Growing your email subscriber list is crucial for all online stores. Sending out emails with optimized content is a cost-effective, long-term strategy to engage with current and future customers.
The bigger your email subscription list, the more people you can reach to let them know about upcoming sales and new products. However, growing your email list requires strategy, consistency, and follow through.
Below are 9 simple ways that you can grow your e-commerce stores’ email subscriber list starting today.
#1. Offer Coupons for Email Sign Ups
The most basic way to get email addresses from your customers is to offer coupons in exchange for their email address. Many e-commerce stores do this with a pop-up marketing campaign that asks for the shopper’s email address in exchange for a 10% or a 20% off coupon code for the customer’s next purchase.
If the customer is shopping on your website already, a coupon becomes a value proposition since they can immediately see the savings on their purchase in exchange for an email address. This is a low-cost and extremely easy way to get customers to sign up for your email list and get a welcome series introducing them to your brand.
#2. Use Your Current Customer Database
We all know the cost to retain a customer is lower than the cost to generate a new one. And it’s also known that email marketing has an amazing 4,400% ROI. Because of this, you should leverage your current customer database to grow your list further. Look into adding your existing customer’s email addresses if you reach out to them and ask if they’d like to participate in your email list for coupons and occasional emails.
For future customers, you can add a checkbox on your website’s order screen where they can opt in or opt out of email communications with your company as they enter their order details.
#3. Add Sign-Ups to Your Highest Ranking Pages
What web page do customers see first if they find your company through a search engine?
For most e-commerce stores, the answer is the home page for brand traffic and product or category pages for non-brand terms. E-commerce SEO is very important for generating traffic and building your email list.
Adding email opt-ins to these high ranking pages may be the most effective strategy for gathering emails from new subscribers. Consider using these landing pages specifically created for your search engine traffic to first drive sales, but also drive email registrations. Examples of an email capture are things such as pop-up windows and interactive chatbots.
#4. Invest in Google Ads Campaigns
For new e-commerce websites just starting out, Google Ads campaign could help drive traffic and grow your email list. While most e-commerce PPC campaigns focus on generating revenue through product orders, new brands can leverage a top-of-funnel branding approach to build up their email list.
When customers hit your landing page from your PPC ads, you can direct them to share their email address for exclusive content or deals. For brands with less awareness and a longer buying cycle, having a potential customer email address can generate long term incremental revenue for your e-commerce business.
#5. Host Contests on Facebook
People love participating in fun contests. A Facebook contest can help drive more email subscriber sign-ups. For example, you could put up a picture and ask Facebook followers to create a caption for it. The winner’s caption will be featured in your company’s marketing campaign and get a small prize. However, to participate, winners must be subscribed to your email list.
#6. Advertise a Giveaway on Social Media
People also love to win giveaways. Advertise a giveaway of a product on your social media account and announce the winner first through your email subscriber list. You can use a paid social media campaign to advertise the contest and generate more subscribers.
You can use a social media scheduling tool like SocialPilot to prepare your contest assets and posts in advance.
#7. Implement an Email Signup “Paywall”
If there’s popular content on your website, consider restricting access to it to only email subscribers. Online newspapers consider this a paywall, where website visitors must pay to read exclusive content, often in the form of a monthly fee. You can implement an email signup “paywall” that works similarly but doesn’t require customers to pay anything.
If people want to read the content, they need to exchange their email address first. Just make sure that all products are outside of the “paywall” so you don’t create a situation where customers are unable to buy products they want from your company if they aren’t willing to sign up for your email list.
#8. Send Restocking and Sales Emails
If your company puts out new prints or frequently has items go out of stock, advertise your email subscription list as a way that customers can be notified of the newest prints and when items are restocked.
Companies such as Baby Tula and JuJuBe were able to drive increased interest for these items by letting customers know the minute a new print is available. For limited edition items and products that sell out quickly, customers want to be in the know. They want to be able to buy their favorite print before it sells out.
If a popular product is out of stock on your website, consider keeping up the product description instead of hiding it. You can put an email sign-up box on the page where people can sign up to be emailed if and when the product is restocked and available. Just remember to send out an email whenever a popular product is restocked after it was unavailable for a period of time.
#9. Create Shareable Content
If you send your subscribers great content, it is likely that they’ll want to share it with their friends. With email marketing, it is very easy for customers to forward an email to a friend or co-worker. To create shareable content, you should look at what your customers really want to know.
If you just started a new blog on your site, do certain posts get read and shared on social media more often than others? These insights can help you to identify what your customers really want to know and would want to share with other people who have similar interests.
There are plenty of examples of blogs where too many e-commerce stores collect email addresses for their email subscription list but fail to actually send out regular email communications. By the time that they send out an email, some customer will unsubscribe immediately because they no longer remember signing up for the email list or feel out of touch with the brand.
If you have spent the time and effort collecting email addresses, it is smart to just go ahead and send emails out to customers.