5 ways to build your email list

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Creating content to keep your subscribers engaged is necessary, but first you must have subscribers. There are five main ways you can grow your company’s email marketing list.

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One of the best marketing assets is an email newsletter.

Creating content to keep your subscribers engaged is necessary, but first you must have subscribers.

There are five main ways you can grow your company’s email marketing list, and a few things to keep in mind for each of the options.

See Also

• 7 tips to keep you on top of email marketing
• How to use existing customer data to drive traffic to your business
• Use less content in email marketing campaigns for better click-through

1. Use a sign-up form

It's essential to have a sign-up form for your newsletter on your website, and not just on your homepage. This form will allow users to fill in their information — usually a name and email address — and immediately get signed up for your newsletter. Place your sign-up form on various pages within your site, and even include it as a pop-up window when visitors leave your site.

The signup form should be easy for people to find. Make it stand out, but also keep it simple — after all, you don’t want it to distract from your site. A long form with too many questions or blanks to fill in can deter potential subscribers. The only two things you need people to fill in are name and email address fields.

2. Offer incentives

We all receive multiple emails a day, so signing up for more emails isn't always something that seems appealing. To encourage your customers to sign up, offer an incentive, such as a special discount or giveaway opportunity. This will attract more subscribers as well as help promote your business brand.

You should also make it very clear what your email campaigns entail — let them know how often you will email them — so that people can know what to expect when signing up.

3. Collect email addresses at a physical location

If your company or business has a physical location, such as a store or cafe, you have several different ways you can collect email addresses from your customers. You can leave a bowl or clipboard by the register, so customers can write down their email addresses at checkout.

Also, create an option where they can choose to receive a receipt via email, and include a link to your newsletter that way. Sometimes handwriting can be illegible, so if possible, using a touch-screen device to collect email addresses is a good idea.

4. Use social media

Having a presence on social media is just as crucial in marketing as creating email newsletters. You can promote your social networks via your newsletters and promote your newsletter on social networks to create a following on both. Your newsletters should contain buttons to "like" or "follow" your social media accounts and options to share your content directly from the email to your subscribers' social media accounts.

By doing this and having links to sign up for your newsletter across all of your social media platforms, you can attract new subscribers. Similar to the sign-up forms on your site, be sure you distinguish what type of content subscribers can expect in your emails, as well as how often they will receive emails.

5. Make it mobile

One last thing to consider when it comes to email marketing is mobile. According to Pew Research Center, 64 percent of American adults own a smartphone, so it is imperative that you have both a mobile and desktop version of your newsletter. Many email marketing services display a test version of what your campaign will look like on both mobile and desktop so you can double check that there aren't any errors or glitches before sending it out.

Check out these email marketing reviews to learn more about the top email marketing services and select the best option for your business.

http://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/how-to/marketing/2015/04/5-ways-to-build-your-email-list.html?page=all

How to Use Email Marketing to Build Brand Awareness

You know building awareness for your business is important.

But how do you stand out and actually get the attention you need to reach new customers and generate new opportunities?

This was the dilemma faced by Davidson & Company, LLP, a full-service accounting firm located in downtown Vancouver.

“One of our taglines is that ‘We’re not your typical accounting firm’” explains Bahar Saadat, client relations & marketing manager at Davidson & Co. “Traditionally, accountants have a reputation for being boring ‘bean counters’ but we want to show people that we have personality, and that we have real people that are great to work with.”

For Davidson & Co, building awareness means having a way to stay top-of-mind with existing clients, and being able to reach potential clients in the process.

Recommended for YouWebcast: Zero to Millions: The Secrets Behind Building a Business and Growing a Digital Audience

For the last two years, the firm’s best tool for reaching these audiences been email marketing from Constant Contact.

“We started with email marketing to communicate and share industry updates with our existing clients,” Bahar explains. “But it’s really grown into one of our best drivers for brand awareness. We’re noticing more people talking about our business, and we have more people showing up at our events.”

If you’ve been struggling to get the reach you’re looking for, email marketing can help. Consider these four tips from Davidson & Co to help you get started:

1. Ask for permission

Growing an email list can take some time, but as Bahar has discovered, it’s better to collect email addresses the right way, rather than trying to take shortcuts.

“We’re careful to only add people to our list that we’ve met and have an existing business relationship with,” Bahar explains. “When you let people know what they’re going to receive — for us that includes information about our events and industry news— people are very willing to sign up.”

Getting permission has proven to be particularly important for Davidson & Co, following the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), which went into effect on July 1, 2014. The legislation introduced new requirements for businesses to obtain consent before sending marketing messages.

“I know there were a lot of business that were worried about CASL, but for us it really hasn’t been a problem at all,” Bahar explains. “We reached out to our audience to let them know that we were aware of it, and gave them the option to update their subscription and an overwhelming number of people said they wanted to keep hearing from us which was great.”

2. Put your audience first

Asking permission will get people onto your list, but once they’ve signed up it’s your responsibility to provide something of value.

With an average open rate higher than 50 percent, Bahar has found that one of the best ways to provide that value is to start with her audience and understand what they’re most interested in receiving.

“It’s all about providing something that’s relevant to them and promotes engagement,” Bahar explains. “When we started out, we were just really sharing a graphic with a short message or announcement, but over time we’ve paid attention to what resonated and began to introduce more and more.”

The firm recently used audience feedback to tweak their strategy and make video a central part of their marketing strategy.

“We thought video would be a fun way to humanize our firm and show the people behind the scenes,” Bahar explains. “It really took off, even to the point where we are running into clients and they are telling us how much they enjoyed a video we sent out.”

The firm has also sent an online survey to a segment of their client base to learn more about what they’re interested in receiving.

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3. Share your knowledge

You’ll get more people opening your emails when you shift your focus to providing content that’s interesting to your subscribers — which is a great first step towards email marketing success.

The next step is to understand what type of content would get people to take an additional action.

For Davidson & Co, that means sharing helpful advice and offering the chance to learn more at in-person events.

“In the past, we had relied on print invitations to promote our events and that made it difficult for people to share the events and invite other people,” Bahar explains. “With email, we have people who open and read our invitations but also share them with others. It’s a good sign when we’re meeting new people at our events that we didn’t send an invitation to. Email has played a big part in that.”

4. Be consistent

Consistency is important — both in the look and feel of your messages, and in the frequency that you communicate with your audience.

Email templates make it easy to create professional-looking messages that can be customized to match your brand.

“We put a lot of thought into how we put our marketing together because we want people to get to know our business,” Bahar explains. “Our goal is to really humanize our business, so each message that goes out will have a video or photos of our staff or clients.”

They use that same consistency when deciding what time and how often to send to their audience.

“In an industry like ours, it can sometimes take a few years before you actually convert a new client,” Bahar explains. “So, we really focus on being consistent and building the relationship anyway we can.”

Each month, Bahar and her staff put together an outreach plan that aligns with industry activities and events. With a list of over 3,300 contacts, Davidson & Co has built an audience of people who care about their business and look forward to hearing from them each month.

This has resulted in new business opportunities, increased referrals, and greater brand awareness for their firm.

“We all know accountants love numbers, and with email the numbers don’t lie,” Bahar explains. “It’s been the most effective tool for delivering our message.”

Put your email marketing strategy into action.

Whether you offer services to other businesses, like Davidson & Co, or want a better way to build relationships with customers, email marketing can help.

http://www.business2community.com/email-marketing/use-email-marketing-build-brand-awareness-01198301

Jeff Bullas's Killer Tips to get your article go viral on LinkedIn

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/6-Ways-to-Create-and-Publish-a-Killer-Article-on-LinkedIn.jpg.jpg

In February last year, LinkedIn gave every member in the U.S. the ability to publish posts on LinkedIn – and the response was swift and enthusiastic. In fact just recently, LinkedIn reached more than one million posts.

Now since LinkedIn wants each one of more than 330 million members to be able to share their insights with other professionals across the globe, they’ve taken another big step toward that goal as they expand the ability to publish on LinkedIn to all members in English-speaking countries.

That’s 230 million users around the globe who can now tell their stories, show their expertise, and express their ideas on LinkedIn.

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/linkedin-notifications.png-300x288.png

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Becoming a publisher on LinkedIn can be a powerful way to reach your target market and generate new leads. The new platform promises to match the blog’s topic with users who share an interest in that particular vertical.

It also gives you greater exposure to your current network given every blog you post is distributed to their news feed and displayed within their notification settings located at the very top of their LinkedIn profile.

If your contacts like the article and decide to share that on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, this will not only create greater exposure but those who aren’t connected with you; may like your work that much that they end up “FOLLOWING” you to receive future posts helping you create a following of raving fans for years to come!!

My blog post results so far:

• Appeared on the homepage of LinkedIn four times now
• Reached over 128,000 blog views and 1000 comments
• Shared more than 20,193 times
• Generated over 430 leads
• Increased my following by an extra 2,300

Here’s a screenshot of a few articles I’ve written:

image: http://cdn.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/linkedin-posts.png.png

How to know if you’ve been approved to publish

To know whether or not you’ve been approved to start publishing content, simply go into your LinkedIn account. If you’ve been approved there will be a grey pencil icon on the status box at the top of your home page as illustrated within the image to your right.

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/approved-publishing-on-linkedin.png.png

If this pencil icon is not displayed, it means that they have not rolled out the publishing feature to your account. Not to worry, simply email their customer service team and request an upgrade to your profile so you can start publishing on LinkedIn.

Publishing your blog is real easy

Simply go to the home page of your account, hover over the pencil icon I showed you earlier. When you do this it will reveal the text “create a post.”

Once you’ve clicked on the link, it will then direct you to a page where you will see a blank blog post ready for you to populate with your headline and main copy.

Start by thinking about your headline! Make sure it’s short, sharp and compelling. Once you have your headline figured out, go ahead and write your copy. I find generally anywhere between 500-700 words is a good length.

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/publishing-platform.png.png

Given that any content you publish on LinkedIn is going to be associated with your profile (and be visible to your network), you will want to ensure that the content you publish on LinkedIn is of the highest quality. Your LinkedIn profile, after all, is your professional online identity. That means your reputation is at stake. Don’t publish anything that could jeopardize or harm your reputation.

Plus the better the content and the more compelling your headline, LinkedIn may end up featuring your article on one of the categories within the “Pulse” network or better yet feature it on the home page giving you visibility to over 300 million members worldwide.

Six tips to implement before publishing

Here are the top tips to create and publish a killer article on LinkedIn.

1. Best dates and times: Generally I have found Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday morning between 8 a.m.-9 a.m. is the best times to post. I should note that these times are based on EST, you may want to test out your own time zone to see what works well for you.

2. Importance of quality content: I touched on this briefly before but the better and more valuable your content the greater impact you will make on your existing and new followers.

3. Preview your content: Before publishing your post always make sure to preview your work. This will allow you to see whether or not your text are aligned with any pictures or videos you have inserted, if heading are properly spaced out, and if your article is properly laid out, etc.

4. Include videos & images: Break up your text with images and videos so that people don’t get information overwhelm when they first visit your blog. Always make it a habit of listing a few tips or provide a how to guide within a section of the blog. Most people will skim through your article, so this is a great way to provide quick rich content.

5. Ask questions: Doing this demonstrates your genuine interest in feedback. It also makes it an interactive opportunity that encourages participation. Simple questions like “do you agree?” or “how have you seen this done?” are a call to action that can start the ball rolling.

6. Check the analytics: LinkedIn gives you great analytics to show you the success of your articles. This gives you a great opportunity to pay attention to which types of articles are getting the most views, comments, and social shares.

Following the same suggestions listed above, below is a screenshot of a blog I wrote on LinkedIn. Within 1 hour, it was featured on the home page and stayed as the top story within the “Entrepreneurship & Small Business” category of LinkedIn’s Pulse network for an entire day helping me reach over 9,000 views and over 100 comments.

Now that you know what steps are required to start blogging on LinkedIn, hopefully its inspired you to get your next article out there for the whole world to read.

You never know, you’re post may start that conversation with your next investor or business partner; it may get you noticed by others in your company or industry and help enhance your reputation as a thought leader. But most of all, it may simply help others.

Whether you’ve just written your first post or have a few under your belt. I’d be interested to know what strategies you’ve implemented on LinkedIn to grow your following and engagement with that audience.

http://www.business2community.com/linkedin/6-tips-create-publish-killer-article-linkedin-01153304

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LeadPages Webinar - If you’re a marketer or business owner, you must watch it

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