Email List Growth Strategies

7 minute read

Upland Admin

Part I: Audience Development

It’s Not Just About List Growth

The most important part of marketing is the audience you’re marketing to. Without their attention, marketers are shouting into the void. It’s because of this that audience development is paramount to email marketing success. But it’s not just about email list growth; it’s also about developing relationships with your email audience. We’ll talk about ways to do both.But first, let’s understand your audience. There are two main kinds of audiences:

  1. Casual Audience: This is anyone exposed to your brand. Maybe they saw your content shared on social media and clicked to read it. Whether they’ve seen your posts or visited your website once or twice, they don’t have any real relationship with you and may forget about you just minutes later. This audience is transient, and their lifetime value (LTV) is very low
  2. Relationship Audience: This is the Casual Audience who has been converted into something more. They seek you out over and over again, and you can reach them directly instead of hoping someone will share your content with them. They come to you for your content, and you deliver it consistently. Over time, they tell their network about you, helping you increase your audience with no effort on your part. Whether you sell a product or make money via ad impressions, they’ll be the first to click.

Both of these kinds of audiences are valuable in different ways, so proper attention must be paid to each. While your Relationship Audience will be worth more for their lifetime value (LTV), there is no Relationship Audience without first having a Casual Audience. The larger the Casual Audience, the more chances you’ll have to convert them into your Relationship Audience.

Developing your Casual Audience is a numbers game; this is where a solid list growth strategy is important. But marketers shouldn’t make the mistake of only going wide and not deep with their list; developing your, well, relationship with your Relationship Audience requires ongoing attention to make the most out of those who have signed up for your email marketing list.

Each audience will need its own strategy.

Part II: List Growth Strategy

3 Ways to Turn a Casual Audience into a Relationship

We talked about the difference between your Casual Audience and your Relationship Audience. Now, we’ll talk about how to develop your Casual Audience into a more serious Relationship Audience via a solid list growth strategy.

Why grow your email list?

Before we dive into growing your list, let’s first give some context and talk about the 5 metrics every email marketer needs to pay attention to:

  1. List Size
  2. Inbox Placement Rate
  3. Open Rate
  4. Click Rate
  5. Unsubscribe Rate

These metrics will ultimately determine whether or not your email marketing program is successful. If one of these is sub-optimal, it can have a cascading effect on the others, bringing down the overall health and profitability of your email program.

List size comes first because without a list to send to, there is no delivery to the inbox, no opens, and most importantly, no clicks. Here are two other reasons to focus your efforts on list growth before anything else:

  1. Unlimited potential. You can improve your open or click-through rate up to 100% (although it’s unlikely, unless you’re only emailing your mom). With your list size, the sky’s the limit. You could increase the size of your list by however large your casual audience is.
  2. Better relationships. Turning your Casual Audience into your Relationship Audience is all about getting them to sign up for your email list. Once you have that email address, you can talk directly to them without hoping your social media post ends up in their feed or your ad ends up in front of their eyeballs. You can begin to turn the casual observer into an evangelist who will bring you new audience members without any effort on your part.

3 Email List Growth Strategies to Implement ASAP

The continuous growth of your email list is the foundation of the ultimate success of your email program. So what can you do to kick that audience development into overdrive?

  • Email capture widgetsThere are a plethora of ways to configure these for the best user experience and impact on your list size. Adding these to your website has been shown to dramatically increase the size of your list.
  • Registration optimization. Is your registration CTA in the footer? Move it to the header. Is it small? Make it bigger. Is it discreet? Make it flashy. Is it only on certain pages? Put it everywhere. Does it contain multiple fields? Make it one field. Is it static? Animate it. In short, if your registration CTA isn’t speaking loudly enough to be heard, crank up the volume.
  • Use your other channels. Did you know you could use your brand’s Facebook page to generate email signups? And why not encourage it on your Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn profile pages? There’s no need to limit email signups to just your website; list growth can occur across many channels.

Once you’ve developed a healthy amount of your Casual Audience into Relationship Audience status, it’s time to deepen that relationship.

Part III: Audience Development

It’s All About the Relationship

Capturing an email address is the first step towards building a relationship with your audience. But just because you got the email address doesn’t mean your work is done. Now it’s time to talk about how to grow that relationship in a way that maximizes the lifetime value (LTV) of your audience while keeping them delighted with your content.

Why do I need a relationship?

If you’ve achieved significant growth in your email list size, then you’re doing great. But even the largest list won’t do you any good if there are no opens or clicks on the emails you send. There are a few things you need to be aware of once you have this nice big list:

  1. The unengaged. This is the part of your email list that does you no good – they’re not opening or clicking on your emails. Your options are either to find a way to get them to engage or remove them from your list entirely before they start affecting your inbox placement rate.
  2. Unsubscribers. People will unsubscribe from your list; it’s inevitable. The bad news is once they leave, it’s incredibly difficult to get them back. You need to be thinking about ways to minimize unsubscribes, and a solid relationship is the best way to do that.

So how do you build this relationship? Here are a few tools that will keep the engagement – and the love – growing:

  • Cross-promotion. Once your subscribers are getting your emails, offer them the chance to subscribe to additional email newsletters and programs. The more content they’re willing to accept from you, the better your relationship is.
  • Preference Centers. You can use preference centers two ways:
    • When a user clicks to subscribe, take them to a preference center to immediately let them know the other things they can subscribe to. This can increase the opportunities you have to reach them: if this causes them to subscribe to two newsletters rather than one, that’s double the chances for engagement.
    • If a user is unsubscribing, take them to the preference center to see if there are options there that might make suit them better – a last attempt to save the relationship. It’s possible that they still enjoy your content; they just don’t want so much of it. They may prefer other newsletters or a reduced frequency.
  • Re-engagement campaigns. If you have subscribers who have fallen by the wayside in terms of opens and clicks, design a re-engagement campaign to help bring the dormant parts of your email list back into the fold. (You can read how one company did this here.)

These are just a few ways that you can make the most of your relationship with your subscribers and increase their LTV, but the most important thing is to keep sending great content that they love. They’ll come back to you again and again, and it all starts with a large, healthy list.

Reliable products. Real results.

Every day, thousands of companies rely on Upland to get their jobs done simply and effectively. See how brands are putting Upland to work.

View Success Stories