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Why it’s important to grow your email list
It’s important to grow your email list as a blogger because the money is in your mailing list. Sure, you can make money from affiliate marketing deals with whoever happens to visit your blog but a mailing list allows you to pitch directly to your readers so you have a better chance of making the sale.
It’s been said that for every 1 person on your mailing list, you can expect $1 per month from them.
The amount of money you can make from each person on your mailing list differs based on your monetization strategy, niche, and more.
Today, we’ll look at how you can grow your email list as a blogger.
1. Provide a freebie upon exit
When you try to exit my site, you’ll see a pop-up asking you if you want a free checklist of 60 side hustles ideas (of course, duh!) and all you have to do is to input your email address to get the free PDF.
This is what “pop-up freebie upon exit” means. You’ll get a pop-up box asking you if you want something for free. For many people, the answer would be yes and that is a way to get their email address.
You can easily set this up with whatever mailing service provider you chose. To find out what email marketing service you should choose, click here.
Here’s a list of different digital products you can offer for free:
- An email course
- A short course
- A PDF checklist
- A PDF poster
- An infographic
- An ebook (Click here to learn how to sell ebooks on Amazon and make money)
- A printable (Click here to learn how to make money with printables)
- Webinar
Don’t make your freebie too complicated. In fact, I’ve seen people whose “course” is literally just links to his YouTube videos that are already on YouTube.
Making your freebie too complicated can waste you a lot of time trying to get it ready and since it’s so complicated, your audience may never finish it. Thus, you lose the chance to connect with your subscribers.
Make your freebie simple to consume. It can even be information freely available on your blog but condensed down further
2. Start a webinar
People like webinars. A webinar is basically just an online event that people can watch anywhere. Webinars are typically live and the audience can choose to turn on the camera and microphone to freely interact with the speakers.
For those of you who may be a bit timider, this option may not be good for you but you can pre-record parts of the webinar to be shared within a live webinar on Zoom. This will allow you to prepare less live content for your audience.
You don’t even have to open up the camera if you don’t want to. A webinar would allow you to connect with your audience better and capture new people’s interests.
You can have your audience sign up for the webinar with an email address.
3. Visit Facebook groups and forums
There are many Facebook groups and forums dedicated to bloggers and those platforms can be a place for you to promote your own content.
Be careful with the rules as you don’t want to be self-promoting when that isn’t allowed.
Make sure you provide values to people first before you talk about your blog so you seem less spammy.
Your goal is to try and get people to know your brand name and trust what you have to say. You can include a link to your blog for people to check out.
Once they land on your site, you should make sure the sign-up form is highly visible so you can capture more email addresses.
You should also give your visitors a reason to sign up to your blog by giving them a freebie for instance.
4. Offer exclusive memberships
Exclusive memberships allow people to gain access to a restricted community.
Your exclusive membership club can be a Facebook group for instance or an exclusive page of your blog.
You can offer more content, more complete content, higher-quality content, etc for your exclusive membership club members.
5. Offer discounts codes
If you sell something on your blog, you can offer discount codes for people who signed up to the mailing list.
For those who are already on the mailing list, you can still give them discount codes to make everything fair. This prevents your audience from signing up to your newsletter using a different email address (which isn’t good since most email marketing platform charge you more money the more people there are on your mailing list and you don’t want any doubles).
6. Giveaway contests
Instead of something free upfront, you can give something away for free in a contest. Only those who won the contest will be given whatever it is.
It can be a:
- Free ebook
- Free consultation
- Free merch
Of course, to enter the contest, they’d have to sign up.
7. Add a signup button on your social media page
Say you have a Facebook page for your brand, you can add a sign-up button on the top right corner for people to visit your site and sign up.
You can do the same thing on Instagram and TikTok.
8. Add a slide-in opt-in form
A slide-in opt-in form is basically a form where visitors can opt-in to receive your newsletters or a freebie.
It’ll slide in from the bottom when the visitors scroll down the page. It can also slide in from the right if you set it at that.
9. Use a game wheel
Have you ever visited a blog and a game wheel slides out with prizes to be won? You may be tempted to see what you won and in order to claim your prize (which could be a coupon code), you have to input your email.
This strategy can work better than outright giving your audience a 15% off coupon in exchange for their email since they didn’t “win” the coupon.
10. Give a free consultation
Now, this isn’t very scalable since your time is limited and you can only handle so many people at once but here’s something you can do, you can offer a free consultation but they have to get on the waitlist first.
That waitlist can theoretically be so long that it’ll never get to all of your opt-in users. Be careful with this strategy as it can make some upset that they never get their turn.
You can instead, host a webinar to do a group consultation to satisfy everyone or, send out some free PDFs to keep them happy in the meantime.
Hey, at least they got something, right?
Another strategy you can implement is to only offer the first 30 who signed up a free consultation for instance. They never know whether they’re the first 30 until they signed up. For those who don’t make the cut, you can still give them a PDF freebie for instance.
11. Create a free quiz
People love free quizzes. It makes them feel that the result is personalized even if it’s the same answer given to everyone.
When you create a free quiz, you can allow people to get all the way to the end before you reveal a box where they can input their email addresses to get the results.
12. Start a youtube channel
You can start a YouTube channel to build your brand. It cements your authority further and gives you opportunities to talk about your blog.
You can offer a link to your blog where visitors will be met with popups for instance and they can choose to input their emails in exchange for something.
Final thought
There are truly so many ways to grow your email list. Remember to give it some time. No need to rush. As long as you’re putting out high-quality content and putting your audience first, you’d see results. It’ll be slow at first but it’ll still be results nevertheless.
