Introduction

So, you have thought of taking advantage of email marketing as a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Here I am discussing 101 email resources to help you get started in your email marketing.

1.Understand the psychology

As per a study done by Salesforce, up to 95% of people like to get emails from brands as they find it flattering and feel they are getting personalized attention from the brand. So they would love to join a list to stay informed.

2.Love sharing good content

Many people do want to join a list to learn something free and don’t mind sharing their email for this. In her blog, Traffic Generation Cafe, Ana shows how you can enjoy good traffic to your website.

3.Relating to the buying persona

The buying cycle of a person can be as small as 1 day or as big as 6 months. That means a person can take a long time to buy from you. They may want to know you more before buying from you.

Email marketing will allow them to understand you more since you will keep on sending them a lot of content and offers and updates. Thus a perfect way to turning cold leads into sales and then eventually leading to increased sales by at least 20% in due course of time.

4.Make email central to your content marketing channel effectiveness

Have you made a content marketing plan for your business?

If no, you should consider email as an integral part of your content marketing system.

It will help you in acquiring your customers at a very less cost. Research has been done by Ascend2 research study, Email-Driven Content Marketing, to understand how marketing professionals are combining email and content marketing.  Email is definitely the most effective content distribution channel online as 82% of the marketing professionals do agree with it.

So very clearly, there are a lot of benefits of creating your own personalized email marketing strategy.

Ways how you can work on it better

5.Choose an email marketing provider

For delivering emails you need to select an email marketing provider who can send tons of emails to your customers in a go.

Tools like ConvertKit, Aweber, GetResponse and ActiveCampaign are an email service provider which are geared towards the needs of professionals.

They give you many options to choose from lead magnets which will help you to capture new leads.

Now that you have chosen an email service provider, it’s time to grow your list continuously.

Here’s how to do that

Ways to grow your email list

6.Create a pop up on your website to attract people.

This is called a lead magnet which will help you to gain many email addresses.

When you create a lead magnet, try to test a few things like does it really give your audience the much-desired value, like giving them a free report or some conversion tips on their blog. See if this evokes some emotion within them. Put in the right efforts, the more the merrier for you and your business. Now building a very good lead magnet is something you spend your time upon.

Let’s see how to build a great lead magnet and how to structure it.

• When your prospects subscribe, be sure what you can give.
• If you created a lead magnet, are you sure why have you created it and for whom
• Does it really address their key concerns to get back to you again

You need to have a well-thought call to action on your lead magnet in order to guide them on what to do next.

Tools like Wistia, Canva, Piktochart, and more can be of help.

7.Create Newsletters

You can use this to give discounts and free items on your web traffic. Create an opt-in form and ask customers to join. You can place a pop up at the top or bottom of your website. Tools like OptinMonster can help in this to get the best results.

8.Sweepstakes and giveaways

Don’t we all enjoy things which we get free? Ecommerce businesses host sweepstakes and so many giveaways to get new email subscribers signing in them. Lure your target audience with something they will interesting and they will share their email id with you. Tools like Agropulse can be useful.

9.Set up Cart abandonments

A cart abandonment software can help you to capture customers’ emails before checking out on an online store. Then you can send a follow-up email as a reminder what is left in the cart. You can provide them discounts and offers and try to push the product. Dynamic yield tool will help you overcome this problem and increase your business ROI manifold.

10.Tame the expectations of the prospects well

Understand your target audience’s needs. You can create a lead magnet by creating a sale on your website or ask them to sign up to receive gifts.

11.Using Social Media with Email

Have you thought of using social media with email – Grow quickly your email list on social media platforms. Put together an opt-in offer for your prospects to subscribe to your list and can grow it fast.

Use a Give away to increase the growth of your email list. Use tools like King Sumo and Viralsweep to create your own contest for capturing emails.

Now that you have a good number of subscribers.

12.Plan Your Offerings

Create a plan regarding what you plan to send your customers and how often. Your audience has to be clear about what they are getting.

13.Reassure Subscribers about Spam

Tell people that you are good people and you don’t spam. This will create a level of trust between you and the customers. This will also give them a good reason to take a chance to share their emails with you.

14.Free Resources

Isn’t it great to get some exclusive forms, templates, worksheets, and other downloadable resources or cheat sheets? Give your customers such things and grab the email. Take a look at the HubSpot email template below.

15.Think about writing an eBook

If you really want to increase email sign-ups, think about giving a good ebook to your customers.

16.Include Testimonials to speed up sign-ups

While you are asking for the email sign up, show them some customer testimonials where they can actually see people getting benefits. This would help them to be more confident in sharing their emails.

17.Can collect email address in your store

While you are doing it online, assign a person the duty of collecting emails when customers visit your physical store. The idea is to capture as many as possible emails whether online or offline.

18.Create Coupons

Create an exclusive coupon code that people can use within their first year of purchase anytime. Venture Harbour does it this way.

19.Business Cards as a way to create a list

Show on your business cards the benefits of joining an email list with you. This way people will know about you while you are networking.

20.Make a Giveaway on some other website

You can create some tie-ups on any other website and sponsor some giveaways there

21.Use Events

You may have some potential subscribers who would like to join an event and you as a marketer can give them the tickets and exchange in lieu of the email sign up.

22.Use Blogs as Online Content

Start writing a great blog. This will help your subscribers see your good piece of content. If they like your content they will share your content with others and more people will be able to join your blog.

23.Use the intent on the exit of your webpage

Use pop up while people are leaving your website and you now need to capture the emails. Here in this image below you can see how to exit pop-up is being used by giving a free case study. This is a smart behavioral technology used by the smart marketer and will help him to capture additional 2-4% subscribers.

24.Use a clever idea on a part of your website

Try creating a portion of your website with some best content information and ask for an email sign-up to unlock it. Market Research companies use this trick very well.

25.Start a Facebook group

Create a Facebook group and give much-personalized information and guidance. To get this ask for an email sign-up. Look for people who share common interests on a topic like shown below. They would like to join your Facebook group. Give them good advice and you have your email list.

26.Start Cross promoting with others

Start connecting with other businesses in your niche and start cross-promoting their email list on your website and you can ask them to do the same cross-promotional activities for you in return.

27.Ask Subscribers to share

If you have garnered a good response on a piece of content and go ahead as ask your email subscribers to share it on their social media.

Remember, we have put a pop-up…right?

When your audience will share on their social media, it will create a viral effect and help you to gain organically many email subscriptions.

28.Promote at a Trade show

In case you promote your business at a trade show, use a sign-up sheet there as well where people can fill in their email information.

29.Create a 21-day Challenge

Ask your customers to take a challenge for 21 days with you and show them the results. Before taking the challenge, they need to sign up with you by providing their emails. Many health bloggers use this technique for getting email sign-ups

30.Create your own mobile app and collect emails

Create your own mobile app and give it free to those who sign up with your email list.

31.Have Order pages where customers can opt-in

Create order pages where people can opt-in for your new notifications and news while they are completing their orders. This will help you in list building.

32.Take advantage of order conformations

Ok, now some people did not opt-in on your order pages, but they completed their order.

You can still try sending an easy way for them to sign up to your email list in case they missed it after they have completed their orders on your website.

We know they haven’t but no harm in trying.

33.Consider asking for emails on product delivery

See if people are really happy with the buying experience on your website, they will go the extra mile to help you. Take advantage of this thing. Use a signup trick here when people get the actual delivery.

34.How about including a sign-up link on your everyday email?

Include a simple sign-up link on your email signature for those who would like to. Give a reason in your email why you are asking customers to sign up. Include the exclusive benefits.

35.Add a sign-up link banner to your social profiles

Create a banner for your social media profiles where you encourage people to sign up for your email list.

Give a quick description of the incentive there. Look how CleverReach is doing this.

36.Offer a Free Service

If you are running a service-based business, try giving free service at the beginning of a free consultation in lieu of an email sign up.

Remember that your free service or consultation should make an impact in your customer’s life, only then they will exchange.

37.Use Event as an opportunity

Be a speaker at an event. Share with people your knowledge and expertise, and you can ask them to sign up for your email list.

38.Don’t stop at one free download

Ok, now you have given an incentive in the form of a free download to your customers by asking them to share their email with you. You have to keep on offering regular downloads for getting new subscribers. For example, HubSpot uses this technique to reach out to its customers and gets new subscribers.

Take a look at the image below and see how they are helping you genuinely.

39.Use Social Media to preview offerings

Create a new offering and start previewing it on your social media. The customers will be able to see and check if they are missing on something and they need to catch with. This way it can lure them to share their email with you in order to get the benefits.

40.Think Beyond

If you provide customers with a range of different content, some individuals will not want to sign up because they don’t want to get all that distinct content.

But you could attract more sign-ups if you break it into more detailed lists, such as one for discount deals only and one for curated content.

41.Scanning QR Codes on Signage

You can make it very easy for people to register for your list on any signage or print materials by scanning a QR code with their smartphones or mobile devices. Look at Purlem, how they have created a personalized QR code.

42.On Facebook, add a Call to Action

Facebook also makes adding a call to action to your page very easy for you. And you can build the option to sign up for your email list with your call to action.

43.Use Content on Pinterest for email sign up

You may also post some visually pleasing material on Pinterest that requires a connection to sign up for your page.

44.Create YouTube Videos

Try to create YouTube videos, here you can include a call to action that encourages people to subscribe.

45.Make use of Influencers on Twitter

On Twitter, to improve exposure, you can tag related brands or influencers when talking about your emails.

46.Use Calls to Action for email sign-ups

You should also have calls to action at the bottom of every post to inspire further sign-ups if you blog about your business.

47.Use Webinars for email sign-ups

48. Send email marketing tips

Give your audience some great tips which can help them build an email list faster. Business Blocks is doing it in a great manner.

49.Create a course on your website and sell

Give a free course to your customers. Ask them to share their email to get the course. This will help you grow your list faster. Udemy is a great place to get such courses.

50.Partner with Influencers for awareness

You can partner with influencers and then guide new visitors to a landing page with your sign-up form to increase awareness for your company among relevant consumers.

51.Give a checklist for productive meetings

52.Give a cross channel social media strategy

53.You can create bundles

How about creating a blogging checklist with some step-by-step process to establish a blog along with a good SEO. Bloggers sidekick have done it like this

54.Use Infographics for getting email sign-ups

Infographics are used by people a lot and it’s one of the most sharable content. Pursuant gives you the best infographics for downloading in exchange for your details. Take motivation from here

55.Create your tool kit

If you have some software, calenders, apps, templates, and more, create your toolkit and use it as a lead magnet to capture emails. Lead pages use this tactic in which they are giving away a list of “The 5 Tools I Used To Create All My Videos“.

56.Create a Video Series

There are many customers who like to see videos. Creating a video series can be helpful. Marketing Results is a company that uses this technique to help their prospects by creating a video series.

57.Create a Mini-Course

A micro e-course could be a fast, easy-to-use lead magnet to put together. In a way, it’s quite similar to using Newsletter or Templates, but can be a strong lead magnet.

58.Teaser of Online Course

You may think of giving away a teaser of the online course you made and use it as a lead magnet, it will help in growing your subscriber list.

59.Full version of a trending course

People will love this. The trick is to give away a full version at a basic level, ask for email, and then start pushing an advanced course.

60.Free chapter of your book

Think about selling your book.

Need to market it? Yes!

How?

Use this strategy to build buzz about your book and generate email leads in the process.

61.Webinar recordings

If your webinar or event is worth the hype, record it, and make it available to people later in an exchange of email sign up. This is an amazing way to increase your email sign-ups.

62.Resource Package

We all know in today’s era, we need high-quality images and fonts for content writing. Yes, your audience is going to need it time and again. An example is from Creative booster, who provide us such infographic vector images as a great resource and collect emails in exchange.

63.Give free CRM access to your customers

Yes, you heard it right. You can help your customers to automate their businesses. HubSpot gives its CRM 100% free. In lieu, they just need your email sign up.

64.Help customers to save their time

Give them a collection of videos or training programs and help them to save their time doing mundane things again and again.

For example, in the training industry, you may offer them an ultimate collection of some best courses to help them understand a topic better.

65.Free Consultation

Depending upon what your business vertical is you can decide to add this as a strategy to be given and ask for emails.

66.Surveys

Use surveys as lead magnets to build your email list. Make it short and fun with some good information or give it away once they fill up your survey form.

67.Samples

You can give free samples of your product to kick start your relationship with your customers.

68.Weekly deals

Once you have customers, use weekly deals as a strategy to make them purchase more and share with other prospects and ask them to subscribe. A great way to build your list.

69.Free Shipping

Most e-commerce businesses use this. Tell your customers if they want free shipping, ask them to share their emails and grow your list.

Now let’s see how to increase the open rate of your emails

 

70.Do A/B testing of your subject lines.

Take two segments of your email list. Divide it into two sets. Think of two subject lines and do an A/B test to check which one is invoking interest with your audience. When your test is statistically valid and you feel confident, roll out the subject line of the champion to the rest of your list. This will save you a lot of time and help in increasing the open rates.

71.Do a subject line test with your customized segment

Instead of testing a sample size subject line, you can test 2 subject lines to your entire list or section of your list, and then apply what you learn from this A/B test to future sends. There are endless choices to make as you gain some experience on this and know what suits your subscribers.

72.Create Welcome series of email

We found that subscribers who receive welcome emails show more serious commitment to a brand: a 33 per percent rise in long-term brand engagement. The more engaged subscribers you have, they are more likely to open your emails.

Now some ways to personalize your emails to get more results

73.Add First name of customers in subject lines

This method is very popular and that for an excellent purpose, very effective. Customized subject line emails are 26% more likely to be opened.

74.Use Geo targeting your emails based on weather conditions.

For example, Seamless, an online grocery service, delivers geo-targeted marketing offers during snowstorms and flash floods in NYC. Seamless knows Americans would wish to remain indoors during bad weather, so they send promotional deals to their New York geo subscriptions.

75.Make Subscriber’s Anniversary Offers

Ahh…This one is simple!

Even if the only details you have are your customer’s email address, you already know the time and date your subscriber was added to your email list.

Now develop an automatic email to mark the anniversary of your bond or relation with your email subscriber.

Then you’ve got high targets for email customization, but where do you get the data which you would need to effectively customize?

At the very least, you do have email addresses and geolocation information saved in your email list.

Remember we did that?

And the first name too.

However, as you develop a bond with your subscribers, you can now start collecting more historical data based on what your subscribers click on and connect with. This data you can use for your future campaigns for your prospects.

After increasing the open rate, lets see how to increase the Click Through Rate

76.Consistency in emails

If you want customers not to unsubscribe, give them consistent content. For getting good results, maintain consistency between your different marketing platforms.

Take a look at the IFTTT message and see how they have maintained the consistent message across platforms.

Do something like this to create a brand and this will get you more subscribers.

77.Check the Standard 600 PX Preview

About 1.8 billion emails opened from almost 22 billion email recipients have been evaluated by Campaign Monitor. Around 28% of openings occurred via desktop email clients. Due to the number of email clients and their versions, it is difficult to create pixel-perfect experiences for all of them.

But then you can take note of their default preview widths, which is about 600 px.

It is difficult to create pixel-perfect experiences for all of them, given the number of email clients and their versions, so keep the previews under 600px.

Work on segmenting your Email list

 

Segmenting your email list allows you to speak with your clients more intelligently and explicitly, giving them information that they want at the right time. And when you do it right, the payoff can be enormous.

MailChimp segmented their email list on the basis of location and job title. They found that their email open rate increased by 19 percent and also their click-through rate increased by 22 percent. That is the power of segmenting email lists. You will now see why we should segment emails and how it can power up your email marketing.

When you put some time into the planning process, it doesn’t take long to get started with email list segmentation. At a basic level, here’s what you will need: User information that is connected to an email address. This information can be anything from the gender of someone to their favorite movie or a favorite sport. Now if you have very less data yet, start collecting data and then create user profiles as and when you feel comfortable.

Some email marketing applications, including the location and level of interaction of the user, can also collect information for you.

An email-sending tool, such as MailChimp or AWeber is ideally one that plays well with list segmentation. Many email marketing tools will handle the segment organization for you and some will even sort your customers into segments automatically, but before assembling groups, you’ll need a rough plan in place.

78.Now Think beyond Opens and Clicks

Once you have got all the open rates and the click-through rates correct, now is the time to see other important goals always to make your email marketing strategy up and running.

• Always focus on customer engagement
• Go out of your way to help your customer
• Understand the buyer’s behavior, and customer journey
• This will contribute directly to creating growth in revenue & profits.

79.Check your timings

Timings are important to send emails. See what times your customers are seeing your emails, so send emails at the right time

80.Update your subscriber list

Keep updating your email subscriber list and see for people who don’t interact at all with your mails. You can drop them off.

81.Don’t buy leads

Take care of this one. If you want your email strategy to work for you, then never buy leads. It may sound a faster and cheaper option but they will never interact with your business.

82.Use a Double opt-in confirmation

Double opt-in works better than a single confirmation, because the new fan is very sure about getting some content from you and has shared his email id and then is taking the pain of double opting in.

83.Make promises which you can fulfill

Don’t be fake. People will not give you a second chance if you do so. They will unsubscribe from your list very soon.

84.Use an emoji

You can try using emojis in your subject lines as a part of brand language. This will help people to identify with the brand in the longer run.

85.Be consistent

Everyone likes consistency, so do your customers. Keep on sending emails at regular intervals and you will see it will increase the open rates over a period of time.

Now some email mistakes you should avoid

 

86.Don’t keep your Sign up boxes in the sidebar of your blog.

It won’t grab your customer’s attention, so avoid this mistake.

87.Send series of emails about Cart Abandonment

As per the research done by a research company Baymard Institute, they found that in the UK approximately 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned by customers.

So what can you do?

Send some targeted emails to such subscribers

Tools like Mailchimp, Aweber, and others will be of much help.

88.Send Welcome Emails

Once you have some subscribers, send them welcome emails.

You need to welcome and educate new subscribers. According to Marketing sherpa, it drives 33% of the total email revenue.

89.Establish a sense of emergency

If your subscribers like, they will not want miss out on any deals from you. Create emails with subject lines like “Two day sale” or “Limited time offer”. This will push the sales and keep your emails useful.

90.Create a feature story

Get customers’ attention to your website by creating a featured story and send an email about it to your subscribers.

91.Use high-resolution pictures

You should use high-resolution pictures to get your subscribers’ attention. Customers love catchy images and stick to the page for a longer time because of this.

92.Do Storytelling

Create a story to address the customer pain points, address some hitches in between.

Add a little drama to it and then show the results of the changed story

Smartblogger has done it perfectly by using the power of storytelling.

93.Personalized Emails

You must be already getting emails and saying, “Hey, Mary, I have an offer for you”, or Hi, Paul, I have a gift for you”. These are all personalised emails. Such emails draw attention and the open rates are also very high.

94.Treat Subscribers as Community Members

Ryan Robinson who writes on ryrob.com gives his take on treating subscribers as community members.

95.Answer Questions

Try to answer all questions of the subscribers. This will create a sense of trust within them as well as they will feel you are quite knowledgeable.

96.Send relevant content

If you know your customers’ likes and dislikes the way you would know about your wife or husband.

Pay close attention to their choices.

Allow them to choose the content they would like.

97.Use words like suppose or imagine

This will keep your readers engaged with your content, as everybody has hope in life to move ahead. You can give them that motivation to imagine and then realize their dreams.

98.Sign your emails

Try and sign emails with your name as compared to your company. This shows the email service provider that the email has been sent by a human and not a bot.

99.Add your business address

If you can add your physical address, it will make your business more legitimate while it goes through the spam filtering.

100.Don’t forget to add an unsubscribe link

This is a great way to ensure the spam filters and let them know if your content does not interest the subscribers, there’s always a way to opt-out.

101.Take care of the bounce rate

Try to understand why your bounce rate is high.

It could be either your subject lines, or your email copy, or the creative and many more things.

Understand them and try to decrease the bounce rate as much as possible.

Conclusion

Awesome! You have learned how to set up your email marketing system and how to capture emails. You should be able to deliver well your first email campaign now.

Now it’s time for what you’ve learned above to be put into practice so that you can expand your email list and get more clients. We concentrated on setting up an email system focused on emails in the broadcast format, otherwise known as marketing emails, for this post.

If you are running an eCommerce website and sell products on your website, you may also use transactional emails. Then you should focus on them as well.

I might have missed any tips on how you can create an email marketing list…

If so, just let me know in the comments section. I would love to hear from all of you!