how to → GET MORE PEOPLE TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR EMAIL LIST

Your email database is one of the most valuable marketing assets that your business will own. It’s often the key to personalising your marketing communication, and a starting point for your digital customer journey.

However, creating an email database and building a successful database of prospective (and engaged!) customers are two very different things.

The key to the success of your database is engaging qualified, brand aligned prospective customers to subscribe in the first place. Without this step, it’s likely that your emails will be landing in a bunch of spam email folders.

“You want to build relationships and create an email list full of subscribers that are eager to listen to you and buy your products or services”

Niel Patel (Marketer, Entrepreneur and Best-selling Author)

Don’t worry though, encouraging the right people to subscribe to your list, isn’t as complicated as it sounds. Here’s how to get started in 3 simple steps…

1. Be Transparent.

Encourage your customers to subscribe through transparency. Tell them what they are signing up for and how often they can expect to hear from you.

We all receive a mountain of emails everyday, so by being super clear with your audience and what they can expect from signing up, will not only gain trust but also allow the website visitor to ‘self-qualify’ as a prospective customer.

For example, if you are a financial services company your subscription call to action might look something like this…

“subscribe to stay on track with your savings goals. Our weekly motivating money management tips will make sure you’re enjoying your dream life sooner rather than later”

Or, if you are eco-minded online fashion retailer, your subscription call to action might look a little more like this…

“Do you want to minimise your fashion-waste footprint? Subscribe to our monthly newsletter featuring DIY alteration tips, styling tricks and capsule wardrobe do’s and don’ts”

Here’s a real-life example courtesy of The Good Trade:

2. Offer something you know your customers will value.

It’s worth investing the time into creating ‘gated content assets’ that provide value to your ideal customer in exchange for their contact details. Think downloadable tools, checklists or industry reports to name a few.

How does gated content work, exactly?

Essentially, gated content means providing a small snippet of the service or product your business offers, to your prospective customers in exchange for their contact details, just like the below example from SuperHi.

3. Keep it simple.

By the time someone makes it to your website, it’s likely they have either been engaged by your social media content, found you on Google search or heard of you through your advertising initiatives. No matter how they found you, it’s likely they have some idea of what you do and are at the beginning of their digital relationship with your brand.

Subscribing to your database takes this relationship to the next level and it’s your customers way of saying “Hey, I like what you do. I’m not ready to buy into your brand yet, but I want to keep getting to know you”.

The thing that can break this next step in the process, is having a complicated, hard to find or over the top subscription form. So, keep it simple. Make your subscribe call to action transparent, obvious and accessible. Keep the form fields simple (asking for a name and email address is a good start!). Remember - you can always ask for more information about them as the digital relationship progresses, but for now we want to make sure we’re not scaring potential customers away.

Want to know more about email marketing? Let’s talk.

words by Kate Cowley, Digital Marketer & Content Creator at Wahoo.