Email has never been more alive than it is today: over 205 billion emails are sent and received every day, and this figure is expected to grow, at an average annual rate of 3% over the next four years, reaching over 246 billion by the end of 2019. Although social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram get all the hype these days, and many marketers pour their budgets into social media marketing, email continues to be a personal, direct, and effective way to connect with your audience, whether you run a personal blog, an e-commerce site, an online magazine, a business blog, or any other type of website.
Email Matters
Did you know that you are 6 times more likely to get clicks from an email campaign than you are from a Tweet? Collecting emails and building an email list is a sure way to connect with your audience, build trust, and increase your reach. If you are also trying to sell something through your blog, such as an e-book, email can also help you turn followers and prospects into customers.
Having a blog or website and not building an email list is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. There are almost 2.6 billion email users. Most people check their email address daily. Some even have push notifications enabled on their smartphones and tablets which let them know right away when they have received a new email in their inbox.
Apart form its popularity and convenience, email is also direct and personal. Social media is also direct and personal, but social media is more distracting, and your message can easily get lost amid so many voices calling people for attention. Email is more direct. It’s just your message, the recipient, and their inbox. With an eye-catching title and engaging content, you can capture the recipient’s attention and hold it, before delivering them a call to action they cannot refuse.
The Benefits of Collecting Emails to Build an Email List
- Your content, personalized messages, and special offers land directly in your subscriber’s inbox, where they are hard to miss.
- Email is private and personal, making it easier for you to build one-on-one relationships with your subscribers. Many people feel more comfortable talking with you and asking you questions in a private conversation than on your Facebook fan page.
- People who subscribe to your email list are interested in what you have to say or offer, or else they would not take the trouble to sign up to your email list in the first place. This ensures that you’re not wasting any resources sending messages to an audience who may or may not be interested. Email subscribers are generally very receptive to what you have to say.
- Email newsletters reach a targeted audience, without requiring the financial investment that most other online communication channels require to reach the right demographics.
- Creating and sending email newsletters is a sustainable and cost-effective long-term strategy that can be easily adjusted and tweaked once it’s up and running, without requiring any costly infrastructure changes.
Email Newsletters Versus Subscription By Email
It’s important to understand that email newsletter is one thing, and subscription by email another. Collecting emails and building an email list is different from using WordPress plugins such as JetPack to deliver each new post you publish on your blog or site to your followers and subscribers as soon as it’s out. You should deliver your content as email, as this serves as a good reminder for your followers to check your site, and keeps them connected to you even if they don’t have the time to visit your site all the time. But you want to go a step further and build an email list by sending your audience unique content, personalized messages, and special offers.
Why Use An Email Platform
With an email newsletter platform you can see the emails of all your subscribers, find out where most of them come from, run A/B split testing to measure the performance of email subjects or registration forms, and much more. Certain plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory such as Newsletter, help you craft beautiful, personalized newsletters. The benefit of using an email platform like AWeber, however, is that you get more tools for crafting engaging emails, including beautiful, customizable templates, and advanced tracking and analytics to measure the performance of your emails based on how many recipients open your emails or click the links they contain.
Email platforms come with in-depth reports that help you understand your followers and segment them according to interest levels, so that you send the right type of emails to the right subscriber groups. In addition, email platforms integrate with customizable sign-up forms you can easily create and place on your website to collect emails faster. There are many email platforms that integrate with WordPress, and choosing one can be a challenge. Do check our How to Choose an Email Platform guide to learn more about the importance of building an email list and finding the right email platform for your needs.
As a rule, the best email platforms tend to come with a monthly subscription fee, but some of them offer a free subscription for a limited number of subscribers, such as 1,000 or 2,000. By the time you grow your email list to that number, it will start paying for itself, making the upgrade to a paid subscription a small investment.
Building Your Email List
The rate at which you collect emails depends to a great extent on the email tools you use. We’ve already highlighted the benefits of an email platform as opposed to a simple newsletter plugin. The more advanced features of an email platform, and especially email tracking and analytics, help you measure the effectiveness of your campaign as well as better understand your audience, which in turn enables you to craft more engaging and ultimately more effective emails.
The quality of your opt-in form and its placement also matters. Forms such as those you can create with AWeber plugins stand out and can be customized so that they integrate perfectly with your website. Even more effective can be the pop-up reminder and signup form you can create with OptinMonster. These forms can pop up on screen when a visitor visits a certain page or when he or she tries to leave your site, and can be hard to refuse, especially when they come with an incentive like a free ebook or other download that they can get as soon as they join your list.
Getting people to sign up to your email list is just the start, though. After that point you have to send your subscribers content regularly, as well as any special offers you may have. You have to understand your audience and first establish trust before you ask them to do anything, whether it’s joining a cause, attending an event, or buying something. Finally, remember that collecting emails and building an email list takes time. It is an ongoing effort that won’t bring you results as quickly as advertising or social media may do, but over time has consistently better conversion rates, and requires a far smaller financial investment.
Email marketing is not a substitute for social media marketing, search engine optimization, or advertising. It is a different way to reach your followers, a direct, focused, and effective method to keep your audience up to date with what’s going on with your site and deliver them content and any special offers you may have. While it’s effective on its own, it works best when it is combined with all of the above. So even if you make email newsletter a priority, don’t neglect other ways to reach your audience.
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