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Email marketing can be incredibly powerful for small businesses, but only when you have a clear-cut strategy.
Here’s what you need to know about how to build an email list that keeps your subscribers engaged with and attached to your business over months and years.
How To Build an Email List From Scratch: What You Need First
If you’re starting to build an email list from scratch for your business, settle three things first before you add a sign-up form to your site: your email marketing platform, who you want to reach, and what your subscribers will get.
Choosing an Email Marketing Platform
Mailchimp, Klaviyo, and HubSpot are all reliable platforms for integrating signup forms into your site, automating email sends, separating your subscribers into segments, and getting robust reporting on how your emails are performing. The differences between these three are in the details.
Klaviyo tends to be a better pick for eCommerce businesses than for small companies that offer local services. HubSpot makes the most sense when used with its companion CRM. MailChimp is straightforward, works well with WordPress sites, and has a reputation for being user-friendly. That’s why it’s our first recommendation as an email marketing platform.
Create an Incentive for Signing Up
After you integrate your email marketing platform of choice with your website, you’ll need to give visitors real motivation to sign up. Offering a discount on services is the simplest way to accomplish this, but there are other options.
Some companies get incredible results from offering exclusive content in exchange for an email signup. For example, if you run a lawn care business and have a video series on dealing with local weather and seasonal changes, experiment with offering this to your site visitors after they enter their email.
Know Who You Want To Reach
Build your email marketing campaigns around your ideal audience, and create content that they’ll want to read and engage with.
Think about your existing customer base. What do they ask your team members over and over? Use your emails to answer those questions. What are they trying to get done? Give them the clear steps to get started. What time of year do you get the most business? Amp up your email cadence just ahead of that season.
If you offer local services, this structure can give you plenty of material for an entire year of emails. Use most of your communication to give valuable information and insight to potential customers, and use the rest to share updates on what you’re offering and working on throughout the year.
Decide What Your Subscribers Will Get and Stick With It
To keep people engaged with your emails, you’ll need a more convincing and clear invitation than “sign up for our newsletter.” If you’re a plumber and plan on sharing biweekly maintenance tips for homeowners, let them know in your email signup prompt. Being specific and clear like this is likely to get you better results than keeping things vague.
How Do You Draw in New Email Signups?
The best way to build your email list beyond your existing customers is to marry email marketing with SEO. Search Engine Optimization draws visitors to your site by making your pages more relevant to what potential customers are searching for online. Getting a click in Google search results can be the first part of the funnel that leads a visitor to your email list.
Use SEO to Your Advantage
Your SEO strategy can complement your email marketing efforts in more ways than one.
By optimizing your site’s content to rank in organic search results, you can draw in curious searchers who are more likely to take specific interest in your business, and more likely to sign up for emails. However, to make this multichannel marketing strategy work, you’ll need to use SEO strategies that align with your customers’ intent.
As a small business, the goal of your SEO strategy should be more leads, not just more clicks on your pages. This means that the best use of your time and energy is on creating highly localized, specialized content that Google will recommend to searchers within your service area.
Use Your Blog Content as Email Content
If you post regularly on your site, which can be part of a strong SEO strategy, you can repurpose some of that blog content as part of your email campaigns. This is one of the simplest ways to marry your SEO and email marketing efforts and make the most of your time.
Not every blog you post will necessarily make an excellent email, and you shouldn’t just paste the entire body of the blog into the body of the message. However, if you feel like a post will resonate with your audience, put an excerpt in the email and link the full post below.
What If People Aren’t Signing Up for Emails?
If you’re a small business owner, you know how hard it can be to get your audience’s attention. If you’re struggling to get existing customers and new site visitors alike to sign up for your email list, it might be time to pull in support from a professional email marketing team.
It’s certainly possible to get solid results while running your own email marketing campaigns, but working with an agency that specializes in small business growth will give you more strategic insight and a deeper understanding of what will connect with your audience.
Working with an agency also frees you up to focus on providing excellent service to your clients, taking the stress of handling marketing off your shoulders. However, you can still be a key player in your marketing efforts, and emails with a personal touch from a business owner can be much more effective than vague ones.
Ready for Growth?
If you’re ready to get results from your email marketing campaigns, reach out to Padula Media today. Our team can help you build an effective email strategy that will resonate.