Loyal subscribers connect with your brand in very direct and personal ways. These folks look forward to reading your next email, feel enthusiastic interacting with your brand on social media, and put in extra effort when recommending your product to friends and family.
Indeed, every retail marketer would value an email list packed with subscribers loyal to their brand or consumers willing to go the extra mile to see them succeed.
But the thing is, an email list of loyal subscribers is not something you can buy from a one-off trade. Your best bet at attracting loyalty is by putting in work to earn it over time.
So, if you prefer to cut corners and don’t mind coming up short in meeting the needs of your audience, forfeit this piece and read something else. Growing a list of loyal subscribers requires putting in maximum time and effort; you’re either fully in or out.
This article highlights everything you need to build a list of loyal subscribers. If you’re ready, let’s get started!
Email Marketing Tools & Skills You Need to Attract & Keep Subscribers
It’s a fantastic feeling knowing that people are looking forward to your messages and reading everything you have to say with bated breath, but what’s more wonderful is having a list of loyal subscribers willing to reply to your messages and keep two-way communication channels open.
Auto-responder sequence
As retail marketers, we’ve all experienced the persuasive and compelling power of auto-responder emails. How they draw us in with a spicy offer, nurture the relationship with consumer-centric emails and get us to take action with swift and, at the moment, long-awaited CTAs.
Auto-responders are automated email series ecommerce marketers use as lead magnets. With an auto-responder email sequence, you can sit back and relax while your new leads fluidly become hot leads ready to buy from you.
You’ll need to create multiple autoresponder emails for your list-building strategy. Make sure these emails are 100% evergreen—that’s today, and three years from now, they’d remain relevant. Get your welcome message right and draft your auto-responder sequence around the ‘AIDA’ {attention, interest, desire and action} model.
Opt-in landing page
For every retail marketing activity, you will come across must-haves and nice to have. When trying to grow your email list, opt-in landing pages, or ‘squeeze pages,’ as some ecommerce marketers love to call it, are a must-have.
Opt-in landing pages serve as a gatekeeper to your email marketing campaign. The primary goal of a squeeze page is to show the instant value ideal customers will enjoy as soon as they enter their data.
It’s okay to use incentives or pressure to get customers to make your opt-in page likable. For example, say you sell software teachers’ can use to mark exams and record grades speedily. You can provide a free e-book on the latest EdTech trends and their influence on educators on your opt-in landing page.
With such incentive in play, administrators and teachers eager to stay on top of industry trends will find your opt-in landing page interesting. They wouldn’t mind using their contact information as a bargaining chip for the free eBook. A win-win for all.
Sales landing pages
Most leads come in cold. That means your ideal audience doesn’t think they need your emails—not until they find themselves smiling to their inbox at every buzz from your marketing campaign.
Sales landing pages help you sell a product. Consumers visit this single page when they find an offer interesting, maybe through your automated emails or lead magnet, and want to know more.
Indeed, a sales landing page might not help you grow your mailing list directly. Still, since we can unanimously agree that the overall goal behind the mailing list hassle is to win new leads and make more sales, you wouldn’t want to undermine the efficiency of a well-optimized sales landing page.
Content marketing
Hundreds of email marketers continue to tout the ‘content is king banner.’ And as such, for most marketers, ‘content is king’ resonates better as a cliché than a powerful claim with a profound impact.
Anyways, if you want to successfully grow your email list, you can’t afford to ignore content marketing. Your landing pages and auto-responder emails are only as powerful as your content marketing strategy.
Content marketing allows you to put the right information in front of the right audience at the right time. A well-thought-out content marketing strategy guarantees that people land on your landing page and get to see what you’re offering.
Email copywriting
The notion that successful retail marketers are skilled copywriters is bold and true. If you don’t know how to write convincingly or grab attention with words, you’d have difficulty connecting with your ideal audience.
Before growing your email, master the dos and don’ts of persuasive and compelling writing. Learn how subject lines work and flow with intuitive copies.
We are not saying you need to become an expert copywriter. Start from the basics, find your voice and pave your way to the top. Copywriting keeps the ball rolling for ecommerce marketers. So, if you can’t afford to learn the skill, hire a copywriter.
Do you need help in building an email list of loyal subscribers?
How to Grow Your Email List
Since marketing is more of trial & error and less of fool-proof strategies, everyone will tell you to opt for the fastest list-building strategy – buying emails in bulk. Don’t go down that path. From experience, we can boldly tell you that strategically growing your list is the easiest way to build a pack of loyal subscribers.
5-Steps Checklist to Growing your Email List
1. Study and identify your audience
Your product might be the best in the market, offering mouth-watering benefits and life-changing features, but the truth is, not every consumer out there wants your product. So the earlier you stop trying to sell to everybody and focus on a subset of your target market, the better.
Studying your audience; knowing their desires and pain points is the first stage to growing your list. If you know your audience, you’d easily identify marketing strategies and tactics with little gray areas.
Before you think of automating an email sequence or drafting a content strategy, break through the stereotypes by learning how to write for your target audience.
2. Draft a long-term strategy
If you’re the type of marketer that expects immediate ROI from every email sent, you might want to rethink your expectations or forget about growing your email list.
The process of growing a sustainable email list is the same as planting a seed. You must water and nurture it till it grows and produces edibles. No shortcuts.
If you want to win, draft a long-term strategy. Highlight content that excites your subscribers and design your content strategy around content that builds relationships rather than promotes quick sales. In summary, ‘lead with value.’
3. Keep on promoting content
Your email opt-in page can only accommodate consumers willing to give their contact information freely. That means you can’t spam your ideal audience with a link to your landing page and expect loyal subscribers.
To save you the hassle of scouring the internet for promotion channels that can help you build a list of loyal subscribers, let’s highlight a few ways you can promote your content.
- PPC: pay-per-click is an easy way to put your message in front of millions of searching consumers. With a PPC expert, you need not worry about finding your ideal audience; they will find you.
- Blogging: the number of blogs on the internet can make you want to rethink the effectiveness of blogs as a promotion strategy. But hey, while blogs require strenuous efforts and huge investment to set up, with little to no guarantee of ROI within the first one or two years, blogging is an evergreen promotional strategy that grows your list on autopilot.
- Solo ads: if you’ve heard of influencer marketing, that’s what solo ads are all about. Every industry possesses influencers with an occultic following. Run solo ads by reaching out to these influencers to promote your list-building content. Though you’d need an incentive or offer, these influencers can’t resist.
- Swap ads: swap ads are like solo ads because you are reaching out to others to promote your product. Just that here, you are swapping a shout-out for a shout-out—not necessarily reliant on monetary incentive.
4. Work with a reliable ESP
A great landing page, formidable content strategy and well-optimized emails wouldn’t do much good without a reliable email service provider (ESP) to automate the process.
Your ESP determines the efficiency of your list-building strategy. But surprisingly, up until now, we didn’t say a thing about email service providers.
Our reason is simple; Sender is an email service provider offering ecommerce email packages you can use to bridge the gap between your email list and revenue.
But our services are not the center of attention for this article. So while we’d appreciate it if you explore any of our packages, our dollar will be better spent if you have your list-building strategy in order first.
5. Segment your list
We purposefully put the idea of list segmentation as the last step for growing your email list because, at the onset, there was no list to segment. But with the tools and strategies we’ve discussed so far, we believe you already have the clever little touch needed to grow a reputable email list.
Sooner than later, you’d need to segment your list. Segmenting your list helps you target a specific subset of your target market and promotes personalized messaging. And hey, including variables that help segment your list in your initial list-building strategy would help you save time, effort and money in the long run.
Now is the time to grow your email list and make more sales!
Final Thoughts on How Retail Websites can Most Advisedly Grow their Email List
As marketers, we can agree that quality trumps quantity every time. If you genuinely want to repay the huge gesture of trust subscribers give you by letting you in on their emails and other personal data, provide quality content.
Loyalty comes with trust, respect, and honor; grow your list with strategies imbibed in these traits, and in no time, you’d have a list packed with hundreds of vibrant brand evangelists ever willing to spread your product’s gospel.
Growth Hackers is an award-winning retail marketing agency helping businesses from all over the world grow. There is no fluff with Growth Hackers. We help entrepreneurs, business owners and retail website owners grow their email list, generate qualified leads, optimize their conversion rate, gather and analyze data analytics, acquire and retain users and increase sales. We go further than brand awareness and exposure. We make sure that the strategies we implement move the needle so your business grow, strive and succeed. If you too want your business to reach new heights, contact Growth Hackers today so we can discuss about your brand and create a custom growth plan for you. You’re just one click away to skyrocket your business.
