Building A Mailing List

[Chip01]

Looking for some tips/advice on building a mailing list without already having an audience or customer base

Looking to launch a business and would like to try out email marketing

I understand people need to sign up, but what are the best methods of getting sign ups?

Preferably not paid advertising as I’m bootstrapping the company. Organic is what I’m after

Hit me with your best

 

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[Charnell]

Is your business going to be the mailing list or is the mailing list going to be a marketing tool for your business?

Edit: Either way, let's see. You're starting fresh, and let's assume you're doing some sort of ecommerce.

Customers when you get them: if you have a product to sell, your (new) customers will provide their email address.

Opt-ins without incentive: a simple "receive updates" from us. Low opt-in rates, but higher engagement with emails.

Opt-ins with an incentive: a coupon code, giveaway, etc. Some people may only opt-in for the thing. Make it relevant to your product, not like an Amazon gift card that everyone will want unless for some reason your market is everyone.

So many different ways to grow it as well. Pop-ups, exit intents, quiz results, those spinning wheels for prizes.

With pop-ups, I set them to at least 60 seconds, so when they do show up the person they're being shown to has had a chance to actually read some content. Same with push notifications.

 

[ALEX-P]

Hi,

email sign-ups strategies vary from niche to niche.

I have tested many the past year and with my business (eCom), Chatbot works really well!

I use Tidio live chat.

However, isn't about how you gain a subscriber, but more about what are you offering them in order to sign up?

Perhaps if you're giving away $300 gift card you will have a different signup rate compared to just a general message "sign up to receive updates and offers"

Hope this helps

 

[Ismail941]

Just like Giving Food Sample in the Costco/Sams Club

Get Leads by giving Contest/Giveaway/Freebies/Sweepstake etc.

 

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[SEBASTlAN]

Weekly curated list of the best ____ in your industry.

If you're low on money, substack is free and is pretty damn good imo.

 

[BellaPippin]

Following to learn

 

[Andy Black]

Looking to launch a business and would like to try out email marketing

I'm curious what else you're trying.

 

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[Chip01]

Is your business going to be the mailing list or is the mailing list going to be a marketing tool for your business?

Edit: Either way, let's see. You're starting fresh, and let's assume you're doing some sort of ecommerce.

Customers when you get them: if you have a product to sell, your (new) customers will provide their email address.

Opt-ins without incentive: a simple "receive updates" from us. Low opt-in rates, but higher engagement with emails.

Opt-ins with an incentive: a coupon code, giveaway, etc. Some people may only opt-in for the thing. Make it relevant to your product, not like an Amazon gift card that everyone will want unless for some reason your market is everyone.

So many different ways to grow it as well. Pop-ups, exit intents, quiz results, those spinning wheels for prizes.

With pop-ups, I set them to at least 60 seconds, so when they do show up the person they're being shown to has had a chance to actually read some content. Same with push notifications.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. The mailing list is going to be a marketing tool for my business.

That's some great advice, thank you. What I'm offering is actually a service which I've went down the route of productising into packages for easy-purchase. Before, my business was more 'bespoke' but I'm looking to move away from that and hopefully being open with my prices will remove any time wasters

Is it reasonable to add email addresses which I've had conversations with due to cold outreach? ie they haven't became a customer but have replied to a cold email asking for more info or objecting

 

[Chip01]

Hi,

email sign-ups strategies vary from niche to niche.

I have tested many the past year and with my business (eCom), Chatbot works really well!

I use Tidio live chat.

However, isn't about how you gain a subscriber, but more about what are you offering them in order to sign up?

Perhaps if you're giving away $300 gift card you will have a different signup rate compared to just a general message "sign up to receive updates and offers"

Hope this helps

Thanks! I think my problem may be more traffic related than mailing list now!

 

[Chip01]

I'm curious what else you're trying.

So far my marketing methods have went as far as cold calling, cold emailing and using LinkedIn. Not great.

Looking to add more marketing tools to my arsenal, just don't want to be trying too many at the one time (input vs output and all that). Would like to double down on what works after testing

 

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[Ravens_Shadow]

We get about 75 signups a day organically, with our best week being about 2k signups thus far. Have something that your users want, and create extremely loyal fans of your offer by being the best. In our case, users signup for an "invitation" to use our software. We only send them emails if they consented to receiving them, and we delete emails from people who don't want to hear from us.

Most of my traffic comes from linkedin/twitter/youtube/reddit, but I have a viral product that gets spread like wildfire organically. I use ActiveCampaign "AC" as my tool of choice, but there are plenty of other options out there. We just use AC's native forms on our website and do a bit of CSS to clean them up. You also *must* use a captcha on your forms, because as soon as bots find your website you'll get hundreds if not thousands of garbage emails no matter what email tool you're using.. ask me how I know.

Our open rates are a whopping 58% on campaigns because we consistently cleanse our email list of people who don't want to get updates. We send out quality emails with the information that our users really want, and it literally consists of only the most important updates about our products or company. I've tried convertkit and MailCheat(Chimp) and didn't like either of them due to their crappy tagging tools and poor automations. At this point, our entire sales process depends on AC. One thing I could really improve in our email marketing is our automated sequences and following up with our users based on their actions on the website/in the software. But alas, that takes time and knowledge.

Building a list takes a lot of time, but you'll eventually get the hang of it. Just offer something that people want, put a form on your website, and be careful of GDPR if you're dealing with customers outside of the US. I keep the marketing wank to a minimum, and our customers appreciate that.

 

[Charnell]

Is it reasonable to add email addresses which I've had conversations with due to cold outreach? ie they haven't became a customer but have replied to a cold email asking for more info or objecting

Don't do that, it will hurt your deliverability in the long run. If you're doing cold email outreach, I would register an alternate domain to send cold emails from and have your opted in emails from your actual domain. For instance, in my case, I have [myurl.net] be my cold emailing domain and [myurl.com] be my website and what I use to send emails to customers/those who have opted in. I'd have those lists as separate as possible, again in my case, I use AgileCRM to GSuite to send my [myurl.net] cold emails and Klaviyo to send my [myurl.com] marketing emails/newsletters.

It's going to be a bit cumbersome to manage once the sales start rolling in, but while things are in their infancy you can set up processes to mitigate time spent managing the two different systems.

 

[Andy Black]

‎Cold Email Outreach with Jeremy & Jack on Apple Podcasts

‎Business · 2024

podcasts.apple.com

 

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