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5 Quick and Easy Ways to Use Social Media to Build Your Email List

Email marketing is huge and likely will be for many years to come. In fact, in Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s recently released 2015 State of Marketing Report, 73 percent of 5,000 marketers agreed that email marketing is core to their businesses and 60 percent went so far as to say that it was a “critical enabler” of their products and services, an 18 percent increase over 2014.

Here are five quick and easy ways that you can use social media to build not just a large, but a highly targeted and engaged email list.

1. Integrate your email service with your Facebook page.

Most major email service providers will have an app that allows you to collect emails right from within your Facebook page. These apps will let you have a fully functional email opt-in form, and your fans will never even have to leave Facebook.

Related: 8 Social Media Mistakes That Are Killing Your Brand

Your fans will simply need to click on the tab underneath your cover photo to access the form. As always, it’s a good idea to offer something of value here rather than just asking your fans to sign up for your list.

2. Hold a contest.

Hold a contest that makes handing over a valid email address an entry requirement. Try to choose a prize that only your target audience would care about, otherwise you could end with a whole lot of subscribers who really don’t care about your business. A strategically designed contest can yield amazing results.

To increase interest in my annual social media live event, Social Boom, I ran a Facebook contest where the winner would receive an “All Access Pass” to the event. Within 48 hours I had more than 800 entries, each one willing to give me their email address in exchange for their entry.

The best part is that these are not just “any” email subscribers. They are interested in social media or they would have not entered a contest to win a free ticket to a social media event.

There are a lot of great, low-cost apps out there that make it quick and easy to build your own Facebook contest.

3. Use Twitter to reach more followers and build your list.

With it getting harder and harder to reach fans on Facebook without using paid advertising, many (including me!) are finding great success distributing free offers using Twitter. For instance, my free ebook, 23 Quick & Easy Ways to Get More Twitter Retweets, has been downloaded over 10,000 times, resulting in thousands of new email list subscribers, as a result of a continuing series of tweets.

Even more exciting, I do not have to actually be on site to post the tweets. There are tons of tweet schedulers out there. I use Hootsuite for my normal tweet scheduling but, for evergreen content, such as a free offer, I use SocialOomph and build something called a queue reservoir. The software lets me set the times, frequency and campaign duration as well as recycles the tweets for later use. It is about as close to an automated email-building machine as you can get!

Related: How to Get Online Customers to Find You and Trust You

4. Use visual-based content to increase conversions.

Tweets with graphics get way more engagement in the form of “retweets” and “favorites” on Twitter than those that don't. People focus in on and would rather engage with pictures than words. That means greater reach and virality for you and more people clicking on and taking your free offers, newsletter opt-ins, etc., and joining your email list.

This does not just work on Twitter. It also works on Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and most other social media sites.

5. Promote your offers.

Did you know that 42 percent of Facebook fans like a fan page primarily for the discounts and coupons they expect to get there? Facebook offers are a great way for getting your fans to "claim" a discount or coupon. As I discussed above, you can also use offers to give away your free info product.

While you can also promote these via your status updates, using paid Facebook offers gives you an added benefit: those who "claim" your offer get an email with details of the offer. This gets your name and business in front of them -- not just on Facebook -- but in their inbox as well.

While you don’t get access to their email address at this point, you will want to make sure you collect emails on the signup page people are sent to when they claim your offer.

On a recent offer, I spent $200 in Facebook advertising and 488 people claimed the offer. However, I got much more traffic than that because many of those people shared the offer with their fans and friends. The bottom line is I added 1,000 targeted list subscribers in just a few days.

Hopefully you can use one or more of these five quick and easy ways to use social media to help you build your email list.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243011

Aweber vs Getresponse - comparison of the two leading autoresponders in the market.

I think that an auto responder tool is essential for every marketer or business online, the 2 leading tools in the market are Aweber  and  GetResponse.

When you need to decide between the two there is much more than the price to compare, yet if you are just starting to build a list and have less than 1000 subscribers and a tight budget it’s a question you would probably ask yourself.

As I have tried both tools in my lists I can tell you about my experience using the products and in addition to add a general view of the product from other reviews I read about the subject.

LETS START WITH WHAT THE HECK IS AN AUTO RESPONDER

Aweber and Getresponse are both auto-responders  that are used by any business online and email marketers to:

- Hosting and maintain your list of subscribers

- Create newsletters and broadcast to your lists of subscribers in the schedule you define up to one year in advance.

- They give you an option of dividing the email marketing campaigns for different niches, for new subscribers and for subscribers already listed for a while.

- convert blog post to email

- split test

- track subscribers activity , how many subscribers opened the email how many clicked the link and how many purchase the product.

- good support and large knowledge base - you can get in touch by phone chat or email in case you need help.

- integration - good integration with 3rd party tools as this is the leading product in the market for a reason.

 

PRICE COMPARISON

GetResponse is cheaper than Aweber  if you are a newbie and your list of subscribers include less than 1000 people GetResponse lets you start your marketing journey from $15.

Aweber will charge you $19 for a 500 list of subscribers but  $29: for 25,000 people.

For experience marketers with a large list of subscribers the differences are small. As with both systems you get a discount if you sign-up for a year

GetResponse  will usually be cheeper at least until you have 25k subscribers

• Aweber will also charge you for anybody who unsubscribes while GetResponse won’t.

TEMPLATES

Aweber’s templates look a bit better than Getresponse  but as I don’t use the templates It’s very hard for me to be objective

Getresponse’s templates look fine and are easily to amend.

Aweber’s templates are slightly more visually appealing but overall there is not much of a difference in the complexity and the design.

KEY FEATURES

Getresponse and Aweber offer a similar feature set, the key features being:

•Ability to capture data and host mailing lists (you get a little bit of HTML code that you can insert on your site or social media profiles to capture email addresses)

• A wide range of predesigned e-newsletter templates

• Autoresponder functionality which allows you to send automated e-newsletters at pre-defined intervals to subscribers after they sign up

• Statistics on the percentage of subscribers that are opening your emails, clicking links or unsubscribing

• RSS to e-newsletter functionality (useful for automatically sending your blog posts to subscribers on your mailing list)

• Easy-to-use message builders that allow you to create and edit e-newsletters without coding

• Integration with various third-party sites/tools (for example, online shopping services such as Amazon Payments, Paypal  and Google Checkout or CRM tools like Capsule and Salesforce) - this allows you to add customers to mailing lists at the point of sale, for example, or use Aweber and Getresponse to send e-newsletters to customers on your CRM system.

• Responsive email templates.

IMPORTING DATA

Both GetResponse  and Aweber allow this feature and I couldn’t fault any of them for not doing the job properly.

INTEGRATION WITH OTHER SYSTEMS

Aweber  still does better job than Getresponse is in its integration with third party sites and tools, they  both tools offer  good  integrations with other sites and tools such as Paypal, Amazon Payments , leadpages but  many  Getresponse integrations involve setting up an additional adapter to complete the functions.

LANDING PAGE CREATION- Optin Pages.

Landing pages or 'squeeze pages' or sometimes called “optin pages” are web pages designed to capture your name and email address.

They typically contain a form, some decent images and a small amount of text spelling out the benefit of submitting your email address - it's generally better to use landing pages for online ad campaigns over a form that sits on your website, simply because they are optimized for capturing data (as they contain less content to distract users).

Getresponse gives you  a landing page creator out of the box, that allows you to make use of 100+ templates and a drag and drop editor to create a great landing pages. To do similar things with Aweber, you would need third party tools, or to hire a designer to code your landing page – this is a tedious task.

.Free trials

The closest you get to a free trial in Aweber, is a $1 trial ,Getresponse, on the other hand, give you a 30 day free trial and  no  credit card details are required.

WHAT IS THE CONCLUSION?

Both Aweber and Getresponse  are great for marketing email campaigns and maintenance of your lists in some areas one is better than the other but both came along way from the early days of email marketing and indeed it is difficult to say which one is better. If you are a new I would recommend to start with get response as you get 30 days trial and the price is more competitive up to 1000 subscribers. If you are looking for better integration I would go for Aweber as it is currently the leading tool and therefore 3rd party integration is at a click of a button.