“81% and 80% of respondents, respectively, said email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention.” — (Source)
Friends, 81% is just too big of a number to ignore, don’t you think?
If data suggests that a huge number of people (specifically, retail professionals) are saying that email marketing has been instrumental in their customer acquisition and retention efforts, then you can bet your family jewels that there is some truth to that.
And so the question becomes: “Have you been building your list?”
If you answered negatively because you’re wondering if you really need to get your hands dirty with list building, then allow me to share with you these crucial bits on why list building is important.
Let’s hop right in.
(Source)
1. List building will help you establish trust with your audience.
Helping your audience with their pain points becomes comparatively easier if you have them on your email list.
After all, you have only to send them an email message to interact with them or straight up share helpful tips that they can use to solve their problems.
Of course, the more you help your audience with their problems, the more they’ll find you to be a trustworthy person (or business entity).
The last bit is important.
Because when it comes to selling, trust is crucial.
Without trust, you’ll find it exceedingly challenging to influence your audience to buy your products.
Another thing worth mentioning is you need to be strategic with the list that you’re building.
Try to establish relationships with influencers or industry experts so the impact of your email messages becomes exponential.
I say exponential because these influencers usually have followers that number by the thousands. And if you can entice them to share your product or your content, then your brand will be exposed to all of the influencer’s follower.
Pro tip: If you’re at your wit’s end and you still can’t find the influencer’s email address, then I urge you to use an email checker tool like Norbert.
These email checker tools have the capability to scrape a website for email addresses.
For example, if you’ll use Norbert to find Elon Musk’s email address at SpaceX, then you have only to add Elon Musk’s name and the SpaceX website on the platform’s search box.
After you press “Enter,” the platform will come back with Elon’s email address.
What makes the platform even more amazing is the fact that you can send your email messages within the platform, making the whole outreach process as painless as possible.
With email checkers, you’d be able to find the influencer’s email address and reach out to them within seconds.
2. Perfect for strategic product pitches.
Since developing a relationship with your audience is an almost organic result of email marketing, then you’d be in a very good position to pitch your services strategically.
What makes the scenario strategic is you can weave in your product pitches on the solutions that you’re sharing with your audience.
Supposing you’re a tech company that offers project management solutions to your clients. Instead of you sharing random productivity tips to your email list, you can insert your project management software as a solution that your audience can use to increase their productivity.
With this strategy, not only will you be able to pitch your products, but you’d also be able to add value to your audience as well.
Bonus Tip: Webinars are classic workhorses when it comes to helping marketers and business owners with building their email list, all while providing value to their audience.
The strategy is quite simple:
Step 1: Schedule a free webinar where you will cover walkthroughs on how your audience can solve an existing problem that they’re facing.
Step 2: Tell your audience about the webinar either via social media, paid ads, or you can even add a banner on your website’s sidebar (among other methods).
Step 3: Require your audience to sign up to your email list as a means for them to join your webinar.
That’s it.
As you can probably imagine, since the webinar is free and the topic is all about the existing problems that your audience is facing, then the likelihood of them joining your webinar is quite high.
3. Make your brand sticky.
Did you know that over 2.5 million blog posts are written every.single.day?
That’s how busy the internet has become.
And if you aren’t constantly reminding your audience that you exist, you can count on them to forget about you.
That’s not a good thing, of course.
After all, if you aren’t the first thing that pops in your customer’s minds when they’re looking for solutions to their problems, then they’re most likely thinking about your competitors.
The solution to this problem is simple.
You just need to keep on reminding your audience about your business.
You just need to engage them.
You can send them email messages about the current promos that you’re offering, your freebies, or perhaps an up and coming contest that you will start.
Bonus Tip: In addition to simply reaching out to your audience through email, you can also connect with them through their phone’s inbox — via text messages.
Through online tools like LinkTexting, you’d be able to send text messages to your prospective customers with a link to your web page (or your app’s download page.)
When you’re using text messages as a platform to reach out to your customers, your brand becomes even stickier since they’d also be able to see your not just in their emails, but also in their smartphone’s inbox.
What’s next?
Have you been using list building to grow your business?
If you answered with a “yes,” then please share some of your best list building strategies in the comments section below. That way, we’d all be able to create a round-up of epic list building strategies which we can all go back to, should we need more list building strategies.
I look forward to reading your comments. Take care.
