A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Powerful List of Emails

Building a list of emails is a vital part of an overall online marketing strategy to fully engage your visitors and convert this interested audience into leads. Probloggers, online marketers, and businesses use this strategy on their websites and blogs to bridge the gap with their prospective customers.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to build a list of emails using a variety of tools to get your internet marketing business off the ground. So if you don’t already know, you’ll soon realize just how important an email list is.

Email marketing is a proven strategy for converting leads into paying customers, which is why top bloggers and marketing influencers are forever teaching and preaching email marketing.

Have you noticed that after every Google Algorithm Update SEOs and Online Marketing experts start focusing on email list building?

This happens because they know that even if you lose your google ranking and your traffic decreases, there’s still a chance that your online business will survive if you have a powerful list of emails.

However, it’s not that simple. You can’t just start building a list of emails and expect that your business will be profitable in a matter of days—-that’s not how it works.

3 Key Components of Successful Email List Building

The following three components of successful email list building will ensure that you collect relevant leads for your business in order to successfully convert them into paying customers:

1. An Appealing Deal

Your offer matters in your email marketing efforts because the subscriber wants to see what he or she is getting in the first place. Different brands and experts use different tactics. Some of them rely on creating interesting and valuable articles and then try to capture leads through their content; others offer different eBooks, whitepapers, or free downloads to attract subscribers.

2. Content Structure and Quality

One of the most important components of email list building is the quality of the content and how well your message is constructed to transfer your helpful and useful information to your readers. Whenever you provide high-quality advice to your subscribers in a structured way, they definitely get the benefit, and you might gain even more traction through word-of-mouth marketing as a result.

3. Choosing the Right Audience

Your work will all be in vain if you don’t know who to target and why you need to target them. The selection of the right audience is key. You should be clear who you need to reach to offer help and useful material to. You can’t offer money making guidelines to the audience on a nutrition blog.

Steps to Building a Powerful List of Emails

list of emails

Take a look at the following steps to start building a powerful list of emails:

Step #1 – Use a Variety of Publishing Platforms

Publishing platforms often attract new readers to your blog and ultimately help you to grow your email list. WordPress is a popular blogging software and content management system for running blogs and websites. It’s recommended that you use this self-hosted platform rather than any free publishing alternatives, such as WordPress.com, Tumblr, and Blogger.

When you have your site or blog ready and in place, then try to develop a publishing schedule to post your new content once or twice a week.

LinkedIn Pulse is another publishing platform which allows you to post your articles on the LinkedIn Network. LinkedIn is a popular professional networking website that connects professionals across the globe. Publish relevant content to LinkedIn Pulse using your LinkedIn account and you’ll be sure to reach more people.

Medium is also a free publishing platform that allows you to publish your articles and grow your audience by using call-to-action strategies in your content and byline.

Step #2 – Create a Suitable Content Plan

Publishing your content without a content strategy is a waste of time and energy. Develop a plan to systematically publish your content in order to reach the best audience. To understand the concept of a content plan, just keep the following things in mind:

• Who is your target audience?
• Why should they read your content?
• How can you help them?
• What are the essential elements you need to deliver?

It’s essential to keep the visitors engaged and never let them think of going off the hook. Once you start feeding them useful information + free resources + great tools, you will find loyalty in your audience.

Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator is a great tool for bloggers and online marketers to generate blog post titles. Once you have a catchy and attractive blog post title, half of the job is done. ContentIdeator is another useful blog post idea generator.

Step #3 – Develop a Social Media Sharing Strategy

Social Media success is all about sharing useful content, interacting with fans/friends and contributing to the social community. However, you’ll find that most people struggle with their social media strategy.

Always remember these three things:

1. a) – It’s not a short-term strategy.
2. b) – You should deliver more and expect less.
3. c) – Always be polite and humble.

Social media engagement is an art — It’s full of mind science, the more you contribute to your community and friends, the more you get popularity and acceptability.

It certainly takes years to develop a following on Social Media – You have to be consistent with your appearance, sharing, and valuing others in order to get their attention.

The success sauce of social media doesn’t revolve around just social ethics, care, and love.

You’ve got to be ready to use some great tools out there in order to make yourself up for the challenge.

Buffer is one of the best social media sharing tools out there. It helps everyone to connect their Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest accounts and share the content collectively within a matter of seconds.

ViralContentBuzz is a paid social media sharing tool that can help any business or blog to reach a larger audience through content sharing. The user can buy credits which are used to share the content they choose to promote. Currently, ViralContentBuzz supports Twitter, Facebook, Stumbleupon, and Pinterest.

In addition, you can use Tweetdeck to boost up your Twitter engagement. This amazing Twitter dashboard tool helps you to get engaged with a relevant audience on Twitter in real-time.

The more your content gets shared, the greater your audience reach, which ultimately means an opportunity to get more subscribers to your email list.

Step #4 – Network with Like-minded People

One of the major reasons why people opt-in to your email list in their ‘Interest‘ in what you’re saying — so when you hang out with people who might be interested in what you’re saying, then you are likely to get their attention, which surely means some of them might go one step further by opting to receive your email newsletter.

Aha-Now is a bloggers community where you can meet the whole spectrum of bloggers, from newbie to highly-experienced. They interact, share their latest articles and visit each other’s blogs. It’s a great platform to start interacting with other bloggers.

Here, you can find plenty of people who will share your content on Facebook and Twitter, and that may end up getting you even more subscribers.

Growthhacker is another content sharing community where online marketers, bloggers, and entrepreneurs share their favorite content from across the web to engage the audience.

A lot of bloggers may not find this community very entertaining or interactive, but once you start to understand this platform, you will force yourself to produce high-quality content in order to engage the influencers.

Step #5 – Create a Community

Community building is one of the hardest things to do, but once you start doing it and you do your best to deliver more passion, help, care and solidarity to the community, you’ll find yourself professionally blessed with so many loyal readers and customers around.

Trust building is a major factor in online businesses.

Once people start trusting you, they are ready to buy from you.

You can use the BuddyPress plugin and premium theme to turn your site into a social media community using the WordPress self-hosted platform. BuddyPress is a social media site plugin from WordPress.

It’s a great way to start building your own community on your blog or website. Meetup is another alternative to BuddyPress to get started with community building.

Besides these tools, you can’t underestimate the power of Facebook Groups and the Google+ Community. It doesn’t really matter where you start building your community; what matters is how well you engage your audience and keep them motivated!

Step #6 – Engage the Visitors Using the Right Tools

Each and every step gets more important when you apply them together – And the significance of every step is amplified when you perform each one to the best of your ability.

So now you have a platform to publish your content on, you’ve designed your content strategy to publish the content, you’ve figured out who to target through your content, you have started getting social on different networks and you’ve already started building your loyal community of readers…

So what’s next?

The next thing is to use the tools that help you engage your audience and boost your chances of maximizing your reach and growing your list of emails.

You can use MailChimp for your email newsletter to send updates to your subscribers. MailChimp offers a free plan which allows 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails each month. Additionally, there are awesome features like automation and in-depth reporting available on their paid plans.

Wishpond is an online marketing toolkit that can help you engage and convert your visitors into subscribers. It’s a lead generation software and an online tool that helps bloggers, brands and entrepreneurs. This tool offers landing pages, social media contests, popups, opt-in boxes, and much more.

Unbounce is another awesome landing page tool that will assist you in lead generation and collecting email addresses on your “Coming Soon” websites and blogs. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can only use this tool for coming soon pages. You can also use Unbounce landing pages for your product launch, as well as for a giveaway.

The core message here is how you can engage with people. You may be able to get visitors from Google AdWords and Facebook Ads, but then what’s next… they might visit your site and just walk away!

That’s something you don’t want.

In order to avoid that, you have to use the right tools to engage these visitors, capture them and bring them into your funnel to educate, entertain, and turn them into paying customers.

For instance, this online tutoring website keeps the user’s data in their record like many other dynamic sites and keeps their online tutors informed about the latest assignments being published in their specific categories.

So, they use this funnel to engage their audience. If this site didn’t have such records or the email addresses of their users, then they wouldn’t be able to re-engage the users ever again.

Step #7 – Offer Occasional Gifts & Takeaways

Nobody hates to receive the occasional gift. Use a giveaway strategy to nurture your lead generation process and fuel up your email list by giving away the things your target audience wants to have.

For example, it’s common practice for bloggers to collect emails. And Bloggers use white papers or e-books on different topics to attract their target audience. Thus, you might want to collect email addresses by offering eBooks on blogging tips and secrets.

It won’t hurt your campaign if you slightly change the deal – You can also offer Premium WordPress themes or Email Templates to your subscribers. Use your chosen landing page service and integrate it with your email marketing service to automatically collect email addresses and deliver the downloadable goods.

What Do You Do Now?

It’s your turn to tell me.

A powerful list of emails doesn’t necessarily mean a list of thousands of people. A 50,000 people list with only a few hundred that are actively opening your email newsletter won’t help you.

I would rather have 5,000 people on my email list who love to open my newsletter, make their replies, click on the links I send them, and purchase the offers I give them than 50,000 people who are inactive and supposedly irrelevant to my business.

What else do you think we should do to build a powerful list of emails?

Got another idea?

Please share. We’re hungry to listen to you because we all want to build our email list here.

About the Author

Hassaan Khan is a blogger and content creator. He helps businesses with their content strategies. He writes his personal blog on content marketing. He loves his dog ‘Milo’ and wants to travel to Finland. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

Featured image:

list of emails

Image courtesy of renjith krishnan at FreeDigitalPhotos.net