Published 8 April 2020

Email Marketing Hacks – How to Grow your Email List Organically

Email marketing is a powerful tool for building an engaged audience and converting leads into customers. To grow your email list, it is important to network and make connections with potential customers. Offering valuable content and incentives can entice people to sign up for your email list. It's essential to focus on serving your audience's needs rather than solely selling to them. By implementing these strategies, you can experience significant growth in your email list and achieve high open and click-through rates.

Introduction

Imagine no longer having to sink your time into 1:1 selling!

Okay, you may still have to sink some time into this, depending on your business, but you can limit it with email marketing. Email marketing allows you to quickly reach more people without using more of your time, so you can focus on the good stuff – like, serving customers, making money, and other ways you love to build your business.

The problem is, most people who desire to add email marketing to their list of inbound activities don’t have an audience. Their lists are either old and cold or just plain small.

If you want to build email marketing campaigns that convert, you’ve got to have an engaged audience. With that in mind, let’s walk through exactly how I grew my list by over 4,000 subscribers with no paid advertising, list trades, or purchases in under five months.

The Importance of Email Marketing

Close your eyes for a moment and picture your website as a physical store. People are going to wander in and out all day long. Most of them are window shoppers – I’m talking 90-95% of them. That’s right. These folks aren’t ready to make a purchase and are just browsing.

Now, I want you to check your Google Analytics for the past 30 days. Calculate the number of people who visited your website and left without making a purchase based on these numbers. If you had 1,000 visitors, that’s 950 people who were just browsing and 50 who were ready to make a purchase.

How many bought something?

I won’t get into all the ways your website may need improvement to maximize conversions from those 50 individuals ready to buy now – that’s worthy of an entire post (maybe even a series of posts, if I’m being honest). I will, however, tell you what happened to the 950 people if you don’t have an email campaign tied to your website.

NOTHING.

I know, it sounds harsh, but I want you to let that sink in for a minute.

If you had an email campaign tied to your website, a fair percentage of those who didn’t purchase anything would at least have multiple opportunities to engage with you, ongoing. They may learn more about business, your offers, and eventually even buy something!

Now you know why email is so special! It’s your secret to staying top of mind with leads and converting them into paying customers and, hopefully, raving fans.

Okay, now that you’re truly on board, let’s chat about how to build your list!

Source : Neilpatel.com

Talk to Lots of People

You can have incredible content, but if no one knows about it then it’s nothing more than a best-kept secret. What you need is visibility. This is achieved the fastest through networking. The problem most people have is time. Networking 1:1 with dozens of people each day to grow your list is exhausting and not sustainable.

Instead, I highly recommend you start by making a list of businesses – or at least the types of businesses – you feel would be a good fit for your offers. Think about where they spend the most time.

Are they attending specific events, do they read certain publications, are their decision makers in popular groups on top social platforms? Wherever they are, you need to also be, spreading the word about you and your business in high-value ways.

I made a list of opportunities I planned to act on quickly, which included:

Guest speaking on popular podcasts
Writing for major blogs in my industry
Joining expert panels at online summits
Being interviewed by popular publications
Showing up daily in groups as an authority

After making my list, I made lots of calls, sent dozens of emails, and took massive action. I showed up every single day and pitched myself until I got a “yes”.

Make Your Offer One They Can’t Refuse

Email marketing campaigns only work when they’re full of value.

No one signs up to be on an email list unless there’s something in it for them – a piece of content, a discount code, exclusive tips, etc. Your job as a marketer is to not only create massive value for your audience but also show them how valuable it is before they fork over their precious email address.

When evaluating the value of my offer, I asked myself, “would I pay for this?” This is probably the easiest way to confirm a high enough value to get results. So, what are you offering your audience and is it something they’d feel was valuable once they got it?

Adding clarity around this value is the key to maximizing your subscriber base. Here’s how I achieved this to ensure lots of people would opt-in:

Outlined my offer in simple terms
Displayed the offer visually as well as in writing
Made the call to action sound exciting
Simplified the sign-up process (i.e. name & email only)

Stop Selling and Start Serving

Humans are inherently selfish. We look after our own well being first, always. This means anything you offer them needs to be focused on their desires, not yours.

If you find selling uncomfortable, you’re doing it wrong. Selling is simply an extension of service. When your offer to get them on your email list is truly in service of them, it’s a no-brainer.

What happens in this case is that they feel like you’ve listened to their needs, read their mind, and truly understand them. This makes getting lots of subscribers easy and exciting for both parties. It also makes the nurturing process flow naturally and result in higher conversions.

So, how do you know if you’ve got a great offer that’s rooted in service? Easy. You’re grateful for those who join your list, even when they don’t purchase something. You feel confident they’ll get the value they came for and walk away having learned something.

Conclusion

Everything in business is a numbers game. The more people you have on your email list, the better your odds of selling. If you want to grow your list without spending a fortune, focus on being visible everywhere – including outside of your existing network – making clear, high-value offers, and seeking to serve your audience well instead of sell to them. This not only resulted in my email list growing by 4,000 people in under five months but also consistent 60%+ opens and 30%+ clicks on the emails sent to them.