85 Ways to Build Your Email List: A Sumo-Sized Guide
Examples, details, and a spreadsheet to help you decide the best way to build your email list.
MAY 10TH, 2016 BY SARAH PETERSON AND SEAN BESTOR
You’ve heard over and over again that email marketing is one of the most profitable marketing platforms available.
You’ve heard that the “money is in the list” and that it’s important to build an engaged following over email.
After all, you own your email list. You can take those emails with you if anything were to happen. But if Facebook decides to ban you or you get locked out of your Twitter account, game over. You lose your following.
So you know you can’t afford to ignore your email list. But how do you grow your list from scratch?
Well, Sean, Noah, Wilson and I put our heads together to come up with 85 ways to do just that.
In fact, we listed every single available way to grow your email list so you don’t have to do any guesswork.
This list is gigantic, though. So instead of reading every single method and trying to figure out where to start:
GET OUR EMAIL GROWTH TACTICS SPREADSHEET
This spreadsheet has every list building strategy, ranking them on the difficulty, cost, and potential impact for each plus a guide to help you choose which strategy to tackle first.
Oh, and before you dive in…
If you can think of a way to grow your email list that we missed, please leave a comment below and we’ll add it to the list with a link to your site to show our appreciation!
Ways To Grow Your Email List:
On Your Website
Through Your Products
On Social Media
Through Online Community Platforms
On Other Sites
Through Interesting Content
Your Email Newsletter
Let’s dive in!
On Your Website
Create a Landing Page
If Snapple made a drink for marketers, here’s what the first fact would be:
Companies with 40+ landing pages get 12 times more leads than those with 5 or less.
Mas landing pages, por favor.
Seriously, landing pages are one of the most proven ways to build your list. They’re pages whose sole purpose is to accomplish one action — be it a purchase, a share or, for our case, a sign up.
When you’re asking for an email address, you’re usually giving something away called acontent upgrade. These upgrades can be e-books, guides, videos or any piece of valuable content you don’t generally give away.
These landing pages generally stand out on their own — they’re not accessible through your main navigation. You use landing pages in very specific ways (some people create a landing page for every banner ad they create).
You can create a landing page a few different ways.
Custom Code A Landing Page
Takes time. Takes know-how. Takes money. If you have the resources to build a custom landing page then more power to you. Laugh at us mere mortals from atop your cushy perches.
For the rest of us, let’s move on.
Static Welcome Mat Landing Page
You can use Welcome Mat to instantly set up a landing page within a few minutes.
Here’s an example of a Welcome Mat landing page. Everything is succinct and to the point: the headline promises a supplement course in exchange for your email address.
All you do is create a page on your website, create a Welcome Mat landing page and then assign the Welcome Mat to that page you created
Viola! Instant landing page without any coding knowledge.
Email Service Provider Landing Page
Same school-of-thought as the Welcome Mat but it comes courtesy of your email service provider (ESP).
By ESP I mean services like MailChimp, AWeber, Active Campaign and more. Generally these services have their own way to create a landing page, but they call it a “signup form.”
They’re the more basic of the options as far as landing pages go. What you’re doing is creating a page then embedding a signup form directly into the body of the page.
The biggest advantage to this method is that you’ll be forced to create a list in your ESP that the form will be tied to. That guarantees you’ll be segmenting your list for future campaigns (that’s a good thing).
Landing Page Software
This is the option you have to pay for, but it also comes with the most flexibility in what kinds of landing pages you can create.
Places like Leadpages, UnBounce and Instapage give you tons of pre-built landing pages where you just fill in your information. You then activate those pages by giving them a URL from your own site.
No coding required on these, either. But you do have to pay for these services, so keep that in mind as you choose how to build your landing page.
Your Home Page
15%.
From January to April 2016, that’s the percent of our entire site’s page views that come from the home page.
The next closest page? 6%.
If I had to guess, that’s how your site looks, too. The majority of your visits most likely come to your home page.
And why shouldn’t they? It’s one of the most important pages on your site. It’s the storefront window into your business. Once they hit your home page, 86% of your visitors are likely to view more about your product or services.
So if your home page is where the action happens, you’ll want to make sure you’re absolutely capturing email addresses while those visitors are curious.
Home Page Sign Up Box
If someone is on your home page, chances are they’ve heard of you and they’re (at the very least) curious about your brand. In most cases, they view you as an authority and want to see how you can help them.
You can build on that curiosity and authority by asking the visitor for their email address right away:
Here’s what Brian Dean of Backlinko does to build his list. The very first thing you see on his home page is an opportunity to sign up for traffic tips.
Since Brian is a freaking wizard at the art of backlinking, this is a powerful ask right away. He’s giving his visitors the opportunity to get his proven SEO and traffic tips.
Since the first fold is the most-viewed section of a page, Brian ensures that 100% of his home page traffic has the chance to sign up.
Home Page Welcome Mat
But maybe you’re happy with your current home page design. Or, like many people, your home page is set and it’d be a huge hassle to redesign and recode your home page.
If that’s the case, there’s an easy solution that takes two minutes to set up and delivers the exact same results — all without having to change a single thing on your homepage.
It’s called Welcome Mat and it’s going to be your new list-building life saver.
With Welcome Mat, you can turn your home page (or any page) into an instant list-building opportunity. Here’s how Clickminded uses Welcome Mat on their home page:
When you land on their home page you’re instantly bumped up to the Welcome Mat. Now Clickminded doesn’t have to change their home page — they’ve instantly got a lead-generating page that 100% of visitors see.
Everything on the page is customizable — the background, headline, subheadline, forms, call to action and even button color. And you can change it all without ever touching a single line of code.
The cool part is you can present this page two ways:
Scrollable: Once the visitors sees this page they can simply scroll past it and see your normal landing page. Once they do that, though, the Welcome Mat disappears and is inaccessible.
Instant Landing Page: If you want to force a choice, however, you can turn this page into an instant landing page. In order to get to your home page, the visitor either gives you their email address or clicks the “No Thanks” button. We’ve seen this option double conversion rates.
Welcome Mat helps you reap all the benefits of a list-building home page without ever actually changing your home page.
Home Page Smart Bar
If those last two options didn’t entice you, then this one 100% will.
The last option you can try on your home page is something called a Smart Bar. If you don’t want to change your first fold — or you don’t want to send visitors to a Welcome Mat — then you can use this extremely unintrusive tool.
A Smart Bar simply sits at the top of a browser no matter where you scroll. Here’s how IzzyStyle used it to build her list:
It looks as natural as anything else on the site and still provides tremendous value.
By subscribing to her list, visitors can get exclusive deals and 10% off everything forever.
Smart Bar takes a few minutes to install and it leaves the rest of your page open to featuring your products and services.
Create a Popup
And no, we’re not talking about VH1’s Pop Up Video series.
A popup is a window that appears in the foreground of your web page. They can be a full page takeover, a mid-screen popup.
They may seem annoying, but they work like crazy. We’ve seen SumoMe users harness popups to increase conversions by over 60%!
You don’t have a lot of room to work with in a popup, so you have to get your point across quickly and efficiently. A great headline, a description and a call to action are your carriers for this method.
Set an Exit Intent Popup
If someone’s decided to leave your page, then that’s that. There’s nothing you can do to get them to come back.
Or is there?
An exit intent popup is a last-ditch effort to get your visitor to interact with your site.They’re already leaving, so it’s this popup’s job to salvage the situation and collect an email address.
You can see the popup appear as the cursor moves to close the page. You want people to stop and read the box, so your headline needs to be catchy and give them a reason to stay.
You can give away a great deal, an extremely valuable piece of content or anything else you think might prompt a visitor to give their email address. If you nail this, it means you’ve turned a disinterested visitor into a potential customer.
Use a tool like List Builder to easily create a popup on any of your pages.
Use a Timed Popup
If you know how long the average person stays on any of your pages, you can create a timed popup to capture their address.
Since visitors usually stay eight seconds on this page, the popup timer is set to five seconds to guarantee the maximum amount of impressions possible. Scroll Box is a great tool to execute this type of popup.
If you put this on a blog post, you can set it to a longer period of time (30+ seconds) to give the reader enough time to be invested in the post.
Trigger a Percent Page Read Popup
Since we know only 20% of readers get to the bottom of your page, you can create a popup that appears at a certain section of your page.
By using Scroll Box, you can input a certain page percentage for the popup to appear. So if you read your Content Analytics and saw this:
You’d see that only 67% of visitors made it 10% through your page. So that means A) You need to write a better introduction or B) You’d want to put your popup at the 8% mark.
Here’s an example of a popup at the 20% mark (where most visitors started dropping off on the guide):
With the percent page read popup you guarantee you’re asking for emails at the most opportune moment.
Use a Static Signup Form
Chances are you’ve seen these quite a bit on most blogs you visit:
It’s a static email opt in box and it scrolls with you wherever you are on the post. Readers only have two places to look with this tactic:
The blog post
The signup box
That’s it. The logic behind this tactic is if the signup box follows you down the page (without interrupting your reading) then you have that implicit, subtle nudge to opt in the entire read.
Not only that, but it’s easily accessible. If you feel like the blog post provides value then you can opt-in for that content upgrade at any point.
It doesn’t have to be a content upgrade, either. It can be a simple ask to sign up for a newsletter:
This sort of ask is enhanced by the article it accompanies. You’re not just asking to sign up for a newsletter. You’re asking to sign up for a newsletter so you get more badass content like the kind they’re reading.
Through Your Products
Yup! You can collect email addresses through your products, too. Here’s every strategy available for doing just that.
Email Your Customers a Receipt
Any time you’re collecting your customer’s email addresses, you have an opportunity to build your email list.
Have you ever been to Nordstrom or Best Buy and are asked for your email address so you can receive an electronic copy of your receipt?
Those stores then put you on their email lists. Yeah, you’ve probably noticed.
If you have a physical product, give your customers this option to both make their lives a bit easier (paper receipts are a pain) and to build your email list.
People are frequently less hesitant to give up their email address when they’re buying something.
Include an Email Field in Your Checkout Process
If you have an eCommerce store, you have a great opportunity to ask for email addresses from your customers in the checkout process.
If you’re not collecting your customer’s email addresses, you’re missing an opportunity to get in front of a highly engaged portion of your market.
Think about it – they’re already going through the motions to purchase something from you. Chances are, they would also like to know about discounts, new products and updates through your email list.
Usually you can integrate your cart with your email service provider (like Aweber or MailChimp) to automate the collection and enrollment in autoresponder series.
SumoMe customers Malkin & Toad include an email field in their checkout process:
You can include a checkbox so your customer is giving you permission to email them, or just let them know in your call to action what they’ll receive when they enter their email addresses.
Give a Discount in Exchange for an Email Address
Ah, good ol’ fashioned bribery.
Luckily, this strategy is ethical bribery, and it’s really effective. Instead of creating an opt-in offer (or maybe in tandem!), offer a discount or coupon code in exchange for the visitor’s email address.
SumoMe customer Kerning Wear does this with a 15% discount in their List Builder popup:
Simply set up your app to redirect to a page with a coupon code after the customer enters their email address (or send it to them in your autoresponder through email if you want to ensure they confirm their subscription). Here’s how (same instructions apply toList Builder, Welcome Mat, and Scroll Box):
Give a Freebie in Exchange for an Email Address
Maybe your products don’t lend themselves well to discounts.
For example, if you have a small profit margin or the discount wouldn’t be enticing enough to draw in much interest.
In this case, you can still reap the benefits of ethical bribery: give a freebie in exchange for the visitor’s email address.
Sumo Jerky has grown their email list by offering free bags of jerky in exchange for an email address:
Free jerky is a high value offer, so it’s a great trade.
Pre-Sell A Product
Most people make the mistake of waiting until a product is finished and ready to sell before they unveil it.
Don’t be most people.
If you’ve got a product idea, make it work for you before it ever makes a single dollar by pre-selling.
Pre-selling has been around for a while but started picking up traction as SaaS companies rose to the forefront. Since then it’s been a staple for collecting email addresses AND creating hype for a new product.
The cool thing is SaaS folks refined it so anyone with a product can use a pre-sell strategy to build a list.
Pre-selling works like this:
Brainstorm possible products you can create.
Vet those ideas by asking your existing customers what product they’d like best.
Put together the framework for the product they want most.
Create a landing page for that product describing what it is, what it will do and when it’ll be available.
Collect emails (and potentially money) by putting people on a waiting list.
You’d be surprised how many people want to “Be the first to know when this product goes live” or “Get updates on the product.”
It doesn’t take much more than a one-fold landing page to pre-sell something. All you need is a headline that promised a product, a paragraph or two saying what it is and a call to action that asks for an email address.
Being the first person to hear about or have a product is a huge motivator. Turn that motivation into email addresses with pre-selling.
Put a Gated Entrance to Paid Product
Warning: you need a legit, no-frills product that people really want in order for this to work.
If you don’t, move on to the next tip.
If you do, though, then this tip will be killer.
It’s already hard enough to entice someone to buy an online course. But check out what Ramit Sethi does with his Zero to Launch course:
You can’t just buy his course (currently). He uses copy to entice you, then you sign up to get an email explaining more about the course.
It’s a way of separating out the serious students from the “ho-hum” ones. You can’t justbuy this course. You’ve got to sign up for it, and he responds back if he wants you to buy it.
By putting the course behind an email gate, Ramit collects emails for future use and builds up the prestige of his course at the same time.
If you’ve got a product that can generate that kind of want, then this could be a game-changing tip for your business.
Set Up a Closed Course Signup
Speaking of courses, there’s another way to capture emails on top of making money. The mechanics are the same, but the presentation certainly isn’t — which makes all the difference.
If you don’t know Joanna Wiebe, take a minute and educate yo’self. She’s a conversion copywriter extraordinaire, and she has a popular copywriting course that, to quote Larry David, is prettyyyy….pretty good.
She also asks for an email address to join the class. But hers is subtly different from Ramit’s page.
Ramit asks for an email so you get more information on the course.
Joanna asks for an email so you can be notified first when the course opens.
With Ramit, you can get the course anytime (provided you get an email back). That’s a gate for prestige-sake.
With Joanna, you have a limited window each month to get the course. So her ask is for you to sign up to make sure can secure a spot.
Both ultimately collect emails. It’s just a different way of presenting the availability.
Host an Event
Settle down. This isn’t a multi thousand person event like what HubSpot puts on every year.
Let’s focus on smaller events. See, the easiest way to collect and manage registrations is through Eventbrite. That’s a universal truth.
You know what they ask for during the registration process? An email address.
You know what happens after a registrant give their email address? It gets automatically passed off to a list in your email service provider.
Pretty. Freaking. Slick.
So your event doesn’t have to be big! You just have to host something that provides value to a community. “Existential Musings on the Plight of Harry Potter If He Played In the NFL?” Hey, people would sign up for it.
And you’d collect their email addresses. You can initially use those to communicate about the event, but you can transition those emails into marketing other products and events of your choice.
Plus you get the added bonus of strengthening the relationships at the event. If you host a killer event then you better believe those attendees will be more likely to interact with you in the future.
Host a Regular Meetup
A meetup is like an event but on a smaller scale and more frequent. It’s still a community of like-minded people, but these meetups offer the chance to have deeper discussion about certain topics.
There’s a site called Meetup.com that lists all the possible meetups in a given area. Just look how many meetups there are in the Minneapolis, MN area:
In order to join any of these meetups you have to provide an email address:
That email address is passed on to whomever runs the meetup.
Search Meetups.com for any gaps in your specific area or profession. Once you find one, create the group and market it. After a while you’ll see more and more people join, which means more contacts for your list.
Speak At An Event
Why do most people speak at an event?
Maybe it’s to get notoriety for a cause. Maybe it’s to gain awareness or sell a product. Or maybe it’s because they were paid serious bucks to be there.
But there’s another thing you can do on top of all those things. You can collect email addresses while you’re giving your presentation.
Two big ways come to mind. First, Leadpages has SMS text opt-ins. All you do is assign a keyword to a shortcode (33444) and people can opt-in to a list via their phone.
You can give that number out during your presentation on a slide or verbally and let people opt-in as you talk.
The other way is to throw a URL on a slide. You can create a page on your site and useWelcome Mat’s instant landing page feature to turn that blank page into a landing page.
If you promise a resource during your talk, you can send the audience to that page to instantly download it.
This is a powerful strategy because the social pressure is MASSIVE. Not only do you have an authoritative speaker prompting you to download a free thing, but you’ve got people around you actually opting in.
That combo makes collecting emails at an event a strategy too good to pass up.
Manually Add Emails of Customers
Now, this method of growing your email list through your customers isn’t necessarily one I’d recommend.
Why?
Well, because *it’s sort of against the rules. *
But we want to make sure to bring you the most comprehensive list of ways to grow your email list on the internet, and that includes some methods that you have to approach with caution.
In this strategy, you’re manually adding the emails of your customers to your email service provider, if your shopping cart platform doesn’t allow you to add a email collection field in your checkout process.
For example, with Etsy you aren’t able to collect email addresses of your customers. With this method, you’d pull their email address from the order page under the Buyer info (like below) and manually import it into your provider:
If you use this method, make sure it’s easy for the person to opt-out of their subscription – and know that you’ll likely get a higher level of complaints from this method as well.
Ask On The Phone
Be it a sales call, a customer support call or any call, you can ask people to sign up for a newsletter.
Or maybe it’s a course. Or an e-book. If you’ve got a valuable piece of content, just ask people to sign up for it.
It’s as simple as asking this at the end of a call:
“Oh, by the way, you’re on the newsletter list, right? No? Well you get a bunch of free stuff and discounts when we mail out, and it’s no more than once a week. No worries, I can just sign you up here, what’s your email?”
Boom. Just like that, on a call you were already having, you got a signup.
Old School Pen and Paper Sign Up
We’re kickin’ it back to some old school hustle with this tip.
Say you’re a marketer at somewhere like Bonnaroo where the cell service is spotty at best. The iPad method of taking down info might not work because you can’t sync up with your form.
So you go old school and whip out the pen and paper for sign ups.
That means tracking people down, maybe offering something and getting their name and email address on that paper. Once you collect those, you can enter them in manually to your ESP.
Post a Link in Your Skype Status
This is a low-hanging fruit and something that can be done in less than 2 seconds:
Post a link to your landing page, along with a call to action with a value proposition in your Skype status just like you did in your social media bios.
This can capture some of your Skype contacts you wouldn’t have otherwise gotten in front of. Use Snip.ly to Add a Call to Action to Any Link You Share If you’ve never heard of Snip.ly, you share content, and you want to grow your email list, you may be missing out.
Snip.ly is a tool that allows you to add a call to action to everything you share. So if you share an article from the Huffington Post on Twitter your call to action appears at the bottom of the screen.
Yes, even if the content you’re sharing is not from your own website. Boss, right? See how I added a call to action to join my free email course from a guest post I wrote onThrilling Heroics?
This is especially effective of course if the content you’re sharing is relevant to your own business, and if you’re sharing it to or with a group of your target audience. If you share highly relevant content on Facebook and your target audience clicks on it from your Snip.ly link, chances are they’ll also be interested in your content and opt-in offers. Use Snip.ly to add calls to action to all of the relevant content you share.
Update Your Email Signature
How many people do you email on a weekly basis?
If you’re a blogger, entrepreneur or solopreneur, chances are you email a lot of people – likely within the dozens every week (if not every day).
Those people are dozens of people you could be driving to your email list. Replace your boring email signature with a call to action to have people sign up for your email list, like Deena from Bulletproof Writing has done:
This is a simple way to convert people who you otherwise would already be communicating with.
Add an Autoresponder Email With a Call to Action
The method above for growing your email list is great for the people you email.
But what about the people who email you?
Well, you can set up a vacation autoresponder to respond to emails with a link back to your landing page.
Write a short email with a call to action sending people to a landing page back to your site. You don’t even have to take this off if you’re not on vacation!
Ask for Referrals from Friends
You know what’s crazy?
Almost all of us have the ability to grow our email lists by hundreds today, but 95% of us will choose not to. Because we “don’t want to bug anybody”.
The thing is, you have a huge group of people who know you, probably at least sort of like you and who would (hopefully) be happy to help you out by recommending or sharing your landing page with your opt-in offer or newsletter with friends who are part of your target audience.
These people are your family and friends, and asking them to share or even forward your CTA to one friend or family member who may be interested is not only one of the most effective and lowest hanging fruits out there for growing your email list, but it’s also the fastest track to a super-engaged list.
Conduct A Survey
Surveys are a dual threat in your bag of list-building tricks:
They help you gain insight into your audience’s psychographics and demographics
They collect email addresses
You’ll have to think of a way to provide value in order for someone to take a survey. You can always ask for free on your social media channels, but when was the last timeyou took a survey just for fun?
Exactly.
You might need to provide an incentive to take the survey. Punch Pizza, an awesome Neapolitan pizza joint in Minneapolis, once offered a free pizza to the first 250 people that took their survey.
The survey was closed 20 minutes after they posted it on Facebook.
I highly recommend using Typeform for your survey needs. Their forms are beautiful and they’re incredibly easy to use.
You can tailor the surveys to provide value to the user like this example. If you want to promote the survey for free, just embed the survey on a blog post and let that act as your call to action.
On Social Media
Include a CTA in Your Social Media Bios
Instead of using your bio on social media to describe who you are, use that valuable real estate to drive followers to sign up for your email list with a compelling call to action.
You can do this on Instagram, Twitter, Vine, Pinterest, or wherever you can include a bio.
Protip: Use the word “free” in the URL of your landing page for the most compelling call to action.
Pin a Tweet with a CTA to Join Your List
On Twitter, you have the ability to “pin” a Tweet to the top of your profile so that it remains static at the top of your page. This is prime real estate on your Twitter profile, as it’s the first Tweet anybody will see when they land on your profile page.
Pin a Tweet with a call to action to get your followers to join your email list, like we’ve done:
View image on Twitter
Follow
SumoMe.com @SumoMe
Join hundreds of thousands of other Sumos to get 20% more traffic in 37 seconds for FREE: http://sumo.ly/iIG8
12:39 PM – 5 May 2016
Retweets
44 likes
Add a Call to Action Post to Your Edgar Library on Twitter
You Tweet out content, thoughts, and notifications of new products. There’s no reason you can’t also Tweet out calls to action to join your email list, like Bridget from Money after Graduation does:
View image on Twitter
Follow
Bridget Eastgaard @beastgaard
Want the best advice to build wealth in your 20’s and 30’s? Sign up here: http://bit.ly/1T2pOZY
4:02 PM – 22 Apr 2016
Retweets
likes
Create a value proposition and add a call to action to your Twitter library on Edgar. Edgar will then rotate through the rest of your library and release the Tweet(s) in intervals.
Your email list will be growing without you even having to think about it!
Do a Call to Action Post on Instagram
Instagram is still a great platform for driving followers to your email list, with a comparatively high level of engagement.
Create an image of your opt-in offer or content upgrade with a call to action in the caption of your post to sign up for your email list.
Daniel DiPiazza from Rich20Something.com has done this to grow his email list significantly:
Protip: Include text over your image that indicates that the link to your offer or landing page is in your bio. Instagram only allows one link and that’s your bio link. You can also tell your followers to copy and paste your link from your caption, too.
Facebook Page Cover Image
Your Facebook page has one piece of prime real estate with the opportunity for a great call to a action to join your email list:
Your cover image.
Replace the image you’re currently using with a call to action to join your list, keeping the URL short and simple so your followers can easily type it into their browsers.
Include an image of your opt-in offer and your URL.
Set Your Facebook Page’s Call to Action Button
On your website’s Facebook page, you have the opportunity to have a call to action button:
Use that opportunity to drive visitors to your page and your Facebook fans to a landing page with button copy calling the visitor to “sign up” or “join”.
Set Your Email Signup Tab on Facebook
You can collect emails straight from Facebook — provided you’ve got an email service provider.
If you do, then you can make a tab on your Facebook page and embed a form to sign up for anything — newsletters, deals, courses, anything.
From Wordstream
GAP uses their page to ask for email signups. It’s a custom page, but you can get something similar using ESPs like Mailchimp, Active Campaign and HubSpot.
Add Regular Call to Action Facebook Posts to your Edgar Library
It’s easy to assume that your Facebook fans are already on your email list, but that’s not necessarily the case.
Liking a Facebook page is a low-commitment action, so a lot of your Facebook fans are just Facebook fans.
Instead of leaving them to just admire your Facebook page, post a call to action to join your email list – either through your opt-in offer or just a call to join your newsletter with a link to your landing page.
Add that post to your Edgar library so you can get in front of more of your fans. After all, not all of your posts end up in their newsfeeds!
Protip: Include an image of your opt-in offer. Studies show that social media posts – particularly on Facebook – perform a lot better when there is an image.
Post in Facebook Groups
You use Facebook. I use Facebook. 98% of the people you know use Facebook.
That means that a gigantic portion of your target audience is also using Facebook, and just like there’s a support group for almost everything (can anyone recommend a good gelato addiction support group?) there is also a Facebook group for everything under the sun.
Posting high value posts that link to my opt-in offer is how I grew my list with my initial 200 subscribers, who then helped me grow my list on Unsettle to where it is now (around 9,000).
If done in a value-added way as opposed to spamming, this can be a great way to grow your list with a group of highly engaged members of your target audience.
Always give more than you take and remember to add value before you post your opt-in offer.
Start a Subscribers-Only Facebook Group
Facebook Groups have a ton of benefits for your business, but they can also grow your email list.
Create a private Facebook Group with the entry requirement that you need to be a subscriber of your email list to join.
You can include that criteria in your group description. As your group grows, so will your email list – the larger the number, the more social proof, and the more people will want to be a part of it.
Post in Google+ Communities
It’s true that Google+ is on its way out, but Google+ Communities can still be active and engaged.
Join some relevant Google+ Communities in your industry or niche and engage with the members and the content for a bit before writing a blurb about your opt-in offer or newsletter and a link to your landing page.
If you’re adding value, most members won’t mind – and some might even find it useful.
Although the communities on Google+ are more like feeds, it’s still important to give more than you take, just like with Facebook groups. Add value first, and make it so signing up for your email list is a no-brainer.
Add a Link to Your Landing Page on LinkedIn
Create a compelling call to action and include a link to your landing page directly in your LinkedIn profile in your “experience” section:
LinkedIn will import the image from the landing page, allowing you to display your call to action in a visual format as well.
This can convert visitors of your LinkedIn profile.
Share in LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn Groups work much like Facebook Groups, Google+ Communities and any other community based platform.
Join active groups in your industry:
Then, contribute and add value to the group members before sharing your opt-in offer or call to action to join your email list.
Export Your Linkedin Contacts
You know all those people you’re connected with on Linkedin?
You can grab every single one of their email addresses in 15 seconds.
Count it down:
Viola! In 15 seconds you get a CSV file with name, job title and email address in one neat package.
Here’s what you do:
Hover over “My Network” and click “Connections”
Click the grey gear in the right side of the page
Go to the far right column and click “Export Linkedin Connections”
Click the “Export” button
But don’t add them to a list just yet. Send a personal email asking them if they want to join your list. Adding without permission is a huge no-no, so take the time to follow up with everyone to make sure it’s ok.
Create a YouTube Video CTA
Two ways you can build your list from YouTube calls to action.
First, you can add a callout link over top the video:
They’ve got a call to action at the bottom of their video to see more from Callaway. That link leads to a page where they collect email addresses to update subscribers with Callaway info.
Second, they include links in the description of every video:
Talk about overchoice. Still, if you focus on one call to action in your description — preferably to a newsletter signup — then you increase your odds of a subscription.
Pin Your Call to Action to Your Own Board on Pinterest
Besides adding a call to action to join your list in your bio, there is another way to drive subscribers from Pinterest.
Create a Pinnable image for your newsletter or landing page and Pin to a relevant board with a link directly to your landing page
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Use a tool like Canva to create the image, and collect email addresses from there.
Pin Your Call to Action to A Group Board on Pinterest
It’s true that Pinterest can be a highly engaged platform and can drive a lot of traffic, and this is even more true with group boards.
Group boards are contributed to by groups of people and tend to have huge followings – usually tens of thousands of people.
How would you like to get your content upgrade, opt-in offer or call to action in front of 30,000+ members of your target audience?
That’s what I’m doing when I contribute my own content to this group board I am part of:
Become a contributor to the popular group boards in your industry and then contribute not your Pinnable image, but also other relevant content. You don’t want to only contribute your own calls to action.
Protip: Use Pingroupie.com to find relevant group boards.
Start Your Own Group Pinterest Board
See how the call to action in the group Pinterest board above is to follow the owner of the board and email her to join?
As more people catch on to the power of group boards, and request to contribute to the board, Michelle’s (the owner) following will grow. You can grow your email list too by creating a group board, and instead of asking potential contributors to follow you, make it a prerequisite for the contributors to subscribe to your email list.
Social Monitoring
And this is deep social monitoring. The kind that can take some time, but has a tremendous 1-to-1 impact.
Here’s how you pull this beast off:
1. Pick Your Blog’s Most Important Keywords
I’m talking about keywords that the majority of your best blogs address. If you’re an SEO agency, you might pick keywords like “rank on first page” or “better SEO.”
2. Find Your Highest-Converting Blog Posts
Pretty straightforward here. Pick out the blog posts that are most successful at converting visitors into subscribers.
3. Set Up A Hootsuite Account
I use Hootsuite, but you can use any other keyword-monitoring tool you like. Once you’re in there, you set up keyword monitoring:
4. Listen and Respond
From there you check in and respond to relevant tweets. I’m just using Twitter but you can certainly use Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or any other medium you want.
Once you see a post that is relevant to your list of blog posts, reply with a link to that post and why it’s helpful.
It’s a grind, but if you’re starting out with no audience or site visitors then this is a great way to leverage built-in audiences.
Through Online Community Platforms
Share a Opt-in Offer on Reddit
Be careful with this one, because Reddit can be a sink or swim environment. Redditors can be… well, they can be dicks. Let’s call it like it is.
But, if your opt-in offer is extremely high value (as it should be) and your call to action is compelling and contributory, sometimes you can get away with this. To increase the chances of Reddit success, try commenting on relevant posts and using permission marketing techniques.
For example, after writing the benefits of your website, you want to ask for permission to share the link to your website.
After a few Redditors start asking for the link to your website, you should edit your original post to include a link. Reddit is a great source of high converting traffic, just take a look at the conversion rates and email subscribers from ONE comment that made it to the top.
When Reddit works, it really works and can send thousands of engaged members of your target audience to through your link.
Answer Questions on Quora
Here’s the thing. Quora ranks.
As in, the questions people ask on Quora can rank just as high (or higher) on search engines than a 3k word blog post you wrote.
People respect great answers on Quora, too. Look how many views an answer from Wilson Hung had in the span of three months:
Just one of his answers was viewed 21,000 times in three months!
2% of that traffic visits his blog. And you better believe that answer had links to a blog post with a content upgrade in it.
Think of Quora as a free, highly-tailored advertising medium. You’re essentially leading people to areas on your site that build your email list.
Most good answers on Quora are long, detailed and rich with knowledge. Find a question that one of your high-converting blog posts can answer and use that information.
Pretty soon, the traff
