When embarking on an email marketing campaign, it’s easy to think that the only thing you need to do to is create some great content to send out every month for your loyal band of subscribers. Of course ‘only’ betrays the nature of that task because creating engaging content on a monthly basis is difficult, especially content that will get your subscribers back onto your site to read the latest posts or make more purchases.

Creating great content that is engaging your subscriber base is vital to any email marketing campaign, and it really is important to get that right first and foremost. But what next after you’ve got that content going out regularly to satisfied subscribers? Then it’s time to grow your subscriber list and plan for expansion.

It’s important to note that growing your emailing list is difficult, and you may not see the results you want straight away – which shouldn’t be a problem, as most email marketing campaigns are long-term strategies. Below are some of the methods used by email marketers to gain more subscriptions to their content, all of which should be easy enough for even the most nervous email marketer to carry out.

Incentives

The most obvious way to get people signing up to your emails is to offer them something in exchange. This can be anything you care to give away, for example 10% off their next purchase, members-only content, etc. This is a technique that predates email marketing by hundreds of years and it’s a proven way of getting people to sign up – people love free stuff and are more than willing to give away details or sign up for newsletters in exchange. Just make sure you aren’t short-changing them after the sign up and are keeping them engaged with great content. Of course, you will probably see a bit of a drop-off in numbers using this method as it’s inevitable some people will sign up for their free gift and unsubscribe later. For the most part though, incentives are effective.

Preview Your Emails

People are naturally wary of giving away their details and signing up for material they aren’t sure about. Reassure them by giving them a taste of your emails. This can either be through posting up an email from a couple of months ago for potential subscribers to take a look at or simply providing a list of what you will be covering in the emails. Make sure people know exactly how many emails they should expect a month too!

Sharing

In general, people love sharing – think about the amount of forwards of funny jokes or pictures of cats you’ve received in your own inbox from friends. What’s to say your email can’t be one of those forwards? Make your content enjoyable and informative and you should find people will forward onto friends or share on social media. Encourage them with highly visible share buttons!

Make Your Sign-Up Form Visible and Easy-To-Understand

Another obvious one, but one that often gets overlooked. Make sure people can easily find your email signup on your site. Put it somewhere that catches the eye and link to it at the bottom of articles – just don’t bury it in the footer! Once they are there, make it easy for them to sign up. A simple name and email address will suffice, as well as a simple explanation of what you will do with this information.

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision, specialists in email marketing software

Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision (http://www.extravision.com), specialists in email marketing software

Author Bio: Ben Greenwood is writing on behalf of Extravision, specialists in email marketing software

Category: Marketing
Keywords: email marketing, email marketing campaigns