One of the most powerful ways you can grow your customer base is through email and SMS marketing campaigns. The problem that many small businesses face however, is that small budgets and limited resources make it difficult to grow subscriber lists. The good news is that there are tried-and-tested methods that will allow you to systematically grow your contacts. So check out these creative solutions to grow your subscriber list and generate strong conversions on leads.
1. Develop good content
This all starts on your website. If you can get yourself into a position where you can create and share valuable content that speaks directly to your audience’s interests, then they will naturally want more from you and will opt-in to hear more. By offering excellent content in the form of guides and advice, you will begin to entice readers to fill out a form in exchange for this info. They get the free info, and you get their email addresses. Win-win.
2. Create call-to-actions in your marketing material
In each and every business blog that you write, add a call to action (CTA). A CTA is something in your messaging that tells your customer what to do next and where they should do it. Like “sign up for this free service here…” A good CTA then leads your readers to a landing page on your website where they can sign up to your mailing list. If you send out your marketing material through SMS campaigns then find other ways to entice your customer to reach out to your website and connect with your business.
3. Consider adding an opt-in pop-up on your landing page
When visitors arrive at your website, it should automatically generate a pop-up that asks customers to sign up for your newsletter. If you don’t have this, then you are losing out on countless leads. To do this, all you need to do is buy a plug-in or tool that will enable this type of pop-up on your backend, this then syncs with your database and does the work for you.
4. Make content shareable
A simple way to increase your contact lists is to allow your existing subscribers to easily share your content. It’s really easy to add “send to a friend” or “share on social” links to each of your articles and this will then allow your reader to enthusiastically share your content if it resonated with them. The knock-on effect is very powerful when you consider that people are more likely to read something that is referred by a friend than a stranger, and this chain of events can prove to be very lucrative for your business.
5. Create effective referral programs
Did you know that over 75% of people are more likely to use a product or service that they heard about from a friend or family member? This makes referral marketing an incredibly powerful marketing tool. Meaning that you need to get on that band wagon and entice existing customers to brag about your business on social media.
6. Gifts and giveaways
People love freebees. In fact, giveaways and contests can generate up to 5,8% more engagement and convert up to 34% of leads. The best part about this is that your costs are mainly in what you are giving away and investing in the campaign itself, which means a high return on your investment. Remember that you can also leverage giveaways and tell the user that the condition of entry is that they like your page, and share it with a friend. In fact, over 62% of users will immediately share your competition with friends if it means getting extra entries into you competition.
The bottom line
You may have thousands of followers on social media, but what if you were hacked tomorrow and all those followers disappeared? Well in an ideal world it wouldn’t matter if you also had a solid database of SMS and email contacts to fall back on. These are solid contact links to your customers and therefore you need to be doing consistent ongoing activity to engage with these customers and build strong lists of email and SMS contacts. With these 6 strategies you will be well on your way to generating strong subscriber lists, regardless of your budget.
