Email marketing is an effective way to grow your online business. There are so many ways of growing an email list, the ones I have shared here are the ones tried and tested by me.

Unlike Facebook and Instagram where your notification stays public, Email remains customised to a specific person. This the reason, even in this social era, people show interest in email marketing.

After sending email to people you can analyse whether they have read or not.

To build a custom audience for your business you need an email list.

Before diving into the ways of growing an email list, lets understand the basis of growing an email list.

How to grow an email list?

Gone are those days, where people use to subscribe to the newsletter of their favourite blogs. Now the bloggers are using insane ways to grow their email list. The underlying principle of every business is driving traffic to their blog and converting that traffic to your subscribers.

To get qualified traffic, you need to provide valuable content that suits the audience.

Driving organic traffic through SEO:

Having an attractive blog is not going to drive traffic to your site. Paying for traffic is not going to benefit you at any cost.  The way of gaining quality traffic to your site is really important. If your blog posts are SEO optimised, it assures that you drive quality traffic.

Simply having an email list of 1000 members may not assure ROI. Having a specific set of audience who are interested in your products is essential.

To drive specific set of audience to your site, you need a content strategy. You can create a content strategy by simply understanding your audience and creating an audience persona.

“Write for human and optimised for the bots”

You can get my audience persona workbook for free here.

Offer a compelling incentive:

A personal email address is real thing of value. If someone has to share something personal with you, you must provide some valuable gift to them. You can consider this incentive as an ethical bribe.

This is called as freebie, lead magnet, opt-in offer and much more.

You must provide some splendid freebie in the form of PDF, eBook or an infographic image. Now people are offering free courses through email. There are so many ways of making people sign up to your newsletter.

The most important thing in creating a freebie is that it must add some value to your readers.

For example, Teaching SEO for your readers is important, then you can create a free SEO course or SEO eBook or a something related to that.

Deciding what and how you are going to offer is where you put all your works. The incentive that you are offering must something away from the customer journey map. Because this is something that you are gifting your readers.

Tips for creating a freebie:

• Be specific about the problem you are solving.
• Provide a unique solution.
• Provide some ready-made solutions and tips.
• Forget about the length or the type (pdf, eBook, course etc)

What type of freebies should I make?

• Guides
• Checklists
• Workbooks
• Templates
• eBooks
• Tutorials
• List
• Tools

Promote your offer to people:

Your email list the core of all your promoting activities. When you write a blog post, you are first going to share with your email list and they are the ones who read first.

When you share an incentive, your email subscribers are the ones who receive first.

This is the real importance of email marketing. You really need an email audience to grow in this social era.

You have to promote your email campaign through various ways. You can share it with your fb groups, Instagram followers and your connections in the LinkedIn.

Placing email signup forms in various places in your blog. adding popups to your post are the ways of promoting your email campaign.

Build trust not spam:

Years back, some blogs were ranking because of using too many keywords in a page. Now google is a smart search engine, which provides value to its users and is not more allowing to stuff keywords in a page. It ranks pages based on the authority and value the page provides.so is your blog. you need to provide value in order to grow.

Providing value means helping others to grow. You have to help your audience grow, making them aware of why your product is necessary for them.

When you are providing value, you are building trust. Spamming works no more.

Offer great content that your audience need.

The best possible ways to grow an email list:

Include a signup form to your blog:

Create a separate landing page, that says what is the benefit of signing up to your email list. This is the most effective way of persuading your reader.

Host a Giveaway:

Hosting a giveaway is a great incentive to encourage email signups. To enter the event, they have to sign up to your email list.

Create a free resource library:

Create a fully password protected page in your blog. To receive password for that page, users have to signup to the email list. This is another win-win situation. Where you provide some freebies to the  readers and they provide you their personal email address.

Have opt-ins in all these places:

• Create an opt-in above the fold. This is something users see before scrolling your page. You can find most of the bloggers have an opt-in above the fold.
• Add opt-ins in various places in your blog.
• Add an opt-in in the side bar
• Below every blog post,
• At the footer
• In the most important pages

Create lead generation ads in social media:

Once you have a Facebook community, and you are actively helping people on Facebook, you can advertise your email campaigns. You must plan a paid promotion for your email campaign on social media platforms and analyse the results to grow your email list.

keep your signup form simple:

Don’t ask for too much information. Make your form so simple with just a name and an email address. This way to encourages readers to signup more quickly to your signup forms.

Over to you:

Do you have an email list? Are you using any different methods of growing your email list? Place your comments below.