You Ask, I Answer: Most Effective Email List Growth Tactics?

In today's episode, Sarah asks, where have you seen success in growing your email list outside of pop-ups on a website and adding users to your active list after they purchase? That's a good question. And certainly the basics like having calls to action and pop-ups and uh subscribe links in your footers, putting them in your newsletters, putting them in your in your uh YouTube videos and things are all important. Uh and if you don't do those basics, uh you will not have nearly as much success. So uh exit pop-ups, I think certainly are important.

Um interstatial pop-ups on the website that are small and obtrusive and mobile friendly, or omit them on mobile devices. Uh those footer uh subscribes. So one of the things that's really important is to have a footer subscribe. And so on any blog post, it should just be part of your template to have one in the footer, one in the in the nav bar. Um to the extent that you can put it on social media, uh recognize that with social media effectively being a a paid uh medium, you know, you should be running maybe run ads for your email list rather than uh just organically posting because it's not gonna do very much.

The three things that have worked well for me this year um went from twenty-two thousand subscribers at the beginning of the year to ending the year at 48,000, so more than doubling. Uh and that came from three things. Number one, um having an e uh an email newsletter people want. Um that is critical for keeping subscribers because uh if y it doesn't matter how many people sign up, if they all quit the week after, you really haven't accomplished anything, right? So you want to make sure that uh you are uh publishing a very high quality newsletter.

Uh I'm actually going to be sending out a survey to mine uh um in the in the new year asking what people want less and more of uh so that it can continue to improve the quality of the newsletter. That provides organic growth. And one of the things to remind people to do, this is something I'm bad I'm bad at. I need to do this more and better is to remind people hey if you like this please um refer a friend, right? Refer a colleague.

Recommend this newsletter to a colleague. That will uh provide you a nice space of growth in the medium that people are comfortable with, right? If they're reading your email already, they clearly are comfortable with email and will probably forward it to other people who also like to read email. The second big win this year was co-branded events. I've done a couple of these uh big events this year uh with other organizations and you know part of the terms of uh engagement are uh we share uh registration lists we share the people who sign up for the event uh have done that multiple times this year and uh that probably brought in I would say probably about a third of that doubled growth uh so making sure that you are uh working together with organizations now if your list is real small to begin with you may have to pay uh rather than trade list sizes because even going into the year with 22,000 subscribers that's enough of a list size that you can say to another organization yeah it's it's a barter it's not uh not one organization is not paying the other likewise uh if you're on the other side of that and you have a large email list you can actually use it as a revenue generator um people can can get access to your audience and the third and the most successful by far is co-branded content marketing.

People who download stuff, um, whether it's white papers, ebooks, any piece of content, uh, videos, webinars, you name it, uh, those have done amazingly well this year. That's where the other two thirds of that, you know, more than uh twenty uh six thousand people came from was uh co-branded papers, co-branded uh studies. It has to be stuff uh like the email uh uh newsletter, it has to be stuff people actually want. Uh so creating a white paper the of uh boring stuff that is uh a retread of other people's stuff or doesn't teach someone something new, not as helpful. Um but if you have really compelling original research, original data, original insights, uh things that will make somebody's life better, things that will make somebody's business better, people will download it and they will be gladly want to hear from you uh after doing so.

So making sure that you are doing a lot of high quality content marketing. I would say I I think I did a piece of you know, high quality content marketing, like a hero piece, if you will, from YouTube's Hero Hub Help Model, um, about once a quarter. So this is not something that you have to be cranking out every single week. That's what your newsletter's for. Um for those hero pieces, try to aim for once a quarter in terms of uh working with another organization or several organizations, co-branding it, sharing the registration lists, and building something that is just astonishing that people like I I absolutely positively need uh to download this paper, I need to read it, I need to implement its changes and make my business better.

So those are uh as of now the most effective email list growth tactics in terms of uh results garnered and also budget wise, too. Um having a great email newsletter that people want shouldn't cost you anything except your time. Right? Co-branded events and co-branded content marketing, again, if there's a substantial disparity between your list and somebody else's list, you may need to pony up some budget. Or find peer organizations with similar size lists and ladder your way up.

Right. If you have 500 subscribers and somebody else has five hundred subscribers and they're not the same subscribers, if you collaborate by the end, you should have both have a thousand subscribers, right? And then you move on, move up the ladder to you find another organization with a thousand subscribers, you work together, and you should by the end have two thousand subscribers. That's how the math works on uh co-branding things when you're smart about it. So um try and identify those organizations that have your audience, and there are previous uh videos in the series about how to do that.

Um, and then use that as a way to uh to build and grow your list very, very quickly. That's that's what's working as of the uh the turn of the century or no the turn of the decade here. Uh please leave uh your follow up questions in the comments box below. As always, please subscribe to the newsletter, see and uh the YouTube uh channel. I'll talk to you soon.

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