How to grow your email list
No, email is not dead.
Trust me as a copywriter who used to be an email marketer that I have been hearing this for years-people saying that email is dead and no one is gonna use it anymore.
But that could not be further from the truth, and as a business, having your email list is still super important.
Why?
It gives you a direct connection to your audience and makes it super easy to speak to them.
And it also means that you own your list, so you are allowed to contact all of those emails.
You own that list, and even if there’s an issue with an algorithm, say what happens in social media, you still have that list and you still have a way to speak to all of your subscribers and the community that you’ve built.
But obviously there’s no point in having a list if you don’t know how to grow it, and the entire point of having a list in the first place is to be able to speak to a lot of people in your audience and have a lot of subscribers that you can talk to about your offer and your business.
So in this guide, I’m gonna walk you through one of the hardest parts of email marketing, which is actually growing your list and getting those subscribers in the first place.
Hi, I’m Elle…
Website Copywriter, Unapologetic Girls’ Girl, And (According To Clients) An “Absolute Dream.”
What “Growing Your List” Actually Means
It might sound like it’s just adding people to your list and getting subscribers, but like with everything, that actually isn’t valuable if the subscribers that you’re getting are not helpful or aligned.
You don’t want just random people on your list-you want your ideal audience, or what we would call qualified subscribers.
So what does that mean? It means that these are subscribers who are actually in your target audience and who are potentially going to invest in your brand or will buy from you.
Anything about ideal audience or your ideal clients-I have a blog post all about that right here that you can go and read.
You have to be careful when you are building a list and when you’re looking to get subscribers that you are not looking at what we call vanity metrics, which is essentially a really big list that looks great on paper but one with a bunch of random people who are not gonna interact with your brand, who are not gonna open your emails, and who are not gonna engage with you.
I always say that it is way more important to have a small list of super engaged subscribers than it is to have a big list of people who don’t really care about you or your emails.
We’re gonna focus on how to get those aligned subscribers and how to specifically build a strategy that will allow you to bring the right people onto your email list.
I’m also an ambassador for romanticizing business and making it fun, an expert in non-toxic conversion copy, a Miranda Priestley apologist, and my actual job description should really be ‘matchmaker for you and your dream clients“
If you liked reading this blog post – I would love to hang out more with you 🙂
And these, IMO, are the best ways for us to that:
The Foundation: Give People A Reason to Subscribe
OK, so the first thing that we need to talk about is making sure that you are always giving value when you invite people onto your email list.
You can’t just say like “join my list for updates and tips” or something like that because, in reality, you’re not giving anyone anything.
You want people to join your list and give you their email address. You have to give them something back.
And there are two ways that you can do this, and I’m gonna break both of those down.
So the first one is freebies. If you’ve ever heard this phrase, it is essentially when you make free resources like downloads or access to a guide that someone will get in exchange for joining your list.
They give you their email address, then you will give them the free resource, and then they’ll be on your email list.
The second way, and this is one of my favourite things that I think everybody should be doing in business, is to have a productised email or create a newsletter that has an incentive baked into it.
What I mean by that is instead of relying on freebies, your actual emails that you send-specifically your weekly newsletters-are the incentive to join. So you make a promise or something that people are gonna get every single time that they join your email list.
And an example I will give for that is on my newsletter: if you join, I will teach you how to write better emails every single week by using the last email that I sent as an example of copywriting and marketing, and how to do that, and a breakdown of that right at the end.
So everybody knows that if they join my email list, every single week they will get a piece of advice or free tips on how to grow their email list.
So both of those things are a great starting point for growing your list because they give people a reason to join, they give people incentive, and they make it really obvious what the benefit is.
However, it’s not always that easy to create those ideas, and also you need to build those ideas around your ideal clients-your aligned clients-so let’s talk about how to do that.
Freebies: (Or - High-Converting Lead Magnet Ideas)
The biggest mistake I see people making with their lead magnets is just choosing something totally random to create and hoping people will want to get that.
When in reality, what you wanna do is think about your ideal clients and what they would want, and then give them a version of that.
But you also want to make sure that any lead magnet that you make is related to your offers and your business goals.
What I mean by that is, I for example am a website copywriter, so it would make sense for me to create lead magnets around website copy so that when somebody joins my list, I know that they’re interested in website copy.
So when you’re thinking of your lead magnet, I want you to consider what your ideal client wants and also what you want people to be interested in when they join your list in terms of what you actually sell, and what might help get them into your funnel, and then think of ideas around that.
Then from there, you can kind of build anything that you think would be interesting to people around those topics.
But here are a few ideas to get you inspired:
Practical Resources
This is something that would be super valuable to them but also not too hard for you to make-something like a checklist, a template, a swipe file with great examples of things from your industry.
Educational Content:
This is anything that’s gonna teach them something they want to know, so it could be a mini course, an email series, a guide, or a video that teaches you something
Tools & Calculators:
If you have a specific tool like a rate calculator, an idea generator, or something that you can share, that is an amazing lead magnet
Productized Emails
OK, so now let’s talk about doing a productized email.
So what you wanna do here is choose something that your email is going to give them every single week when you send a newsletter, and then promise that on your signups and your website.
So this can honestly be anything that you think that you can talk about in your email that would be super valuable. It could be a free piece of advice or a tip that they get every week. It could be exclusive access, behind-the-scenes content that they get every week. It could be an interview with someone exclusively every single week-whatever you think would be super valuable to your audience and you know that they care about and that you believe that you can deliver every single week or every couple of weeks or however often you are sending out newsletter emails, you should use this.
The goal is to be able to have a clear promise or tagline for your email that you can tell people as a reason to sign up.
When do I think that this works best?
Well, honestly, I think people should always be doing this, but specifically anyone who is based in the EU. And the reason for that is I would be remiss if I did not tell you that under GDPR you cannot ask somebody to join your email list in exchange for a freebie without also asking them to check a box saying that they agreed to receive marketing emails.
I am never not frustrated by how many people don’t do this because this is technically the law in every country, even if you don’t live in the EU but you have people who are from the EU on your email list. You technically need to do this-you have to have a GDPR checkbox.
I’m not a lawyer so I can’t give you legal advice, but you should go and research this and Google this because I feel like no one ever tells you this on the Internet because they’re not doing the fucking due diligence and you should know this.
As much as freebies and lead magnets are amazing, I don’t believe that you can just rely on those as a lead source because technically somebody could say, “I don’t want to give you my email. I don’t want to get more emails in exchange for your freebie,” and they could just take your freebie and go.
What I think the best thing to do is combine these methods. I think it’s great to have some freebies because most people are not assholes-they will let you be on your list for the freebie-but also make sure that you have an incentive to join your email list even without freebies.
And if you have more details about how to write a newsletter, especially one that’s got a product section, I have a blog post right here about how to start a newsletter that people will actually want to open, so you can get more details about how to create that here.
Is there anything else that you can use as an incentive to get people to sign up to your list?
Yes – by offering discounts, or exclusive access.
These other two methods are more commonly used in slightly different industries, so you will see this a lot in e-commerce or maybe in tech companies, where they will give you a discount if you sign up to the email list.
So you might get 10% off your next purchase, 20% off your next purchase, or a free incentive for your first purchase. This is only really used commonly in e-commerce, but it might be interesting to look at.
And then also you can give people a promise of getting exclusive access to things or first access to things (but only if that’s true!!)
Again, you then need to consider whether or not your ideal audience cares about getting early access to things and whether or not you have something that is going to be interesting enough for them to know about.
This works better for, again, e-commerce: you get first access to information about a drop or first access to a new drop, but it could be something to think about for your business, even if you’re not in those industries.
How Do You Capture Emails?
OK, so…how do you actually capture emails for your list?
There are a lot of places, but, essentially – on your website.
You can have a standalone landing page, and you can also have your freebies around the Internet.
For your website, you can put a section anywhere that just says, you know, this is my email list, this is what you get signed up for.
Most people put that in the footer, or a lot of people actually have a subscribe page on their website.
You can go and check out the subscribe page on my website, but, essentially – it’s a dedicated page on your website that you can send the link to anyone who potentially might subscribe, and that just makes it super easy for people to find.
It also, you know, makes sure that you have a really nice link that’s tied to your website for people to sign up to.
If you run a blog or a podcast or anything like that, it can also be smart to add as a CTA at the end of each article or episode that you have a newsletter and what they’re gonna get when they join up, and invite them to sign up there because they’re already engaging with content from you. If they get to the bottom, they’ve probably enjoyed it, so that’s another great place to put it.
You can also have pop-ups across your website – embeds using code from your email platform – these will pop up as somebody is scrolling through a website inviting them to subscribe.
My word of warning for this is: if you’re gonna do this, you need to make sure that the promise of signing up to your website is amazing, and that you’re giving people a really, really good reason to join, because there is nothing more annoying than a pop-up when you’re trying to scroll that doesn’t actually give you value and that you don’t care about.
Then most email marketing platforms will allow you to make your own landing pages that you can set up exclusively for your email list.
So these will be tied to the email platform and they can be linked anywhere. So if you have a link in your bio, you can add that on here. You can share that link on social media. You can share that link anywhere honestly that you’re posting content and it will take people directly to a landing page for your email, where again you’re gonna promise something and they can sign up.
And then when it comes to your freebies, you can really share those anywhere. You can share those on Pinterest, on social media. You can share those on your website. You can share this on your blog posts.
You can also have a dedicated resources page or freebies page where people can get access to those. You kind of just wanna share those anywhere that you can, even sections across your website.
Traffic: You Can’t Grow If No One Knows You Write Emails
If no one is on your website, if no one is seeing your post about your email list, if no one knows that you exist, then no one is gonna join.
So the first thing I’m gonna tell you to do is talk about it all the fucking time. If you do not talk about it, people don’t know that it exists. If you do not share the fact that it exists, no one is going to care. So you’re gonna talk about it on your website, on your blog post, but specifically on social media. You are gonna talk about your email list and what people are getting.
A few ways that you can do this: you can talk about, you know, the promise or what people are gonna get when they sign up. You can also talk about things that you’ve posted about in past emails. If you have something really cool coming up, you can, you know, let people know that if they sign up by a certain date they can get access to it, and just talk about it like it’s the coolest thing in the world and share any great information that you have.
The freebies, if you have a really cool freebie that you think people should know about, you can, you know, share information telling people that that exists, that they can get free access to this thing that sends them to a landing page, sending them, you know, links to everything, and just make sure that you’re talking about it all the time.
The next thing that you can do is, you know, collaborate with other people. So you can do something called a newsletter swap, where somebody is in your newsletter writing stuff and you’ve gone on their newsletter and you write stuff. That means that their audience gets access to two different types of experts and you can, you know, plug your newsletter in there and tell them that there are people that they can sign up to what you’re doing.
And the same kind of goes for guest posting on podcasts or a blog post. You can write guest posts for people. You can be a guest on podcasts and you can let people know that you have an email list that they can subscribe to and kind of go from there.
But essentially it’s like anything else in business. You just need to talk about it more than you think you need to, and if you think you’re being annoying then cool-talk about it more. Because the more you talk about it, the more likely people are going to join, the more likely people are gonna care, and especially if you’re doing the work to make your email list, especially for newsletters that sound really amazing, then you shouldn’t be worried to talk about it because people should want to join it and you should be doing something exciting.
And again, if you’re not sure how to do that, I have a blog post all about that right here.
Conversion Optimization: Turn Visitors into Subscribers
When people are going on your subscribe page or your website or your landing page – what can you do to make it more likely for someone to actually convert?
Well, that’s why we decided to have a promise, but essentially you want to make sure that you have a strong headline and clear value proposition, which is your promise telling people exactly what they’re gonna get when they sign up for your newsletter.
It is also helpful if you explain to people how often you send emails and when they can expect to get them because that removes a lot of anxiety.
You also want to keep it simple for them to sign up, so don’t ask them for loads of stuff and specifically do not ask them for a bunch of personal information outside of their name and their email.
I see people sometimes where they like “sign up for my email list” and then I’ll be like “can you give me your phone number? Your Instagram account?”
I’m like: “I’m not gonna give some random person on the Internet my phone number ever.”
So keep it simple, only ask them for things that you actually need like their first name and their email and obviously anything that you legally have to ask for in your country.
You need to go and check that, but it could be that you need to ask for their consent and have a checkbox for your privacy policy.
And then you can also share some social proof or subscriber counts or testimonials if that’s something that you have.
This is better to save for a subscribe page because anywhere else on the website it can get a bit complicated, but if you have people who have emailed you to say that they absolutely love their emails, you could add that somewhere.
If you have like 10,000 subscribers you could share that and show a few examples of how you can do that to inspire you.
How To Keep Subscribers Once You Have Them
Ok – so – let’s talk about is what to do once someone actually subscribes.
You wanna have at least one welcome email, if not a welcome sequence.
And in this welcome email you’re gonna say hi, you’re going to introduce yourself, and you’re gonna set expectations of exactly what they’re going to receive.
One of the biggest things that kills conversions or makes people unsubscribe or dislike you as an email marketer is if you do not remove the anxiety around receiving emails and you don’t clearly explain to people what they’re gonna get and what they should expect.
So all you wanna do is make sure that you tell them when they will receive emails, like how often do you send them?
What do you talk about?
And when will they get them?
Clearly communicate what they can expect to read about, what the benefit of it is for them, and what they should look forward to.
And then give them the option to unsubscribe if they don’t want to be on your list because it is okay for people to unsubscribe.
You do not ever wanna have somebody on your list who doesn’t like your emails because they are gonna basically just not open them and it’s gonna make your other emails more likely to go to spam or promotions, so do not feel bad if somebody unsubscribes – you don’t want them on your list.
Something else that can be smart to do is to tell people or ask people to move your email address to their inbox or save you as a contact so that you don’t get lost.
Not many people will do this, I’ll be very honest, because it’s just extra work for them, but some people will and if they do that then it will mean that you will not go to promotions or spam when you send them emails.
The main thing here is you really want to sell the email in this email.
You want to make it sound really amazing and make sure that they are super excited to get emails from you and they understand that your emails are gonna be super valuable and that they’re gonna get all of this cool stuff.
And then once you start sending the emails, the thing that you wanna make sure you do is not breaking that promise.
You then need to send really great emails that are not spammy, that are not sleazy, that you’re not selling every single time, that you are not using clickbait in your titles.
You need to deliver on the promise of value and you need to make sure that your emails sound really good or people are gonna unsubscribe.
And then once people are actually subscribed to your list, here are a few extra things you can do to get more subscribers.
So if somebody is opening all of your emails or somebody that you kind of have a warm relationship with, you can ask them if they wanted to send you a testimonial for your email.
You can also just put this in one of your emails and say if anyone is really enjoying this email and you wanted to leave a testimonial, I’m adding some of those to my site and I’d love to have you on there.
Also add a CTA at the end of your email with a link to share the newsletter with somebody else and say something along the lines of: if you love this newsletter you can share it with somebody else who you think would love it too.
This is the link to do that and then hopefully you’ll get extra word of mouth.
And then the last thing you wanna do is look at your analytics and kind of see how are your emails performing, who is opening every email, who isn’t opening any email, and you want to clean your list.
So cleaning your list is really easy. It’s essentially just checking to see who hasn’t opened any emails for a really long time and removing those people from your list.
Ideally, after sending them a last couple of emails checking if they want to keep receiving emails, if they don’t open those then you remove them from your list.
This might sound bad because you’re losing subscribers, but actually going back to what we said about wanting engaged subscribers, it means that you’re removing anyone who’s unengaged so the only people on your list are people who are actually opening your emails who actually want to receive them.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Let’s quickly talk about mistakes I see a lot, that I don’t want YOU to make!
1. Driving traffic without a conversion strategy
What I mean by that is what we discussed: start creating lead magnets that are not even related to you or your offers so that you get a bunch of people on your list who are not gonna buy from you because you know you created a lead magnet about how to start a blog but you’re a website copywriter so like now it’s aspiring bloggers on your list instead of people who want to hire a website copywriter.
That also goes for, you know, not knowing what you’re gonna post your newsletters about, not knowing what you’re gonna talk about once people are on the list, and then you lose them because you don’t have a clear plan or an incentive or a good reason for them to stay on the list and stay signed up.
2. Forgetting mobile experience and not optimizing emails for mobile.
It’s one of the biggest reasons people end up unsubscribing. People write these emails that look great on desktop but on mobile they’re just these huge chunks of text and they look horrible, so make sure that you check what something looks like on mobile every time you write an email.
3. Buying an email list or using sleazy tactics to get someone on your list
Not only are people gonna unsubscribe, talk shit about you and hate you, but your email service provider is gonna punish you for that
It’s a big no-no to buy lists or try and buy subscribers.
You need to earn them, and, also, they’re just not gonna buy your products if you buy people on your list or like use sleazy ways of adding people to your email list.
For example – I’ve seen people go to networking events and then get people’s emails and just add them to their list.
(That is illegal just as an FYI.)
Which makes people hate you, and your brand, and not want to network with you.
So – always stay on the legal side of things, and make sure that you are adding people to your list ethically.
Those are the only people that are gonna buy from you anyway, so don’t use shady tactics. It’s not worth it.
In Conclusion
You’ve got this 🙂
No, but seriously – It’s not actually that hard to grow your list – like everything in business, it really comes down to you just need to have a really strong selling point be offering value to your subscribers and talk about it all the f*cking time
The most important thing is to be consistent even when it feels like it’s not working you need to keep talking about it because people need to see on average something seven times before they buy or click on it and it’s kind of the same with email. people might not subscribe the first time you talk about it but if you keep being consistent sharing lead magnets are really strategic.
If you create a really good incentive for why people should sign up and then you talk about that all the time you will start seeing results and you are gonna start growing your list and then from then on you just need to focus on writing really great emails and you’ll be good to go.
The Hot Gossip, The 411
More from The Blog
If you loved this post, and you want to get the 411 on more things copy and marketing – here’s your next read, all lined up.
Hi, I’m Elle
Website Copywriter, Unapologetic Girls’ Girl, And (According To Clients) An “Absolute Dream.”
I’m also an ambassador for romanticizing business and making it fun, an expert in non-toxic conversion copy, a Miranda Priestley apologist, and voted most likely to over-deliver and overshare.
But — you know what else I am?
A girl who’s tired of seeing talented, creative women settling for mediocre copy and generic branding because they think they have to do it all themselves, or they’re waiting for permission to step into their It Girl era and become the hot brand they’re supposed to be.
Which is why I’d love for you to finally get copy that reflects your full potential — even if you can’t quite yet put that into words.
