In this guest post, we take a look at how you can create a targeted email list.

This article will cover some of the most effective ways to bring in more users and maximize your email marketing results. Keep in mind that lead acquisition is just one step of the sales cycle—once a customer joins your list, it’s important to follow up with fresh content that gets them interested in your brand and products.

How to Create a Targeted Email List (Guide with Examples)

Marketers often focus on email content, but even the best content strategies won’t succeed without a strong targeted email list.

Furthermore, email has an incredible ROI at roughly 4000%, so it’s critical to generate as many subscriptions as possible in order to drive sales.

1. Maintain A Healthy List

You might think that a larger email list is always better, but quality has a greater effect than quantity when it comes to email marketing. Adding disengaged leads who don’t care about your brand will only hurt your email performance.

Spam filters use open rate and other metrics to determine whether your content is worthwhile. If most users are ignoring your messages, they’ll eventually go straight into your subscribers’ spam folders. Email list cleaning is crucial to maintaining strong email deliverability.

Buying leads is, therefore, one of the worst things you can do for your email list. While you’ll technically gain subscribers, you’ll end up having more trouble reaching the readers who genuinely want to engage with your content. Resist the temptation to pay for contacts—if you can buy them, so can anyone else.

With that in mind, you should try to remove any inactive users from your email list at least annually, and even more frequently if possible. Of course, you can try to bring subscribers back with a re-engagement sequence before deleting their contact information.

Here's a handy graphic that outlines how a targeted email list can help drive sales.

2. Leverage Marketing Software

Marketing automation is still a relatively new field, and nearly 3 in 10 businesses still haven’t automated their marketing practices. Without an email service provider, you’ll be at a significant disadvantage compared to other businesses in your niche. These are just a few of the tasks you could streamline through automation:

Design and implement new sign-up forms
Segment sign-up forms based on customer information
Analyze subscription rate for each sign-up form
Develop automated messaging based on customer behaviour

Marketing automation might sound like a useless expense, but it can save you money while helping you increase sales engagement and web traffic. Automating tedious and repetitive tasks will give your team time to spend on other important projects.

3. Experiment with Different Sign-up Forms

There’s nothing wrong with the classic opt-in form, but more interesting visual designs will catch your audience’s attention and lead to even more subscriptions. With marketing automation software, you can test out a variety of sign-up content to see what resonates with your audience.

Landing Pages

Dedicated landing pages, for example, focus directly on your email newsletter rather than making the opt-in form one element on a crowded page. They can also be used to offer discounts, gifts, and other perks to users who enter their email address and subscribe to your newsletter.

Customers are substantially more likely to subscribe if they feel like they’re getting something in return for their contact information. All things considered, an initial benefit is a small price to pay for a new customer.

Exit-intent Popups

Many programs also give you the ability to add popups to your site for even more subscriptions. Popups are one of the best ways to direct attention to your sign-up form.

While popups are usually associated with intrusive or distracting content, exit-intent popups only appear when a user is about to leave. In other words, they’ll help you generate more subscriptions while improving your website’s average length of visit.

Like landing pages, popups are a great opportunity to provide exclusive perks for new subscribers. If a reader sees that they could save 10% by entering their email, they may reconsider their decision to leave your site. Don’t forget to test different offers to monitor each one’s subscription rate.

Interactive Sign-up Content

Any perk can help you get more subscribers, but the ability to win a variety of benefits will give users even more motivation to sign up for your newsletter. The Wheel of Fortune sign-up form, for example, gives each new subscriber one spin for a selection of discounts.

Be creative when trying to add to your targeted email list.

4. Start a Referral Program

No matter how well you optimize your digital marketing practices, there’s nothing more efficient than word of mouth referrals. You can generate even more referrals by offering customers a bonus in exchange for introducing friends, family members, and business contacts to your brand.

Attracting new leads is one of the most difficult stages of the sales cycle, so gaining subscribers through referrals is a natural way to build your list and improve your email marketing results. Even something as small as free shipping or access to exclusive content can be enough to incentivize referrals. There are plenty of ideas on how to promote your referral program.

5. Run Online Giveaways For Your Targeted Email List

Running giveaways is another highly effective option for increasing shares on social media and other platforms. A single giveaway can bring in tens or even hundreds of subscribers, so even a relatively expensive prize will still lead to a strong ROI.

Along with providing their email address, you can offer additional entries to promote other behaviours such as sharing the giveaway on social media or entering their phone number for SMS marketing.

Make sure to pick a prize that’s unique to your audience—if you give out a generic prize like cash or an Amazon gift card, people will sign up regardless of their interest in your brand.

Lead acquisition is just one part of the puzzle, but improving your subscription rate is an incredibly efficient way to increase both sales and traffic. These tactics will help you optimize your email capture practices for more subscriptions on your website and social media pages.

Customers will ultimately be attracted to high-quality content and products.

Why Do Almost All Market Leaders Use A Targeted Email List? They Work!

According to McKinsey & Company Marketing and Sales, email marketing is almost 3 times more effective in acquiring customers than using Facebook and Twitter combined. In addition, the average purchase generated by email is 17% higher than the purchases from social media networks. Market-leading businesses have found that email marketing is a cost-effective way to meet with their customers in a location they visit every day – their email inbox. We challenge you to take one of these ideas and use it for a month and see what kind of results you get.

Email marketing can help your business grow because it:

Strengthens Relationships: Email is an effective tool to help you communicate with your customers and keep you in the forefront of their minds. People are more likely to buy from someone they know and are in contact with.
Builds Credibility: By sharing helpful and informative content, your emails can increase your credibility with your customers.
Generates Sales: Every customer is valuable to your business and finding new customers is important. Not everyone who signs up for emails may be ready to purchase, but your emails will help you capture a potential customer’s attention and grow a relationship with them so that when they are ready to buy, your business will be foremost in their thoughts.

About the author: Evaldas Mockus is an Experienced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and Saas companies. Currently, he is associated with Omnisend, an e-commerce marketing automation platform built for growing e-commerce businesses.

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