While social media and artificial intelligence are helping to propel your business forward, there’s a quiet tool that should still be working in the background: email. Despite the digital leaps and bounds we’ve taken recently, email has proven to stand the test of time. If you don’t agree then you’re not utilising it properly.
How do you effectively utilise email to grow your business?
You build an email list.
To build an email list, you need to first answer three questions…
- What is an email list?
- Why is having an email list important?
- How do you grow an email list?
Let’s get into it.
What is an email list?
An email list is exactly what it sounds like – a collection of emails that you can use for marketing and selling purposes. The most important part of that description is that you control this list, it belongs to you. There’s no algorithm dictating who receives your emails, no other emails popping up to distract from yours.
Why is having an email list important?
Aside from the fact that an email list gives you direct contact with your customers, having an email list is important because it builds a strong connection with your audience. Email allows you to personalise your marketing efforts based on various factors related to your customers. This personalisation leads to increased engagement and higher conversion rates because of how direct you can be via email.
How do you grow an email list?
Now, we’ve arrived at the most important question: how do you grow an email list?
The quick answer is that you create a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something you offer your audience for free in exchange for contact information, usually an email. For example, a weekly newsletter that people need to sign up for to read. However, before you go through the process of creating this lead magnet, there are a couple of things you need to consider.
- Are you attracting the right people? Whether it’s a PDF, whitepaper or newsletter, your lead magnet needs to be targeting the right people. The last thing you want to do is fill your email list with the wrong people, people who have no motivation to buy or interest in what you have to offer.
- What is the intent? To ensure you are growing an email list filled with the right people, the intent of your lead magnet needs to align with the intent of the emails you will be sending to this list. If the kind of emails you send out to people are going to be about how to generate leads, you don’t want to share a lead magnet teaching people how to overcome burnout.
Of course, much more goes into creating an effective lead magnet than this, but this is the basis of what you need to get started. From here you need to create titles that capture your audience’s attention, graphics that hold your audience’s attention and content that increases their curiosity.
If you want access to a detailed process of how to grow your email list and examples of successful lead magnets you can use to create your own, consider becoming a Growth Titan. Growth Titans belong to an exclusive online community dedicated to growing their businesses online through weekly resources, bi-weekly masterclasses and daily tips and support.