An email list is worth its weight in the gold. Once you have a potential customer’s email address, it’s just a matter of driving some great email marketing flows and campaigns to turn them into customers and then repeat customers and then loyal evangelists! You know how that goes.
Sure, you already have an email list made up of your existing customers, but as an ecommerce store you need to constantly keep adding more emails to the list to grow your email revenue. Plus, accounting for the churn of emails due to unsubscribes, you need to backfill. Even so, the excitement for your offers and brilliant campaigns can wear off after a few campaigns on your existing audience base, so you should always be targeting new, fresh subscribers.
But how can you get those fresh subscribers flocking to you consistently? The trick lies in the right timing, right incentive and of course the right strategy depending on your store goal, budget and relevance. Here are some of the ways you can grow your email list, incentivise your website visitors as well as get email signups from non-visitors using some well-known as well as offbeat techniques.
1. Offer a strong discount offer to sign up
Turning visitors into subscribers is at the very top of the email marketing funnel, and these pop-ups are designed to do just that.
This one’s really basic but it’s surprising how many ecommerce stores actually don’t have a welcome pop-up to collect emails. The welcome popup should have an attractive discount coupon to entice even casual visitors to an ecommerce website to submit their email address. They may or may not make an immediate purchase, but with their email in your armour, you can start with the lifecycle of email marketing with them beginning with a welcome flow to campaigns.
2. Use exit intent pop-up forms
Just like a welcome flow at the entry of a user to your website, have an “exit intent” pop up when it looks like the user is going to drop. Klaviyo and many third party apps like Privy allow you to have a custom exit popup enabled on your store, that track the user’s click movements, and the second it looks like the click is hovering towards the “x” or the close sign, the exit popup makes an entrance (!) offering them a special discount or perk if they subscribe to your email list. If you’re successful enough, these forms should land you new potential customers, who could eventually convert after your campaigns drop in their inbox. Here at Hustler Marketing we build our clients’ pop-ups with Klaviyo. They’re astoundingly easy to build and use, and not only that—they provide you with insightful data about your customers. Just make sure to keep your message simple, add a little mystery and, of course, include a mention of your product and brand.
3. Offer content or regular pieces of useful information
B2b businesses use the “lead magnet” approach all the time, but even as an ecommerce store, you can attract users that were not particularly looking to buy from the store but for a specific information or query. Sometime it’s not just a discount or an offer that encourages the user to submit their email but rather the promise of the information they could receive for free on their email. For example, this beauty store has a weekly “beauty guide” and all one has to do is submit their email to receive free beauty and fashion advice delivered straight to their email. One of our clients Eternity Modern offers a curated “buying guide” that offers great design tips and information on buying furniture.
4. Host online webinars or virtual consultation sessions and collect emails to sign them up
Even as an ecommerce store, you can create virtual sessions, webinars or other events that need an email sign up. The idea is to think creatively. For example, if you’re an online store selling baby clothing, you could host a monthly “Mom meetup” where you invite an expert like a nutritionalist or child behaviourist and attract new moms to attend the session. A webinar can be an amazing opportunity to gain access to a wide, relevant audience and also to build engagement in the long run. An amazing example of a list growth hack from the lingerie store Curvy Kate that organizes virtual “bra fitting consultations” which assumably don’t just work great to collect emails but to upsell the product to the registered user based on their fitting report!
5. Organize email signup contests, giveaways and sweepstakes
This might be one of the easiest ways to engage visitors into becoming subscribers because everyone loves themselves some free goodies from brands they like. And the best part? You can use contests, sweepstakes, and giveaways to drive your social media followers to your website and then collect their email. Use your social media accounts to host a free giveaway in exchange for contact information. Encourage entrants to click through to your website and sign up using their email address. In order to keep your list clean, fresh, and growing consistently, you can even use this tactic once a month to ensure new subscribers keep flowing in. Don’t be afraid to give things away! You’ll end up gaining much more than what it costs you.
6. Host an online quiz and send the detailed answers on email
Online quizzes are really popular and stimulate the user’s curiosity and ego depending on the topic. Have a light hearted quiz on your website that’s relevant to your niche and while you should give out the score on the page, a clever way to get the player’s email from the activity could be to send out a detailed answer sheet or a personality report based on their answers emailed to them.
7. Create a sense of an exclusive “member’s online” community
This strategy can work well to make your visitors sign up with a sense of joining an exclusive member’s only community that’s privy to special offers, discounts, freebies and useful content.
8. Offer a small-value freebie on a user just entering an email
Sure, sending a freebie to everyone who enters their email may sound like a foolhardy proposition, but hey think of the Customer Lifetime Value here. Customer acquisition does cost a pretty penny no matter what the channel. But if you could create an attribution-based rule and make a “Freebie popup” just for an audience that’s less likely to buy, it may be worth getting an email for. Also, another great hack to leverage here is to offer to send a freebie, but ask the user to just cover the shipping costs. Not ideal yes, but better than burning thousands of dollars on shipping to non-paying customers/
9. Collect emails in your store
It’s a back-to-the-basics tip, but if you’re lucky enough to own a physical store, you can make good use of your purchasers’ and visitors’ contact information. They can automatically become subscribers to your mailing list. Make sure your sales team is aware of this opportunity, and don’t let them waste the chance to grow the number of inboxes your campaigns can land in.
Our bonus tip? Be as creative as you can while you’re upgrading your email list. Remember: clean list + new fresh subscribers means more $$. Good luck on your journey!
