3 ways content can light a fire under your list building strategy

Spread the love

Virtually every marketer has heard the phrase – “the money is in your list.” So why aren’t your email marketing campaigns gaining momentum? The two biggest reasons are:

The leads you attract aren’t very interested in your offer.
You aren’t generating enough traffic to your opt-in pages.

Refining your content marketing strategy can be the best way to address both of these problems. Here are some ways content can push your list building strategy into overdrive.

Build a personal brand

Why do people subscribe to your email list? It’s not necessarily because they think you will give them free stuff but rather VALUE. Depending on your business, that value may come in the form of monetary discounts or insight to help them in some way. Building your personal brand gives people the confidence to know that you are knowledgeable in a specific area and that there’s value in subscribing to your email list.

Find social platform. Are you a chef? You should be creating amazing Instagram posts of your food. Motivational speaker? Facebook videos should be your daily activity. Digital marketer? I should already be in your funnel.

Collaborate with other personal brands. While you’re making a name for yourself it’s critically important to collaborate with other personal brands to expedite your follower growth. Identify thought leaders in your space and create content together. If you’re a digital marketer, that could mean going on their podcast to share insights from recent campaigns that their audience will find valuable.

Create compelling content…consistently. This is the most important activity in building a personal brand. Your audience started following you because of your content. You need to give them more to keep them coming back. It’s this great content that will allow you to monetize your list in the future.

Create engaging, valuable and shareable content

Creating valuable blog content is a great way to engage followers and build your list. Benefits of creating useful content on your site include:

When promoting your page with PPC or media buys, you need to keep investing money into your funnel to maintain a traffic stream. This isn’t the case with blog content. Your website can generate traffic from your content forever at no additional cost.
You create a more natural sales funnel. People visit your website to get valuable insights from your blog posts. If you educate them properly, they will eagerly subscribe to your list for more valuable information.
When you use paid traffic to drive visitors to your opt-in page, your funnel depends on converting those individual visitors. You can reach far more people by driving organic traffic to your blog posts if they are optimized for social media. Those visitors will share your best posts with their network, which will drive more people to your site. If your posts gain a lot of traction on social media, you can get a lot more traffic and subsequently more email subscribers.

Here are some strategies to gain more email subscribers with your onsite content:

Tell personal stories. Too many content marketers share the same tips, which has caused the Internet to be littered with thousands of dull, similar sounding blog posts. Writing more personal stories helps your content seem more engaging.
Use original data to illustrate a point. Far too many people use the excuse “there is no original content on the Internet, anymore” to get away with writing the same boring posts. It is simply not true. Collecting your own data is the easiest and most effective way to create engaging posts that stand head and shoulders above your competitors.
Partner with other experts in your field. Too many people are worried about providing attribution to their competitors. While you don’t want to help promote your closest competitors, there is no reason that you shouldn’t get content ideas from less direct competitors. Many of your competitors focus on other demographics or regions. Some practice different specialties. Getting quotes and feedback from them can be an excellent way to create more engaging content for your list-building strategy.

Creating valuable blog content is more of an investment than other traffic generation strategies. However, it will pay massive dividends over the long-term. You can generate a steady supply of traffic, which will translate into new subscribers for your list.

Create a more seamless conversion path

Driving a steady supply of traffic isn’t enough to build your list. One case study found that simplifying their funnel allowed them to boost their conversion rate by 173%. In this email list building guide by Campaign Monitor, the email automation company shows the two-step process to provide a seamless conversion path. First, by creating simple subscriber opportunities. This can be done in the following ways:

Jf your website sells something, then you can use your checkout process to capture emails. Since you have already collected their name and email, you can include a checkbox to opt them into your email list.
Use a subscriber popup on your blog to convert readers into subscribers.
Convert Twitter followers into subscribers by using Twitter Lead Generation Cards. These cards are simply a link you can include in your Tweets that expand into a pre-populated window that followers can simply enter their email to subscribe.
Use your email signature to include a link to an email opt-in landing page. With hundreds or even thousands of emails being sent by your company each month, there’s ample opportunity to grow your email list.

Second, offer valuable incentives such as:

Amazing content can be all you need to incentivize visitors to subscribe, while others use exclusive content only available to subscribers.
Discounts and exclusive offers are used to effectively convert visitors to subscribers.
Early access to promotions gives loyal followers first dibs on your best deals and products.

Using multiple email subscriber conversion points along with incentives will be the fuel that supercharges your email list building strategy.