Are you considering building an email list but not sure why it's so important? Many bloggers and business owners don't see the importance of building an email list right away until they see the impact emails can have on traffic and on their revenue.
In this tutorial, we'll walk you through the top reasons why building your email list is important. We'll also show you how to start building your email list (step by step).
By the end of this tutorial, you will have answers to all your questions about building an email list.
Why build an email list?
What is an email list and why is it so important?
An email list is a list of names and email addresses of people who have given you permission to send them updates and promotions from your business via email.
Why is this so important?
Because these subscribers joined your email list from your website and verified their identity (double optin). They are extremely interested in what you have to offer.
According to Direct Marketing Association, the Marketing by email, on average, sees a 4300% return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the United States.
It makes sense if you think of these five benefits of email as a communication channel:
- The email is personal - email allows you to land in a user's inbox. There is no ranking system limiting your reach. He is very direct, personal and laid back.
- The email is tenacious – To get your email, the user will need to subscribe to your email list and confirm their address.
- Email is targeted - As we mentioned above, the interest that the user has already shown in your products / content. Since you already know what they like, you can provide them with highly relevant content and offers to get better results. This is called segmentation, and we'll cover this later in the article.
- You are the owner of your email list – You do not own Facebook, Twitter or Google. Your social media campaigns and SEO efforts can go to waste when these platforms change their policies. On the other hand, you own your email list, and it won't be influenced by the decisions of other companies.
- Email is a direct conversation - People read emails from the privacy of their inbox. The post is not on a public calendar or RSS feed. They can ask you questions directly in private with confidence. It helps build trust and connection.
This is precisely why every business in the world should have an email list.
The big brands learned this lesson a long time ago, and that's why they spend thousands of dollars on social media campaigns to get people to sign up on their email lists.
They understand that email markeing is the best long-term investment with a much higher return. Because people will continue to get their message across at a very low cost for a long period of time.
Now what about social media?
A lot of social media experts and consultants, in an attempt to sell their services, downplay the importance of an email list.
In fact, we were asked if the Marketing by email still had a future, with social media becoming increasingly dominant.
The best way to answer this question is to look at the information that Twitter and Facebook ask you before creating an account:
Yes, there is An email address. Because these companies know that emails are the most direct and reliable way to get in touch with you.
All social media platforms are building an email list because they are smart business owners. This helps their valuations when selling their business.
While social media is a great way to reach your audience, it's important to keep the timely nature of social media platforms in perspective.
They come and go.
Too long ago we had MySpace, FriendFeed, Google Buzz, Plurk and countless others. Most of them are either dead now or irrelevant.
today, we have Facebook et Twitter, but not everyone is hooked on these sites. Some prefer other places like Instagram, Pinterest, wine, Snapchat, etc.
But studies show that at least 91% of consumers check their emails on a daily basis.
We're not saying social media isn't important. They are, and you need to explore all the possibilities in order to reach your audience.
However, you have to spend more time and effort in something that guarantees much higher results.
That's why you need to start creating an email list right now
Hopefully, now you know why building an email list is so important, and why ignoring it would be a huge mistake.
So let's take a look at what you need to know to start building your email list.
3 things you must have to build an email list:
- A website or blog.
- A service ofemail marketing.
- Subscription form
All three of these are pretty easy to set up, and none of them require you to know how to code.
For the purposes of this tutorial, we will only focus on the last two items in the list. If you do not have a blog, you can learn how to create it in 12 steps.
Choosing the Best Email Marketing Service
There are tons of services Marketing by email online. Often beginners use the free options to cut costs, which is understandable. However, some of these free platforms are not the best option. For what?
Services such as FeedBurner or Jetpack offer a subscription to the blog by email. This allows your users to receive an update each time you publish a new blog.
The downside of a blog notification service like this are:
- You will need to create a blog to send an email. This means that the information you want to share will be publicly available first. You can not send private e-mail newsletters.
- You can not customize the e-mail message. It will be delivered in the same format often without branding or personalization.
- You can not rank subscribers by interest, demographics, or type of content.
- There are no reports. You don't know how many people received the emails, what percentage of users opened the email, and how many of them clicked on links.
If you later tried to switch to a paid service, users will need to reconfirm their subscription. Many of them won't, and you will end up losing subscribers.
That's why we recommend always using a professional email marketing service. Yes, it's quite expensive, but it will make you a lot of profit.
Professional email marketing services are:
- You can send private emails en masse to your subscribers.
- You can see subscriber activity and group your subscribers based on the actions they take.
- You can run split A / B tests to see what type of email, content, and offers work best with your subscribers.
- With reports, you can see in which country you have the most subscribers. You can set your preferences on the time zone, and send emails at the right time.
- And in the end, but certainly the most important, you can see the email addresses of all your subscribers.
There are hundreds of professional email marketing services available, but we have compiled a list of the best email marketing services.
For small businesses, we recommend using 'Constant Contact' as they are one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing services in the world.
They offer a free trial of 60 days. This gives you a lot of time to install and start seeing the results. At the end of the 60 days, you will need to start taking a monthly subscription to 20 $ / month.
Constant contact
Because we know that people often like to test options before making a decision, we also recommend AWeber. They are another popular provider of email marketing services, and they offer our users a free trial of 30 days. Discover our tutorial on constant Contact.
Once you've signed up with an email marketing service, the next step is to add subscription forms to your website for your users to subscribe.
How to increase the list of your subscribers
Choosing the right email marketing service is important, getting more subscribers is even more important because that will determine how you make income.
The biggest mistake of beginners is to do not place strategically these subscription forms.
While some WordPress themes come with widgets embedded in sidebars, they don't always convert properly. Your email marketing department may also provide you with codes to embed in your theme, but that requires you to know how to code.
This is why we recommend our users to use " OptinMonster , Which is one of the most powerful conversion software that helps you convert visitors to potential customers.
You can easily create conversion forms such as " popups lightbox "," Floatting head "And bars at the foot of the page, dragging subscription boxes," Welcome mats In full screen, forms in articles, and more.
But what makes OptinMonster really powerful are the behavior automation and personalization features. OptinMonster allows you to automatically display different subscription forms depending on where users come from, what page they are visiting, and what they are doing on your site.
For example, the “Exit-Intent®” feature tracks user behavior and shows them a targeted form at the exact moment they are about to leave. This allows you to convert visitors into subscribers.
This is important because more than 70% of people who leave your site will probably never return.
That's why influencers like Michael Hyatt, Neil Patel and " Social Media Examiner "Use the" Exit-Intent "on their websites. This allows them to have a lot more visitors.
Email marketing strategies
Having the right tools is essential, but knowing how to use them properly is the biggest difference.
In your email marketing strategy, the most important thing you need to plan for is segmentation. It's the process of grouping your subscribers together, so you can better personalize your emails based on interests. It helps you get higher open rate and click through rate. This reference guide to email marketing has all the information you need to segment your email list like a pro.
Content updates are the highest subscription forms in conversion. This is a technique where you give your bonus content at the end of your popular articles. These usually convert 5 times more than a regular form.
Conclusion
It doesn't matter what type of business you have, what type of site you have, or your niche.
If you have a site, and want to turn your visitors into repeat customers, then you need to get their emails.
We hope this tutorial helped you understand why building an email list is important and that it will help you build a list in your WordPress blog.
