Planning is the first step that should be considered before taking any form of decision to enable you to remain in line. Before you begin collecting emails, you need to have a plan with clear set goals. You need to understand what you want to achieve, how well you expect your sales to increase, how cordial you want to be with your subscribers, how email marketing can fit in with other marketing strategies you want to employ, and the effect on your overall marketing income. Because of the dynamic nature of humans, these goals will be updated as you go, but it is important to know what you want to do first while making sure that they can be achieved. These goals may change or evolve over time; it’s important to consider the purpose of your emails and set goals that are both measurable and attainable.

As previously said, it is never too early to begin to plan. This will help you grow faster, as you have a plan and enough time to dedicate to ensuring the success of the plan. Some of the strategies to consider include:

Quality Blog Content

The most common strategy in building an email list is creating a blog, delivering quality content, which drives traffic to your website. If people love your content, they are likely to subscribe to receive updates on future content and exclusive offers related to the content they have just consumed. Content creation may be demanding in terms of time and personnel, but it is definitely worth it, as people are always looking for answers online to numerous questions they have.

Give them answers to these questions, especially those linked to your niche, and try to get a few information from them to give them more content. The email address is the most important detail to get, but you can get a few more details. Your content must be valuable. In any marketing strategy, you want to apply, content is key. No matter how you water a bad seed, it won’t germinate properly, but if you water a good seed appropriately, you will get the desired plant. For visitors to turn to subscribers, they must love your content.

Engaging Email content

It is important that the content in your email is conversational; your content should be aimed at getting the recipient to open and engage. This will foster goodwill as your audience will interact with your website. Ask what they think, let them share opinions. This causes loyalty and gets the emotional part of them, causing attachment to your brand.

Use Irresistible Lead Magnets

As you already, lead magnets are enticing offers that provide value for free or cheap. To ensure optimal effectiveness of your lead magnets, you should ensure that;

• It is easily exhaustible; people get bored easily, so if you are offering a free guide, you should keep information concise for easy consumption. If your audience does not consume the lead magnet, then it has lost its purpose.
• Your lead magnets should be applicable and effective. When the free product has reasonable effects, people won’t hesitate to pay for products.
• Ensure that your lead magnet is relevant for your target audience. If you use a lead magnet for the wrong audience, your efforts will be futile. Remember to have a well-defined market persona.
• Make sure it is readily available; you don’t want them to forget about it. 

Utilize Sharing

Social sharing is a great tool; adding a “share” call-to-action in your email content can double your click-through rates. Sharing is not limited to getting more clicks and engagement; it should also increase your subscriber list. If your offer is valuable, and someone shares with his contacts, if they profit off it, they are likely to stay subscribed to get first-hand information about future offers. Sharing is a great tool for exponentially increasing brand awareness.

Personalize Email Content

Cordiality is something you want to achieve, and personalizing the content of your emails is a great approach to achieving this. The emails will make more meaning to them. Personalization goes beyond addressing subscribers by their first name but giving content that will exclusively be beneficial to each of your subscribers. This can be achieved by segmenting your list of subscribers (Discussed in the next chapter). Segmenting your list has a lot to do with giving exclusive offers and information to people on different lists, helping you build a better cordiality with your subscribers.

When they have the knowledge that they are receiving exclusive content tailored to suit their needs, you will get loyal subscribers.

Utilize Urgency

Humans naturally have an inclination to procrastination or second-guessing situations, but if your emails add a sense of urgency, you will convert more subscribers to customers. “Only available to the first 100 clicks”, “grab your spot now,” “Hurry,” and other similar words and phrases can put your subscribers under pressure because they do not want to miss out. Because of the inclination towards procrastination, a push to hurry will be effective to ensure they click as soon as they is a limited-time offer or limited-customer offer.

Use cliff-hangers

A cliff-hanger is a suspenseful and intriguing ending to a plot that makes you interested in what happens next.  Just like in movies, and novels or even Television shows, where cliff-hangers keep your mind fixed on the next episode or chapter. They can also be useful in emails sent to your subscribers. They should be excited to open your new email because they want to see the new content your email brings. It is a good way to make your subscribers anticipate and get cordial with you. Cordiality is important in keeping your subscribers loyal because humans can easily get bored with routines. 

Avoid Excessive Call-To-Actions

You should avoid clogging your email with several Call-To-Actions, let every email have a target, request just one action from your subscribers because multiple CTAs make conversion difficult. Subscribers have different options of actions and often get lost in the process of deciding what to do, in the end, they may as well do nothing. It is better to have one clear CTA per email, which can be repeated a few times because people may forget easily.

Aesthetics Matter

It is important to ensure that your emails are pleasing to the eye. No matter how great your content is, if it is not pleasing to the eye, it may not even be read at all. The eye is very sensitive to colors, the beauty of design even more than text, which can be an influential factor to determine if your subscribers will enjoy reading your emails.

Your email marketing service provider will likely provide you with templates, pick cool colors that are easy on the eye yet catchy enough. It is also important to pick a color that is in line with your brand. Avoid clutters of colors and designs as it can make the email look really terrible, especially for mobile users. It is important to note that the majority of subscribers will view their emails on mobile. Strategically place images in between large texts to make the texts better processed as readers will largely skim through; long texts are usually tiring and may be avoided. Some catchy images in between can help break up the texts. It is also important to avoid clogging emails with texts and images, blank white spaces between texts and images – where appropriate, helps the eyes read them better. Blank space in your emails frames your content nicely, which helps increase readability. Use catchy colors for your call to action and ensure the command is large enough to attract attention. Always have it in mind that your content will be viewed on different types of devices. Hence keep them simple.

You can format your emails in a text or HTML format. An HTML format gives you the liberty to have special characters, colors, and text processing to bold, italics, etc., while plain texts allow only text, no images, or extra formatting is allowed. If your HTML link is broken, it can totally distort the output in your subscriber’s device. Still, fortunately, many email marketing service providers usually have a default option of displaying text only if the HTML link is broken. You should use tools like “Email on Acid” to get a preview of how your email will look on different devices to ensure you’re getting it right.

Properly Schedule Emails

Timing is important when sending out your emails to ensure that people are reading them and taking action on them. There is no specific time this guide can recommend for you, but you should make a market survey of the modal send times of emails from companies in your niche. You can also employ a trial by error method with the use of analytics. Send at different times, and see what works best. You should also have a steady send schedule. Your subscribers should know what day(s) of the week to expect your emails, be consistent with it.

Read Also:

• Email Marketing Guide
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• Podcasting Guide

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