Build An Email List with Social Media
In this article, I will share with you ways to build an email list with social media. So, stay with me.
Email marketing is one of the oldest tools of internet marketing for growing an audience and building a brand. Little has changed since. With its own peculiar attributes and advantages, email marketing can give to businesses what social media could not. Though limited in its reach, it is a personal communication channel that helps turn your followers into lifelong customers.
It is costlier to attract a new customer than to keep an existing one.
When businesses carry out a well-planned email marketing, they stand a chance to benefit in many ways because:
Emails last longer in the audience's inboxes and can be found easily. Many people have more than one email address and technology has made it easy to check email using mobile devices. The good news is that you can then reach them virtually at any time.
Customers receiving phone calls in the middle of business can be annoying and unexpected, but with emails, your customers can come back to it when they are less busy and at a convenient time.
Unlike social media posts or advertisements people may scroll up or down quickly and pass over, emails, when opened, are given more focus and attention. The trick this does is that any advert or call to action will stand a chance of more visibility and being followed. This implies that you will need to craft your headlines to grab attention.
You can also deliver tailored content to different customer segments. When you have a sorted email list, you can group your list according to your business goals or type of content that will resonate with them. Emails also give you the opportunity to share all your other marketing contents and related contents in one place.
Research claims that email marketing generates $38 for every $1 spent. A very good ROI I might say
When choosing an email marketing service provider, it is easy to get confused on which to go for because almost every email marketing provider makes a promise and comes with an enticing offer. I recommend going for providers that have good and navigable user interface, campaign tracking, email automation and retargeting (The email marketing technology is almost stable now and there is little or no difference in the type of service each renders), I prefer getResponse for my email marketing and my friend uses it too.
1. Email Marketing In Social Media
It won’t be a fair comparison to compare email marketing and social media. Though Social media has the potential of reaching more people than emails, emails have almost the sole power to make your listeners your converts. Another reason is because they are more like two different rooms in the same building, there is no reason to treat them as competitors because they are used together for business benefits and achieving goals.
If a business is investing in digital marketing, which is a nice move to make, and wishes to include social as one of its channels, I believe email marketing can easily be included and make a good return when handled properly.
2. How to Get Email Address with Social Media
First and foremost, your social media followers, all the thousands and millions of them can varnish and be lost to you in a second. Should Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin decide to close your account for flaunting one of their rules,or if for some reason your social account gets deleted, or you got booted from the social site you built all your followers, your hours of effort will be lost and that can be heartbreaking. To avoid that, businesses need to find a way to retain access to their customers, and an email list is the better option. With an email list, you have direct access to your audience and that is a priceless asset.
The earlier you realize that you need to bring your followers or audience to email marketing, the better. Your followers already like you, that’s why they connected with you in the first place. And it is easier to convince a follower to subscribe to an email list than it is to convince a total stranger.
With Social media being the wide gate that brings you to the outside world, you can harness the reaching power it offers to throw your net wide to catch prospects and customers. And when you do, email list building should be next on your strategy. Continue reading to know practical ways to convince your followers and prospects of their email addresses.
3. Create a Special Social Media Group
When people connect with you on social media, they already know what your page is about, even if they don’t know the extent of your products or services, they follow you to know more about it. When you create a group, stating clearly in good copy what entrants stand to gain in the group and how long you will be running the special promo in the group, you will create a sense of urgency in your audience as well as a desire to participate in the group before it becomes inaccessible. This has been working and still does.
4. Add Your Website Link on Your Social Media Profile
When prospects or customers want to check you out, they may go to your social page to see how active and how long you have been in business. Some visitors will also opt to check your posts; what it looks like and what products, promotion or campaign you are presently running. A good social proof will convince them too.
Really interested people who intend to find out more, are more likely to visit your site and read your About Us page. That is why it is necessary to be deliberate when writing an “About Us” on your website. And let me add, “About Us” is really not about you. Find out how to craft an intelligent about us page. The trick is to include your website link in your profile page. The link can lead them to your landing page where a provision will be made calling them to action to subscribe to an email newsletter with a popup or whatever your designer made to capture their attention. Professionals advice that you should state clearly what your intended subscribers stand to gain if they submit their email address to you.
Some people believe that companies will include the best way to reach them for quick response on their sites, so make sure any phone lines or chat contact you put up is working.
5. Promote Your Gated Contents
Gated contents are contents that have part of its body hidden from full view and require some kind of action from the reader to be fully accessed.
Promote your nicely written gated articles on social media channels and demand email addresses from your site visitors before they can progress to the full article. This strategy is widely used by sites like forbes magazine and can be applied by any website to get the emails of visitors who are interested in your content. This way, you will be certain that your content really got their attention and they may end up being the target customers you are after.
Gated articles need to be your most interesting or sought-after piece.
The intense desire to access the contents will be based on how well researched, informative, and educational the content is. I have given my email address to a site in exchange for a full report on skill distribution on the global skill distribution. To me, the cost and time of carrying out such research and documenting them is far bigger than my email address. Your visitors will likely think the same when they see value in your article. And don’t spoil a good article with a poor headline. Be authentic.
In my short article on writing eye grabbing headlines for socials, I exposed more than 10 headline formulas that works for social media posts and blog titles.
6. Run a Paid Ad Campaign
Social media ads are a great way to build an email list but it costs money and little technical work. When set properly, you are very likely to get email addresses of people particular with your product or service. This way, you will be sure that your email marketing efforts are getting to the desired set of people. Before running ads, it will be good to know your goal and optimize your ad in that regard. Lead generating ad campaigns should offer something valuable in exchange for a prospect's email address.
Almost all the social media sites have an option for paid ads. Locate the platform your customers mostly use and go about launching a paid advertisement there.
When launching your ad campaign, be specific and precise. Include gender, age gap, demography and other dimensions that will narrow down your target audience so that you will make the best of your budget.
7. Social Media Contest
Creating contests on social media is a good strategy of social media marketing, and it can be applied to get email addresses from participants. People are more likely to compete in a contest when the requirements and prizes to be worn are clearly stated and the barrier to entry low and digitized. It should be designed in such a way that participants will provide their email address to be eligible to participate. As you may have noticed, the real challenge here as well as all other channels of digital marketing is not the lack of tools to be used, but putting up a plan on how best to use the tools.
8. Ask People Directly
In social DM, you can directly ask your audience for their email addresses to send them special offers. People connect with a brand for a reason and when you figure out what it is your followers want, you can easily convince them to give their email address for first-hand information. This requires work, but it’s worth its effort in the long run because social media audiences can disappear the next moment.
In conclusion, email marketing may be old but it is still as effective and useful for today’s business. When you finally get the list of emails you need, go ahead and sort them into segments if you have extra information about them. And don’t spoil your whole effort with bad email content or boring headlines. Always remember to give people the ability to subscribe or unsubscribe themselves, by this you will be assuring them you are not desperate and unconcerned. When they see all these, they will trust you the most.