7 Ways to Build a Successful Email List

This is a guest post by Melissa Tamura. If you too wish to guest post at DKSpeaks, you can read the guidelines here.

Building an email list for your marketing campaign, website, or business can become a very steep task. What you have to realize first is that you can’t build a successful email list over night. It takes planning and some crucial steps to create a list that converts readers to customers. It takes time to develop all your strategies to gain more traffic and opt ins so don’t think it will happen over night. The people online with websites that have hundreds of thousands of subscribers have been working at building their list for years.

There are some things you can do to speed up the process of getting more subscribers to your email list which I will go over here. The 7 most successful things I do to build a list are incentives, pay per click advertising, proper sign up form placement, selling on your opt in form, providing value, pop up offers, and squeeze pages.

Using Incentives To Build a List

This is one thing you must have in order to build a successful email list. If your visitors don’t have any reason to sign up to your email list, chances are, they won’t. If you think about all the large lists out there, they either offer something for free, or they have such unique and interesting content that the readers want to make sure they get all the updated content regularly. Providing something like a free e-book or guide to do something will instantly increase your conversion rate of sign ups to your email list.

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising To Attract Visitors and Capture Email Addresses

Using PPC ad programs is also an excellent way to gain email addresses. What you would do is go to google and/or yahoo and start a campaign using keywords related to your niche and buy traffic to a landing page or squeeze page. I will talk more about squeeze pages later. You are essentially buying traffic to that landing page where all you want to get is an email address. It is then up to you to create a set of emails sent to that person inviting them to your website and possibly trying to sell them something.

Sign Up Form Placement

The placement of your sign up form is very crucial. I feel the best place is the top right or top left of your website. The form should include the boxes to put their name and email address, plus your incentive for signing up. You can also use links in your content, and other sign up form placements such as below your articles.

Selling on Your Sign Up Form

Again, you must use some form of selling technique to entice your readers to sign up to your email list. If you only have the boxes to sign up, chances are you will have a very low conversion rate.

Providing Value

If you do not have a unique voice or unique content that gets people to come back to your website, you will not make it in this business. Providing value to your prospective readers and customers is a must. Make sure you are doing your best to inform and educate your readers so they have a natural feeling to sign up to your email list.

Pop Up Offers

Pop ups are very irritating, I know. But they work very well in converting first time readers to long time subscribers. The pop ups are only shown once to each visitor so it won’t be too irritating if they come back and read more of your content.

Using Squeeze Pages

Finally, we get to using squeeze pages. This is a page that has only one thing in mind and that’s to capture an email address. Once you set up a PPC campaign, you want those clicks you purchase to go to a sales pages that states why they need to sign up for your email list. Make sure to include your incentive and strong reasons why they should sign up.

About the Author –

Melissa Tamura is Editor at Large of the Zen College Life directory of online degrees. She most recently wrote about Ashford University.