Tips for Building an Effective Email Marketing List for your Raleigh Business
Litmus, an email software company, recently released a study that shows email marketing drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. Chances are your Raleigh business isn’t coming close to that dollar amount when you send out email blasts. Why is that? It can be a variety of things such as poor copywriting, emails hitting the spam box, lack of perceived value by the recipient, or an email list that is too small. To run a profitable email marketing campaign, you need to have a good email list before opening up that copy of Microsoft Word to compose the subject line and body of the email.
What’s an Email List?
If you’re new to email marketing, an email list is simply a spreadsheet of names and email addresses of those people who are most likely to purchase your products, services, or perform some other desired action, such as subscribe to your newsletter. You take that spreadsheet of names and email addresses and import it into an email program of your choosing, such as Mail Chimp. You then compose the subject line, body, and call-to-action, and then schedule the campaign to begin. After you’ve sent the last email, over the next few hours and days, you’ll be able to track and measure the success of your campaign by viewing how many people opened the email and how many clicked the link inside. Read on to learn more about how you can immediately start building an effective email marketing list that will act as the foundation of a very profitable future email marketing campaign.
Add a Signup Form
Adding a simple email capture form to your company website is easy enough to do without hiring an expensive coder. It’s even easier if your website runs on WordPress. Countless free (and paid) WordPress plugins will instantly add an email capture form anywhere on your website. If your website doesn’t run on WordPress, the cost of hiring a developer to create one should be minimal. By having a form on your site, you now have a proverbial fishing pole in the water that can generate new email addresses monthly. If your website doesn’t get that much traffic, consider setting up and running a paid ad campaign to give it a much-needed boost.
Create Lead Gens
Lead gen can be anything from an informative .pdf to a 3”x5” card sent out via direct mail. For the former, you would have a plugin on your website that promotes the valuable content piece. Once they enter their email address, they’re immediately allowed to download the .pdf. For direct mail, you can add a QR code or pURL to the direct mail piece. When the recipient scans the QR code with their cell phone or enters the short URL into their web browser, they’re immediately taken to a landing page where you can capture their email address.
Add a Website Popup
Have you ever visited a website where a little box “pops up” after some time? That’s called a “popup,” and it’s a great way to gently “nudge” the website visitor into giving you their email address. If your company site runs on WordPress, there are many free (and paid) popup plugins to choose from. You’ll be able to configure the text that’s written on the box as well as the length of time it takes to show—from the instant they land on your website to a several-second delay.
Create a Referral Program
Many brand-name companies have a box in the corner of their website that promotes a referral program. The visitor enters the email address of a friend, and in exchange, both parties are often given a percentage off coupon code for their order. This form of email lead generation is highly effective as it rewards both the website visitor and their friend with something of value (in this case, the coupon code). Much like the previous examples in this blog post, there are plenty of free and paid WordPress plugins that you can download.
Use Facebook
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Do you have a company page on Facebook—not a personal one but rather a specific Facebook page for your business? If so, you can add a call-to-action button at the very top that links to a landing page on your company website. From there, you would have a contact form that allows the user to enter their name and email address.
Email Marketing in Raleigh
It takes a lot of practice and knowledge to design, set up, and execute a profitable email marketing campaign. If you find yourself struggling, get in touch with the experts at AlphaGraphics. To learn more about how AlphaGraphics of Downtown Raleigh can help with your email marketing list needs, you may email us, request a quote, or call us at (919) 832-2828.