t add value can make it seem less personal.
• Offering personal insights. People are much more likely to engage with email marketing when they feel they’re communicating with a real human they have a relationship with. Provide opinions and insights into your working life, and ask questions to boost engagement. 

When it comes to campaign content, remember, data is king. You can easily A/B test different elements to find out what works for your audience. This can be two completely different emails, or simply the same email with two different subject lines or CTAs. See which options perform best before rolling the campaign out to your wider email lists. 

Utilize social media 

If your company has a decent following on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, social media can be a seriously powerful tool in growing your email list. 

Here you can promote your gated content campaigns using organic and paid promotion, as well as running competitions and offers through Facebook that require an email address to sign up. Be sure to add a call-to-action button to the top of your Facebook business page that links to a signup form. 

It’s also worth spending time contacting promising leads through LinkedIn to gather valuable email addresses. While this type of behavior might not be welcome on Facebook Messenger and Twitter’s direct messaging service, LinkedIn is designed for business networking, and prospects are often happy to be contacted by relevant brands. 

Use personalized pop-ups on your website 

Pop-up advertisements on your website can be used to help grow your email list – but only when done right. The random, irrelevant pop-ups famous for irritating internet users in the 2000s are a thing of the past – now it’s all about personalization.

Create a pop-up on your site that states the benefits of signing up to a mailing list, with a simple, built-in form for entering email addresses. Remember, the more frictionless the journey to signing up, the more people will do it. 

Marketing expert Brian Dean believes strongly in this email list-building technique. However, his stats show that pop-ups only achieve success if they’re relevant to the page they appear on. He found that if the page is about email lists, the pop-up will boost conversions by 65% if it offers new email tips.

Segment your email lists

Growing your email lists means retaining your subscribers – otherwise you may only be replacing those you’ve lost. A proven way to keep your list subscribers engaged is by ensuring that you’re only sending them relevant content.

This is where segmentation comes in. 

Segmentation is an easy way to achieve personalization without the time drain of crafting a separate email for every single recipient. 

Segment your email lists into smaller lists. Depending on your needs, you can segment in terms of job roles, your relationship with the contact, where they are in the sales funnel, or their buying behaviors. There are infinite ways to segment email lists – you just need to find the right one to drive your business outcomes. Then, instead of sending one catch-all email, create tailored emails for each group, ensuring every recipient is always receiving the most relevant content for them. 

Encourage sharing and forwarding 

Focus on making your emails shareable: ensure your contacts love your emails so much that they’re regularly forwarding them on to friends or colleagues, thereby organically increasing the reach of your emails and growing your email list.

Include social sharing buttons and – vitally – an ‘Email to a Friend’ button within your emails. Ensure you always include a text CTA motivating recipients to subscribe to your emails so opting in is as simple as possible for those who receive your emails without already being on the list. 

Author Bio

Sujan Patel is a partner at Ramp Ventures. He has over 14 years of marketing experience and has led the digital marketing strategy for companies like Salesforce, Mint, Intuit and many other Fortune 500 caliber companies.

The post How to Grow Your Email List appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

In fact, 92% of consumers are not ready to make a purchase on their first time to visit an online retailer. Instead it is only on later visits that people become customers.

As many first time visitors will never return to your site, you need a way to remarket to these people so you can increase the likelihood they’ll come back and make a purchase.

One of the most effect ways to achieve this is by collecting email addresses.

Email is one of the most effective channels, especially for ecommerce stores. The average return for every dollar spent on email marketing is a massive $44. Harnessing your website traffic to grow your email list is therefore essential to your ecommerce success.

Achieving this is not always that easy, however. People tend to be hesitant when it comes to handing over their email address, especially when it’s on a website they haven’t visited before. So in addition to offering an incentive for people to opt into your email marketing, you need efficient ways to capture email addresses.

But how do you get email addresses of website visitors?

As a digital marketer, you need to come up with increasingly novel ways to increase your conversion rate when it comes to getting email addresses of website visitors.

To help you with your email signups and to grow your list, here are some of the most common, as well as creative ways of capturing email addresses of web visitors.

1) Popups

Popups are probably the most popular means of collecting email addresses on the web at the moment. No doubt you have encountered them popping up in the middle of your screen as you while for the page to load. Their ubiquity across the internet is due to two factors: the ease of setting them up and their effectiveness.

Adding a popup to your site with an email form highly effective way to increase the number of signups you receive. Their ease of setting up and low cost, including SmartrMail’s own free popup, adds to their appeal. This also makes them something you should definitely try out on your site too.

The only downside to popups, however, is that they can be irritating to some people. Particularly when someone struggles to find how to exit out of the umpteenth popup that’s blocking what the content they’re after for the day.

If you’re concerned about this happening to your visitors, there are some variations on the typical popup that you can use to make them less intrusive.

2) Exit Intent Popups

Exit intent popups only appear to users when they are about to leave your page. These are relatively new and rely on tracking people’s mouse movements to detect when someone is about to click off your page.

These popups are ingenious for two reasons. Firstly, they don’t get in the way of visitors and the content they came to your site for. Secondly, having the popup flash onto the screen a split second before someone leaves causes people to immediately stop what they’re doing and pay attention to the popup.

When combined with other email collection methods, these popups essentially give you a second chance to capture email addresses

3) Delayed Popups

Another effective way to avoid having your popups annoy visitors is to only have them appear after your visitor has met a certain criteria. Common examples of this criteria include having spent a certain amount of time on your site, visited two or more pages, or has scrolled so far down your blog posts.

The disadvantage of delaying your popup is that fewer people who will see it. Having less people see your popup will likely mean fewer signups as well. However, it does mean that the people who stay on your site long enough to be present with the popup are probably more qualified leads and therefore more valuable to be on your email list, leading to better open rates when you send an email.

Determining whether delaying your popups is a good fit for your site will likely involve running a test. If you find that they don’t lead to a significant drop in conversions, then the annoyance you save your visitors might be worth it. Otherwise you can always get rid of the delay.

4) Sticky Top Bar

Displaying a small thin bar at the top of your page that stays at the top of your visitors’ screens as they scroll down the page will command their attention without being annoying.

Usually these bars are used to notify visitors of an update or announcement, but there’s no reason you can’t add an email address box to it and a subscribe button. Being in such a visible part of your site, you ensure that everybody is given the opportunity to sign up to your email list if they want.

Including an incentive offer alongside this telling visitors why they should sign up and giving the bar a bright color to stand out will lead to even more conversions. When DIYthemes added a top bar to their site, they gained an additional 1,180 email subscribers in just 30 days.

Hello Bar is a great service that lets you easily add a top bar on your site.

5) Sidebar Forms

Sidebars are a common navigational feature of many websites. While their primarily purpose is to provide visitors with links to other pages, there’s usually plenty of room to include other content in them as well.

Their width and that they continue down the length of your page makes them ideal for a rectangular graphic showcasing your opt-in incentive. Including a subscription box here will give it plenty of visibility without distracting your visitors.

If your site already has a sidebar that has a lot of free space, then trying this option is a no-brainer. For more crowded sidebars, see if there’s anything you can take out of it to make room for your email opt-in form. If you don’t have a sidebar, then creating one will likely require a moderately intensive site restructure. However if you’re struggling to get email signups, then it might be worth the effort.

6) Footer Subscription Form

The footer is probably the most common location for a subscription box on websites. This means anybody who wants to sign up to your email list will often go straight to the bottom of the page expecting to see an opt-in form.

One advantage of these boxes beyond being where people expect to see them is that by appearing in the footer, they automatically appear across all of the pages on your site. So you only have to set it up once instead of manually creating them across all your pages.

While this is far from the most creative means of collecting email addresses of website visitors, it’s just an integral part of web design that including it is pretty much mandatory.

7) Welcome Gate

If a popup isn’t large or attention grabbing enough for you, then maybe welcome gates might be a better option.

Welcome gates are essentially full screen popups that cover the entire page. They will appear a second or two after the page starts to load to let people catch a glimpse of the actual page they’re visiting. This helps prevent people from mistakenly thinking they’ve visited the wrong site or clicked on the wrong link. This makes them appear very similar to landing pages.

As these welcome gates are very similar to being their own webpage, you should be careful with them showing to the same person multiple times. If someone who has already entered their details on welcome gate sees it again, they’ll want to exit from the form. This is where there’s a risk of them bouncing if they decide to just exit the page. To help avoid this from happening, ensure that the welcome gate isn’t shown to people who have already seen it and provide a clear and easy option for exiting the sign up form.

Being relatively new and not as common as popups, they don’t tend to be as annoying. This is especially true if you don’t make your welcome gate too aggressive in your attempt to get someone’s email address. Instead by including your opt-in incentive and politely asking for your visitor’s address will likely yield better results.

Justuno is a popular lead capture app that also integrates with SmartrMail.

8) Run a Competition

If you’re struggling to get signups with your opt-in incentive, then it’s probably worth improving your offer. Running a competition that people enter by signing up to your email list is a great way to improve your conversion rate.

For ecommerce stores, the reward can be as simple as a discount coupon, however the better prize, the more likely people will be to sign up. When it comes to running competitions to grow your number of email subscribers, this can be both a blessing and a curse.

Ultimately you want to grow your list with qualified leads who have a reasonable potential to convert into paying customers. If people are signing up purely for the possibility of winning the prize, then you risk cultivating a disengaged email list that won’t be that beneficial to your business. The goal here is to balance these competing factors so that you get a decent sign up rate without tarnishing your list.

To run the competition on your website, you can use apps such as Gleam that make doing so super simple. Gleam also lets you run competitions where you can choose from a very long list of activities potential subscribers must do in order to enter such as retweet a tweet or check-in at a particular location on Facebook.

Other options also include gamified popups such as Wheelio’s virtual spin wheel that gives people the chance to win a prize.

What To Do With Your Email List

Now that you’re aware of all the main ways to capture the email address of your website visitors, it’s time to start implementing them on your site.

Collecting addresses to add to your email list won’t do much for your business unless you actually send an email to your subscribers though. Email marketing campaigns are a great way to increase your sales.

If you’re looking for an easy way to automate your email marketing, then check out SmartrMail’s features. We make it easy for ecommerce stores to automate their email campaigns as well as quickly composing email newsletters. Our features include abandoned cart emails, smart segmentation, and triggered email campaigns with integrations with all the popular ecommerce platforms.

The post 8 Ways To Capture Email Addresses of Website Visitors appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Email list cleaning, also known as list scrubbing or email list hygiene, is the process of removing addresses from your list that should no longer be present. This helps to maintain a lean and clean email list populated only with those you want to be emailing.

Any good email service provider (ESP) will automatically remove unsubscribes from your list, but there’s other reasons you might want to remove addresses that ESPs rarely do for you.

These include:

• Typos in addresses rendering them invalid
• Subscribers no longer engaging with your emails
• People signing up to new inboxes and abandoning their old ones

Overtime these factors result in more and more addresses on your list decaying. In fact, research has shown that the average email lists decays at a rate of 22.5% per year. Such a high percentage should highlight the need for keeping your list clean.

The consequences of poor email list hygiene

There are a number of consequences for you to consider as the number of bad addresses on your list builds. This is firstly reflected in poor open and click through rates (CTR). This can have flow on effects on your deliverability too. This means that by removing these bad addresses from your list, you can potentially increase the odds of your emails landing in the inboxes of those who want to receive them, making it likelier that they’ll convert.

It costs you more financially

In addition to potentially hurting your conversion rate, not regularly cleaning your email list is likely to result in you paying more for your email marketing than you should be. This is because the vast majority of ESPs (email service providers) charge based on the size of your email list. Each additional address on your list is potentially then adding to your costs. Because of this, you’ll want to ensure that everyone on your list is worthwhile being there to begin with.

Spam Traps

Another key reason to keep your email list up to date is because of email spam traps. These are merely email addresses that are used by firms involved in fraud management in an attempt to catch email spammers. These addresses no longer belong to a real person and so the thinking is that nobody should be sending emails to them. When an email is sent to one of these addresses, the sender is flagged as a spammer.

Fraud management firms employ several tactics to generate these addresses, the method of concern for email marketers however is the use of recycled email addresses. These are collected from once active addresses that have not been used in a very long time. The longer you put off cleaning your list, the greater the chance of a once active address being swooped up as a spam trap is. The larger your email list, the more likely this becomes too.

When to clean your email list

Best practice is to make email list cleaning a regular part of your marketing efforts. There are however several red flags indicate your list should be cleaned sooner rather than later. These red flags include:

Declining open and click rates

The first red flag is if you begin noticing your open and/or click through rates falling. Often this is because people are beginning to lose interest in your emails and are ignoring them in their inboxes. To be sure that they are declining, you’ll want to ensure that there’s a consistent and reliable trend occurring. It’s not uncommon for the odd email campaign to miss the mark or for engagement to drop off during certain times of the year depending on your industry.

Increasing bounce rate

Bounces are when an email fails to deliver to a person’s inbox due to a technical error. Reasons can include there being no inbox to send the email to, the subscriber’s inbox being full, and even the subscriber having block your emails. Occasionally bounces will occur as because of misspellings in email addresses.

More people unsubscribing

Having people unsubscribe rather than simply ignoring your emails is generally a bigger red flag. This is because they are actively saying that they do not want to receive any emails from you or your store again. Typically this can indicate that you’re sending emails too frequently.

More spam complaints

The most serious red flag, if your complaint rate is rising, then you might have a problem with people inadvertently joining up to your email list.

How to clean your email list

When it comes to cleaning your email list, there are some general principles and methods to follow and some more specific things to do in more unique situations.

General Cleaning & Dealing with Lowering Open and Click Through Rates

The first step to cleaning your email list is removing people who are no longer engaging with your emails. Exactly what constitutes a disengaged subscriber will vary depending on your store’s nature. For example, if you’re specializing in back-to-school sales, it wouldn’t be unusual for people to only engage with your emails in the lead up to the new school year. However, if most people are engaging with your emails on a weekly basis, those who haven’t opened an email from you in months are likely no longer interested.

Once you have determined a suitable time period for your business, you can then go about identifying your disengaged subscribers. Depending on your ESP (email service provider) you may be able to quickly generate a list of subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails in your specified time period. SmartrMail allows you to do this quickly and easily, instructions for doing so with SmartrMail are here.

After identifying your disengaged subscribers, you have two options: remove them from your list straight away, or try to win them back. Attempting to re-engage your disengaged subscribers is the preferable option as it’s a lot easier to get people who have previously shown interest in your emails to once again interaction with them than trying to brand new people to subscribe. You can view our earlier blog post here on how to get people to re-engage with your emails. If after attempting to win these people back, they’re still not engaging, then it’s time to delete them from your list.

More Specific Situations

If you’re finding that either your unsubscribe rate or, worse, your compliant rate is increasing, then there’s some extra steps you should take.

People Unsubscribing

For an increasing unsubscribe rate, you might want to first see if whether reducing your send frequency lowers the number of people unsubscribing. This is because one of the most common causes of unsubscribes is people getting sick of the number of emails landing in their inboxes.

If this doesn’t help, then it’s possible that people are signing up without actually being genuinely interested in receiving your emails. This can occur if you have a free offer for people in exchange for signing up to your email list, such as a free report or a one-off coupon. Once they have what they want, they might not see any reason to stick around and therefore unsubscribe. In this case you’ll want to make sure that your emails are worth sticking around.

People Complaining

People complaining (i.e., reporting your emails as spam) generally indicates that they did not want to be on your email list to begin with. Because of this, your first step should be to ensure that you are only adding people to your list who have fully agreed to being on your list. If you find that people are being added to your list without their full consent (e.g., you aren’t buying email lists or signing people up in a deceptive manner) you should immediately end the practice and see if that improves your compliant rate.

If after ensuring that people are not being added without their consent and your compliant rate is still high, you might then want to send a re-opt in email. This basically involves simply sending everyone on your list an email asking whether they still wish to continue to receive your emails and if so, for them to sign up to a new, separate mailing list. Because those who are still interested in staying on your list might miss this email, you should consider sending a few spaced out over a few weeks.

Conclusion

Obviously, you shouldn’t just sit back waiting until red flags start appearing before you start cleaning your email list. Maintaining good email list hygiene is essentially for every email marketing manager. Doing so will not only improve your sending reputation and deliverability, but most importantly it will ensure that your emails are working their best to generate you more sales!

If you’re looking for an email service provider that makes this easily, you can get started today with SmartrMail – a dedicated ecommerce email marketing service where you can quickly and easily create great looking emails filled automatically with products your customers are most likely to want to buy.

The post The Essential Guide to E-Commerce Email List Cleaning appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.

Simple. Because email marketing has an insanely high ROI. How high exactly? Well, according to the DMA National Email Report 2015, an average campaign has a 3800% ROI, which means that the average return for every dollar spent on email marketing is $38.

Moreover, while a lot of online stores have caught up with the times and started to build their lists, email marketing is still severely underutilized in the world of e-commerce, and doing it right can help you get ahead of your competition.

Building a solid email list takes time. However, if you know what you’re doing, you can really accelerate that process.

Follow these five steps. It’s time to put your email list on steroids!

Offer an opt-in incentive

An opt-in incentive is a “bribe” that you offer your store visitors to encourage them to sign up to your email list, such as a discount code, a free report, a free video course, etc.

A lot of online store owners are missing out on tons of email subscribers (and, consequently, sales!) by not having the right (or any) incentive in place.

I recommend to use something that is delivered over the course of several days (as opposed to one-off download) because that will help you draw your subscribers in and get them used to opening your emails.

What exactly am I talking about? Okay, so let’s say you have a health and fitness store aimed at men, and most of your customers are interested in losing fat and gaining muscle. Here are some examples of what you could offer them.

• A newsletter with exclusive content. The very least you can offer your subscribers is a weekly newsletter with exclusive, relevant content. In this case, that would be weight loss and muscle building links from all other the web, advice, interviews and success stories.
• A text-based email sequence. You can start with something as simple as offering your subscribers 3 tips that will help them build bigger and stronger muscles and then send those 3 tips in 3 separate emails over the course of a week. This is very easy to set up, so you really don’t have any excuse not to.
• A video-based email sequence. You can make those same 3 tips more appealing if you offer them in a video format. You can either film yourself talking into a camera, create Powerpoint + voice over presentations, or produce animated videos. Don’t know anything about video? You can always outsource to someone who does.

Keep in mind that this opt-in incentive is the beginning of what is hopefully going to be long-term, mutually beneficial relationship. It doesn’t have to be fancy… But it does have to provide value to your subscribers. Remember, you only get one shot at making a great first impression, so go above and beyond with your opt-in offer.

Create a high converting landing page

Once you have your opt-in incentive, it’s time to create a landing page, which is where you’ll “sell” your free offer to potential subscribers.

Here are three things that you need to keep in mind:

• The sole purpose of a landing page is to get the visitor to subscribe to your email list. That means that you should remove any and all distractions – your landing page shouldn’t have any links to your own websites, any external links, any other calls to action, etc. It’s one and only aim is to get that email address so remove anything that might distract the visitor from subscribing.
• Headline and subheadline of your landing page must explain why the visitor should subscribe to your email list. So, for example, “Lose fat. Build muscle” as a headline and “3 Tips That Actually WORK – Straight to Your Inbox!” as a subheadline might work for a men’s health and fitness store.
• The color and the text of your call to action button matters. The button must stand out from the rest of your page, so you should pick a color that would stand out. Red, orange, and yellow buttons tend to convert the best, but really, it all depends on your particular color scheme. And the text? Avoid using boring words like “Subscribe” and go with something more lively and relevant to your audience instead (say, “Get Jacked!” in the case of men’s health and fitness store).

Of course, these are only three tips, and while they are enough to help you get some of the most important stuff right, you should really take time to learn more about crafting high-converting landing pages.

Use Facebook ads to drive targeted traffic to your landing page.

Ecommerce expert Leighton Taylor says that the fastest way to build an email list is to send quality traffic to a landing page:

“The fastest way to start building your email list is to send quality traffic to a landing page. By quality traffic, I mean that it needs to be people who are likely to be interested in your products. Your marketing budget will be much more effective if you carefully choose who to spend it on.”

And what is the easiest way to get quality traffic? Paid advertising. Leighton himself used Facebook ads to go from 50 subscribers to over 1,000 subscribers – all within 4 weeks!

“My online shop sells survival knives, so I set up a Facebook ad targeting men ages 18-50 located in the United States who have expressed interest in survivalism and bushcraft. I was able to send traffic to a landing page for about $0.08 per click. The landing page offered a weekly newsletter containing survival articles and gear reviews, and about 15% of the visitors signed up for my newsletter. Within 4 weeks I went from less than 50 to over 1,000 email subscribers”

It might seem strange to use ads to get email subscribers instead of sales, but given the insanely high ROI of email marketing, it’s worth it in the long run.

Plus, It’s also a great method for introducing new people to your brand and warming them up to the idea of buying something from your store before hard selling them your products.

Use strategically placed, well-timed pop-ups

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. You hate pop-ups. So do I. So does everyone. Despite that, there’s no denying that they work (and sometimes they work extremely well… SkinnyMe Tea increased their email opt-ins by 758%!)

Here are three pop ups that you should be using on your site:

• 60-second delay pop-up. This is the pop-up that appears 60 seconds after a visitor arrives to your store. That gives them a bit of time to look around and get a sense of what it’s all about before they are presented with the opt-in incentive.
• Store browsing pop-up. This is the pop-up that appears when a visitor is already browsing your inventory. They are probably thinking about buying something… So what better time could there be to offer them a $5-$10 discount (a small price to pay for acquiring an email subscriber!).
• Exit-intent pop-up. This is the pop-up that appears when a visitor is about to leave your site. Offering a discount is probably your best bet.

Run giveaways and contests!

Giveaways are a great way to boost your email list. Everyone likes free stuff, right? So give people a chance to win some of your merchandise!

Here are some suggestions:

• It only makes sense to give away your own product because giving away something random will attract random people who might not otherwise be interested in what you are selling.
• Creating a landing page for a giveaway will help you to get more subscribers. Make sure to really “sell” your prize and encourage people to sign up for the contest!
• Use paid ads on Facebook and Reddit to drive quality traffic to the landing page. Once again, it might feel strange to use ads to get email subscribers instead of sales, but it makes sense in the long run.
• Promote your giveaway on social media. This is where having a solid following on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram comes in handy.

Remember, if you want your giveaway to be a success, you can’t do it in half-hearted way. You need to put time, energy, and yes, even money into it. Take it seriously. After all, if you play your cards right, all those new subscribers will be more than worth it in the end!

What’s next?

Okay, so now that your list is growing, you might be wondering how to make the best use of it…

Here are three articles that you can read next to make your email marketing more effective and increase your sales:

• 3 Emails Every Ecommerce Store Needs in Their Welcome Series – Wondering what you should even start with? This article will help you!
• 3 Emails Every Ecommerce Store Should Be Sending in 2017 – Learn about the 3 types of emails that are an absolute MUST for every ecommerce store.
• Killer Tips for Designing Email Newsletters for Gigantic Conversions – No one will bother to read your emails, much less buy anything, if your design is ugly. Improve your design and get more sales!

Also be sure to check out this case study – How Purple Toys Boosted Their Sales By Over $150k Using Automated Email Marketing!

Over to you: What tactics do you use to grow your email list faster?

The post 5 Steps to Supercharge Your Store’s Email List Growth appeared first on SmartrMail Email Marketing Blog.