Email marketing might be one of the oldest, but it is one of the fastest ways to drive sales for online companies. Almost all successful e-commerce companies have either tried email marketing in the past, or they are currently developing their email campaign right now. Behind every successful email marketing campaign is a strategy that contributes to the growth of an email database. It is quite a challenge to grow databases and seed the data initially.
Research shows that it is difficult for new companies to begin email databases as it is difficult for veterans to collect the data from more than 10,000 users and potential customers. Growing the database depends upon a large number of factors including the experience of the team, the resources at hand and the time available for the campaign.
Take the help of a viral competition
Going viral is almost every marketer’s golden dream. To secure the attention of every target user in the market, you need to launch a viral competition, poll or discussion. Ensure that the topic and the content are in sync with marketing ethics and audience taste. Keep the competition details and prize details sharable via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
- Ensure that the prize attracts people, who are genuinely interested in your products or services.
- The prizes should be enticing enough so that all participants share their experience on your website competition.
- Couple the registration process for the competition with your email database. Each person signing up for the competition will also be contributing to the database automatically.
Make full use of opt-in applications
Applications like List Builder and Scroll box encourage more visitors to sign up or register for business newsletters. When a visitor has been on a website for a while or when he is about to leave the site, these apps create popup messages for the visitor. These pop-ups gently nudge the visitors to leave their email addresses to receive special offers, promotions, and newsletters via email. You can test other similar applications too that allow you to set time limits before the registration request pops up. You can try other plug-ins and apps that prompt a registration message after the visitor has scrolled through at least 25% or 50% of the page. Keep active options for the user to opt-out of registering on-spot as well. Research shows that websites that keep the pop-up registration-optional aid in faster database building.
The ideal way to determine the message or the pop-up design that works best for you is to implement an A/B design. Switching up the CTA message on the popup can make a drastic change in the registration rates. Several applications that assist the contact form pop-ups and registration processes for websites also offer A/B testing facilities in their premium versions.
Use the content cliffhanger technique
Collecting emails for your database becomes easy once you start using the content cliffhanger technique. It uses the psychological research of Zeigarnik et al to power the process of subconscious recollection of incomplete information and the urge of the human mind to complete it. You should start with a popular list of “10 ways you can boost your SEO”. Provide your readers with five tips and then mention the next 5 in the free download section. Set up a popup that urges people to sign up with the website by providing their emails. They can get the complete content in their emails, or they can access it online from your archive by completing the registration process.
New methods and tactics call for the measurement of the metrics. Record the dates of registration and the conversion rates before and after the introduction of the email opt-in. You can try several cliffhanger plug-ins over time for your content and website. Just like a cliffhanger in a good TV series or crime drama, start the idea on your website or blog and finish it in the email cum download. This can increase the sign-up rate by almost 10% as per reports from expert digital marketing teams.
Add a viral element to your website content!
Adding a viral loop is another brilliant way to add negative churn to your email website. People will keep subscribing to the viral content, and the database will keep growing for every added subscriber. Viral loops relate closely to viral pre-launch campaigns. During a pre-launch campaign, you can offer free products, services and subscription offer for those, who register with your email services. This is one of the most effective ways to garner email contacts and create your email list when your brand is nascent. Sometimes, brands have used pre-launched campaign prizes to extrapolate registrations. For example – if you offer one registering user two months of free service for every one new registration he brings to your website, it will create an extrapolation effect. Each leading application including Uber, PayPal and Lyft have used the referral tactic to grow their email list.
Turn your homepage to an opt-in page
One method that works uniformly for all is the conversion of the landing page or the homepage to an opt-in page. No one can go to your internal pages and products without visiting your homepage. This makes your homepage the perfect natural opt-in page for your visitors. When content marketing is the key part of your digital business strategy, this tactic works well. However, be very careful while employing this approach since you do not want to turn off your visitors from your website altogether while building your email database.
Always keep an option where they can opt-out of subscription and still get to view the content. Don’t make opt-in compulsory for every visitor. This will give your website a lot of false positives from uninterested people who had no other option than to sign in. Implementing just one of these hacks may not be enough. You need to select and use multiple in different combinations to find the ones that work best for your website and brand.
