3 Easy Steps To Grow Your Email List Using Social Media - Social Media Explorer
3 Easy Steps To Grow Your Email List Using Social Media
3 Easy Steps To Grow Your Email List Using Social Media
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I have good and bad news for you… and a solution, too.

The Good News: Social media is now the biggest source of referral traffic in the world… even generating more traffic than Google. Shareholic showed that social media is responsible for 31.24 percent of all referral traffic. It was also further established by another study that social media is responsible for 43 percent of all referral traffic to news sites — compared to Google’s 38 percent.

The Bad News: Conversion from social media is abysmal. In fact, conversion from social media is so poor that it is estimated that just a measly 0.7 percent of Twitter users will engage with the average tweet. This experience is consistent across social media sites. Much worse, the actual conversion rate of social media lags behind every major traffic source — with social media having an average conversion rate of 0.71 percent.

The Solution: Ultimately, effective marketing is about learning to take advantage of systems to get optimal results. Social media is too good of a force to ignore, but what do we do about the poor conversion problem? After all, traffic that doesn’t convert will only waste your server resources. The solution is to combine your social media and email marketing efforts.

These following stats should give you a good idea of how important email marketing will be in 2017:

  • The average email conversion rate is 3.19 percent, which is more than double the average conversion rate of social and search combined.
  • According to the Direct Marketing Association, you can expect a ROI of $38 for every $1 you invest in email marketing.
  • Email is always responsible for the most sales, even during holidays. In fact, during Black Friday 2015 email was responsible for 25.1 percent of all sales — making it the best performing source of traffic.

The 3 Core Steps to Build Your Email List With Social Media

The key question then is how do you combine your social media and email efforts? How do you use social media to effectively build a high performing email list? Here are some tips:

Incentivize:

When you consider social media’s record low conversion rate, how do you get social media visitors to subscribe to your email list? You incentivize.
Think about what you can offer to social media visitors to have them join your email list. You can run a social media contest, for example, in which people win certain prizes, and then make it part of the contest requirement to join your email list.

You can offer discounts, coupons and other relevant bonuses to have people sign up. You can create a special product or gift to be offered to people who join your email list from social media.

Regardless of your approach, offering an incentive to encourage social media users to subscribe to your newsletter will seriously boost your ROI. In fact, offering an incentive is so powerful that it can result in up to a 5,000 percent boost in conversion rate.

Segment:

At the end of the day, you do not just want to have email subscribers that are practically useless to you. Over 2.5 million emails are sent every second — people are increasingly distracted and overwhelmed, and email conversions is suffering as a result. However, some people keep recording increases in sales and results from their email marketing efforts. These are the people who segment. Research shows that sending targeted emails to people, based on their interests and preferences, can boost conversions by up to 208 percent.

Segmenting is especially important when it involves social media users — you want to give people just what they want in order to keep their attention and maximize conversions from them. Obviously, not all email marketing service provider has these feature, so you might want to do your due research before you select an email service provider — here’s a resource that might help.

Repeat:

Psychologists have long discovered that we can get people to notice and like something they once ignored by constantly exposing them to it. This principle is called the familiarity principle, and it has been found to be very effective as far as social media marketing is concerned.

Research, based on an analysis of 100 million pieces of content, found that resharing old piece of content can boost conversions and engagement by up to 686 percent. When trying to promote your incentives and offers to join your email list on social media it is important not to just share it and forget. Instead, make regular posts and updates about your offer; if just 0.7 percent of people will engage with your average tweet, making more tweets will increase the chances of people subscribing. The same goes for all social media sites — use repetition to get your message noticed, and carefully convince the additional traffic you get to join your email list.

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About the Author

John Stevens
John Stevens is a founder, CEO and business consultant who helps startups develop a growth strategy. He regularly contributes to publications such as AdWeek, Entrepreneur and About.com. You can follow him on Twitter.

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