‘How can I grow my marketing list with active, valuable leads?’
This is a question we get asked all the time!
Now that the dust has settled after the 2018 GDPR changes and we have adjusted to the new regulations that came into force, you may still be wondering how to pick up the pieces and start to think about how to grow your marketing lists in the GDPR world we all now live in. This is particularly important if your marketing has decreased as a result of last year’s changes.
The key to growing your marketing list is building good leads with fresh, valuable contacts who you can nurture and ensure these early leads progress into purchase ready leads. A list of current engaged users is more valuable than low quality and out dated data.
Here are some ideas to ensure you continually build your mailing lists whilst maintaining the necessary compliance with the GDPR.
Website Newsletter Sign-Up Form
Once you have a visitor on your website you can use their current interest in your product or service to encourage them to sign up your newsletter. Generally speaking users do not sign up without some encouragement or reason, so a standalone message that reads ‘ Sign Up To Our Newsletter’ is unlikely to perform well. Instead you can demonstrate the advantages of signing up by highlighting the main benefits of what the user will receive in each mailing. You can even show them a copy of what the last newsletter contained. You can also strategically place sign up forms near your most popular and useful content with a message such as “To be alerted whenever we have more advice and tips like this, sign up for our regular newsletter’.
Meetings, Events & Networking
A really good way to gain sign ups to your newsletter is face to face contact. You can even show people what they will receive, especially if you send out a printed version. Whilst in discussion at an event, if someone has a question about your area of expertise you can inform them that your newsletter contains a lot of this information as well as other useful insights and advice.
Create a Button For Your Email Signature
Your email signature is easily forgotten as being a useful marketing tool. If you are already in communication with someone via email, why not include an invitation within your email signature for them to sign up to your newsletter, highlighting the benefits and reasons for doing so. This is a great way for all the contacts that you and your team in the business are already in touch with to learn about your newsletter.
Social Media
You will no doubt have a following on social media and it is likely that these followers are a different group of users to your existing customers or contacts that you are in regular communication with. It is also very likely that a percentage of these followers would be interested in hearing more from you. You can either invite users to sign up directly via social media posts by highlighting all the content they would otherwise be missing out on, or you can lead them to useful content on your website and then offer them the chance to sign up on these pages.
Provide Amazing Content
If you are taking the time to produce helpful and interesting content in your emails it will not only mean that users stay engaged and do not unsubscribe, it will also mean that you will have plenty of content to use at your disposal to encourage new users to sign up. You can submit this to guest blogs or request to be featured on newsletters from other businesses who have similar customers to you but are not directly competing with you. You can also use your content on your blog to improve your search engine rankings and encourage new users in who wouldn’t have otherwise found you.
Offer Free downloads
This has become a harder proposition in the last few years and whilst everybody loves to get free stuff, we live in a time of information overload and you now need to provide much more value to the user than ever before to win their sign up. Nevertheless, by creating a downloadable item on your website which offers useful documents or videos on your sector, you can grow your marketing list considerably. The user will need to give their details so that they can be emailed the free documents. One thing to remember following the 2018 GDPR rules is that just because they have requested the free download, it does not mean you are automatically allowed to email them your newsletter. However, within the page, make sure you highlight your newsletter and give the user the option (via a tick box) to opt into your newsletter too.
Another good practice method to remember is that a double opt-in sign up process is safest. This means that users who decide to sign up to your newsletter will receive an email to the address they just submitted with a link to click in order to confirm their subscription. This prevents people inputting other email addresses instead of their own and means you will have a cleaner and more streamlined list.
Incentive
No matter how many ways you present to a user to enable them to sign up, the one thing that all these ideas share is ‘incentive’. Visitors are unlikely to act unless they believe that it will benefit them in some way, it also needs to be simple so keep forms to a minimum in order to achieve optimum conversion.
Using some or all of the ideas above should replenish your list if it took a hit last year. We would love to hear from you so please get in touch if you would like to discuss the options available to suit your business and marketing campaigns.
