The following is a guest blog post written by Fahad Muhammad, the Content Manager at Instapage, a landing page software company that believes “every promotion needs a page.” He writes about marketing trends, conversion optimization, copywriting and user behavior on the Instapage blog.
What do a SaaS company and a bookstore have in common?
It’s the fact that both businesses aim to build and nurture better relationships with their customers.
How do you start to build a relationship with your customers? Start with their email address.
According to McKinsey & Company, “Email conversion rates are three times higher than social media, with a 17% higher value in the conversion.” Once you have their email address, you have a legitimate way of contacting them. Emails typically enjoy a longer lifespan than, say, an occasional tweet or Facebook post.
Email marketing opens up many opportunities for your business. That’s a fact every marketer will agree on. The tricky part, the part most marketers and bloggers struggle with, is building a substantial email list.
How do you get visitors to opt into your email list providing personal information? How do you convince prospects that you’re trustworthy? Simple. Give them something in return.
How Instapage Grew Its Email Subscriber List
At Instapage, we understand the importance of a customer’s email address, which is why we spend countless hours trying to come up with strategies that help us capture as many email addresses as possible.
We truly believe that the way to our customers’ hearts is through their email addresses. This is why we have multiple email list-building campaigns running simultaneously.
The great thing about these strategies for you is you can duplicate each one to build your list.
List Building Strategy #1: Our Gated Webinar Landing Page
Every Wednesday, Instapage’s CEO, Tyson Quick, hosts a webinar: “Master Instapage in 30 Minutes.” The purpose of this webinar is to:
- Familiarize new Instapage users with our landing page builder
- Attract potential customers showing them how easy it is to create landing pages with Instapage
We use a simple landing page design for our webinar page:
If you notice, there’s no form on the page. We did that on purpose because we didn’t want to scare away prospects by asking too much, too fast. Instead we preview the webinar using the bullet points on the page, telling them what they’ll learn from the webinar. Those that are interested then click the CTA button, and this is what they see:
Bang. This short form helps us collect emails (and generate leads).
Two-step opt-in forms are a great way to build email lists because they don’t go for the “ask” right away. They warm up the prospect, and then go for the sale.
As a result, we’ve been able to generate over 6,000 signups (and counting) with our short opt-in form on our gated webinar page.
List Building Strategy # 2: The Blog Pop-Up Box
The Instapage blog has a substantial visitor count every month, so we decided to leverage our blog’s traffic and use it as a strategy to increase our email lists.
So we created an exit pop-up:
The exit pop-up is pretty simple and straightforward. As soon as a blog visitor attempts to leave the page, the pop-up appears, encouraging them to “Get Fresh Content From the Instapage Blog.” Implementing this didn’t take very long and it’s been very effective at growing our email list. The pop-up has been active for three months and has collected more than 2,500 email addresses. Exit pop-up for the win!
List Building Strategy # 3: Strategically Placed Sign-up Forms
How do you collect more eggs than everybody else on Easter? You get more baskets.
We didn’t want just a pop-up to collect as many email addresses as possible from our blog’s traffic. We also placed a sign-up form in the right margin of our blog because some visitors get irritated by pop-ups. This short form does not interrupt the visitor and, if they like what they read, the form is readily available for them to sign up.
The form conveniently scrolls with the reader, so if the visitor feels like signing up, they can input their information. Think of it as a constant call to action.
We believe in more baskets, so at the bottom of each blog article there is a secondary call to action. It’s placed at the very end of the page, and we’ve made sure that the first sign-up form disappears when the visitor sees this one.
We don’t want to overwhelm visitors or be too pushy, so one form at a time is enough to accomplish our goal:
The sign-up forms have been live on the blog for approximately three months and we have been able to generate about 500 trial signups (and counting) from these alone.
List Building Strategy # 4: Our PPC Landing Page
We love to create landing pages because they continue to be an excellent way for us to collect email addresses and generate leads.
To date, the largest number of email addresses collected is from our PPC landing page:
The page has three calls to action, benefit-oriented copy, and images that convey our software’s ease of use, ultimately persuading them to convert on the CTAs. You’ll notice we chose the two-step opt-in on this page as well because it proved to be very successful on the webinar registration page.
The result? Approximately 16,500 trial customers in nine short months!
As you can see above, the second step in the process shows visitors why it’s a good reason to sign up for Instapage with social proof. By entering their email address, prospects will become a member of a community of 230,000 marketers.
Wrapping Up
Email list building is not that difficult if you implement the right techniques. It’s just a matter of testing and determining what works best with your brand’s audience.
Proven strategies that help you build your email list include:
- Making the opt-in form very obvious to see and convert
- Not going directly for the “ask”
- Being subtle with your forms
- Giving prospects something valuable first
- Telling prospects “what’s in it for them”
Corresponding with your email subscribers on a regular basis is extremely important. Engage with your subscribers regularly even if it’s just to ask what they’re up to. Send them an automatic thank you email as soon as they sign up to show true appreciation and begin building a relationship. Email your subscribers new offers and special trials first when they become available so there’s less of a chance they unsubscribe from your list.
Want to collect more emails from your forms? Try these strategies and analyze the results until you’re satisfied – and then keep refining to achieve even better results!
Have any additional techniques that built your list we didn’t cover? Please share it with us in the comments!
The post 4 Insanely Actionable List Building Strategies Instapage Used to Increase Subscribers appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.
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