7 Super-Practical Techniques to Rapidly Build Your Email List
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This document discusses 7 techniques for rapidly building an email list: 1) using a feature box to pitch email opt-ins, 2) creating a homepage squeeze page focused on opt-ins, 3) using social media squeeze pages, 4) using the about page as a landing page, 5) implementing popups correctly with targeted pitches, 6) using content upgrades, and 7) expanding guest posting efforts. It provides examples and tips for each technique, and notes that Brian Dean's email list grew from 2012-2014 using these strategies.
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7 Super-Practical Techniques to Rapidly Build Your Email List
- 1. 7 Super-Practical Techniques to Rapidly Build Your Email List Brian Dean Founder, Backlinko
- 3. Average email open rate is only 19.7% 19.7% Unopened emails Source: http://bit.ly/1wCa0i7
- 6. “Email marketing was ranked as the best channel in terms of return on investment… Source: Email Marketing Industry Census 2014 (Adestra)
- 7. …with 68% of companies rating the channel as ‘good’ or ‘excellent’.” Source: Email Marketing Industry Census 2014 (Adestra)
- 8. Source: http://bit.ly/1set2gh $40 $7.30 $22.24 $19.72 $10.51 $17 $2 $45 $40 $35 $30 $25 $20 $15 $10 $5 $0 Email Catalogs SEO Internet Display Mobile Keyword Ads Banner Ads ROI (Per $1 spent)
- 9. Backlinko Email List 2012 2013 2014 Backlinko Revenue 2012 2013 2014
- 14. Strategy #1: The Feature Box
- 15. Most people’s email opt-in “strategy”: Ad Ad Ad Wait! Don’t Ignore This! Ad
- 16. The data supports this:
- 17. Bottom line: If you want people to opt-in, your pitch has to be front and center.
- 19. But…HOW?
- 20. Two Options F EA TURE BOX HOME PAGE SQUE E Z E PAGE 1. 2.
- 21. 7.5%
- 25. Strategy #2: The Homepage Squeeze Page
- 26. Two Options F EA TURE BOX HOME PAGE SQUE E Z E PAGE 1. 2.
- 28. Design FTW
- 31. Pro Tip:
- 32. Pro Tip:
- 33. Pro Tip:
- 34. Strategy #3: The Social Squeeze Page
- 39. 21.7%
- 40. Topic
- 41. Video
- 42. Pro Tip
- 43. Social
- 44. Form
- 45. Traffic
- 46. Strategy #4: About Page=Landing Page
- 47. Traffic
- 52. Strategy #5: Popups (The Right Way)
- 53. DUDE…you need to use a popup.
- 55. Exit Intent
- 56. Targeted Pitch
- 59. Strategy #6: The Content Upgrade
- 69. $43,080 revenue 3,590 subscribers @ $12 per subscriber $42,628 profit $372 cost $90 design + $282 Leadpages
- 74. Strategy #7: Expanded Guest Post
- 82. Backlinko Email List 2012 2013 2014 Backlinko Revenue 2012 2013 2014
- 86. Trust me :)
Editor's Notes
- I have to admit, the naysayers have a point. By all accounts, it’s harder than ever to get your visitors to put their email in that box.
- And if that wasn’t bad enough, when you actually get someone to enter their email…they’re extremely unlikely to open it. Silverpop research.
- So is email marketing really worth all the trouble? I mean, is it worth bribing everyone that comes to your site with a freebie…only to get your emails ignored by 80% of them?
- Let me answer that with a statistic. A study by Adestra found that…. Not #5, not #2. číslo jedna.
- You can’t get 68% of marketers to agree on ANYTHING.
- OK, one more to really drive the point home. For every dollar spent on email, you get $40 back. Direct marketing association. That’s double the ROI of SEO.
- Betting on email works. This growth is almost 100% due to the growth of my email list.
- But the coolest thing about email is that you get to have REAL conversations with your customers. Not 140 character “conversations”. On social media, people are fake. In email, they’re real. This is the email that I send to new subscribers.
- And I’ve received over 3000 responses. Think I know my readers and customers better than most people. You’d be right.
- But to get that insane ROI, you need to get your blog readers to enter their emails into that little box. And out of desperation you may be thinking to yourself: “to get subscribers today I need to resort to dirty tricks and annoying popups.” Well you’re absolutely right. And that’s exactly what I’m going to show you today.
- Let’s jump right into strategy #1: the feature box
- Here’s what most people do to get email optins. Pop an invisible opt-in in their blog’s sidebar or footer.
- Sidebar blindness is the new banner blindness. No one will even see your sidebar opt-in form. And if they do, it’s impossible to make your offer compelling enough for them to actually fork over their email.
- And what better place to do that than your blog’s homepage? After all, if you’re like most blog, your homepage is one of the most-visited pages on your site.
- But how can you do that…without turning your homepage into a shady squeeze page. I mean, you don’t want your homepage to look like this. You want to give people a GREAT first impression, show off your brand, etc.
- You have two options. You can go with the Feature box, or the homepage opt-in page. Which I’ll get to a bit later.
- This is a box that you add to your blog’s homepage, right above the feed. And it works GREAT. My featurebox converts at about 7.5%.
- Let’s go over what you’ll need for your feature box to work. First, you need to dedicate some of your blog’s real estate to the feature box. Ideally it should take up the entire above the fold area.
- Next, you need a strong headline and benefit statements. This is what compels people to actually sign up. So they need to be bodybuilder strong. Now these bullets have an added benefit.
- They also give new visitors an idea of what your site is all about. That way, even if they don’t signup right away, they know the basics of you and your blog. It also gives you a chance to pimp some social proof. Dollars and roses.
- Let’s move onto strategy #2, the homepage squeeze page.
- You have two options. You can go with the Feature box, or the homepage opt-in page. Which I’ll get to a bit later.
- Who here has landed on a page like this? And how many have converted? Back in the day, these squeeze pages converted GREAT. Today, they simply don’t work as well
- First, you need a solid designer to get this done for you. Here are a few examples from the wild. You can see that they all look GREAT. The only way you’re going to get away with making your homepage a squeeze page is with a solid design.
- So besides a solid designer, what else do you need? First, you need benefit driven copy. Just like with your feature box.
- Next, you need to sprinkle some of that social proof on there.
- I’ve tested this, and individual testimonials work better than XX,XXX people have already signed up….especially from a respected person in your field. But if you don’t have that, a testimonial from a subscriber or client works great.
- I’ve tested this, and individual testimonials work better than XX,XXX people have already signed up….especially from a respected person in your field. But if you don’t have that, a testimonial from a subscriber or client works great.
- I’ve tested this, and individual testimonials work better than XX,XXX people have already signed up….especially from a respected person in your field. But if you don’t have that, a testimonial from a subscriber or client works great.
- OK, so it’s time for strategy #3 on our list…the social squeeze page. So up to a few months ago, this is really all I had going on my blog in terms of conversions. I knew that a squeeze page would help.
- This was the situation I faced a few months back. I had a 6-month stretch where my conversion rate didn’t budge. I knew I wanted a few landing pages to collects emails, but I didn’t want to go the scammy squeeze page route.
- As we’ve already established, old school squeeze pages like this aren’t effective anymore.
- That’s when I stumbled on this page by copyblogger. At first blush, this just looks like a cool page. Even an infographic. But when you scroll down, you can see that it’s actually squeeze page. Hmmm, very interesting.
- And unlike most squeeze pages, this one not only had social sharing buttons…but people were actually sharing the damn thing. That’s when I decided to take the idea of a squeeze page that actually provides value…and add a few tweaks to make it more effective. The result?
- The social squeeze page. By far the highest-converting page on my blog. This page’s average conversion rate is 21.7%. Here are the 3 things you’ll need to create your own SSP.
- First, you need an in-demand topic. Something that your target audience can’t find enough information about. If the topic is something they can find info for elsewhere, they’re not going to hand over their email. In my case I realized that my target audience of SEO professionals and small business owners couldn’t find enough actionable info or SEO case studies. So I provided both.
- Next, you need an awesome video. The video is HUGE because it instantly shows you’re not another scammy squeeze page. I know that some squeeze pages have videos. But the video in your SSP is very different. It should be something that you would be proud to upload to YouTube. I literally rented a flipchart from a store down the street and called my friend (the guy who is always available). I was like “dude, come over. We’re shooting a video”.
- Use Wistia turnstile. I forces people to enter their email to watch the rest of the video. This turnstile alone converts almost a third of the people that watch the video.
- Finally, you need social elements, namely social sharing buttons and comments. This accomplishes two things.
- Finally, you need social elements, namely social sharing buttons and comments. This accomplishes two things.
- First, it gets more traffic to your SSP. If your video is awesome (which it should be), people WILL share it, as we saw with the Copyblogger example and my own SSP.
- OK we’re moving right along to strategy #4. Who here has an about page? Who has an optin form on that page?
- If you don’t, you’re missing out on A LOT of subscribers. Here’s why. If you check your analytics, I can guarantee that your about page is one of your most popular pages. So for that reason alone, it makes sense to have at least one opt-in form on that page.
- If you don’t, you’re missing out on A LOT of subscribers. Here’s why. If you check your analytics, I can guarantee that your about page is one of your most popular pages. So for that reason alone, it makes sense to have at least one opt-in form on that page.
- That’s why you NEED to add at least one opt-in form on your about page. I actually have two.
- That’s why you NEED to add at least one opt-in form on your about page. I actually have two.
- My about page converts at a very respectable 6.18%.
- Who here HATES popups?
- I also used to hate popups. Then one day I was talking to my friend Noah Kagan about my horrendous conversion rates. Here’s what he said:
- After a lot of hand-wringing, I decided to give it a one day trial. I used Noah’s free sumome plugin and added this popup to the blog. As you can see, it converted at DOUBLE my sitewide conversion rate. Now it’s time to go over the 4 keys to using popups that maximize emails and minimize annoyance.
- This is HUGE. Exit intent popups only appear when someone is leaving your site anyway. So you’re not interrupting them while they read.
- If you’re going to annoy someone with a popup, make it count. Here’s an example of what NOT to do from SEJ. This is a generic pitch that doesn’t add much (or any) value.
- Here’s a laser targeted exit intent popup. When someone is about to stop reading my keyword research guide, they get a popup that pitches a PDF version of the guide. That’s as targeted as you can get.
- And I have a targeted popup for almost every blog post on my site. They convert better and annoy people less. Probably not a coincidence.
- A few months ago, I had this problem. There was a post on my site that brought in an insane amount of traffic per month.
- For the life of me I couldn’t get visitors to that page to convert into subscribers.
- That is, until I tried The Content Upgrade. Here’s what my conversion rate looked like then. Huge difference, right? Let me show you what I did, step-by-step.
- First, I thought of a way to make that blog post even better. If you can’t think of anything, take a look at blog comments on your post and on similar posts. In my case, readers were telling me in black and white: PDF would be great. Also, what are the most important factors from the guide?
- So I decided to create a PDF checklist that outlined the 10 most important factors from the list.
- Now it’s time to give your resource away. I added a pitch in a yellow box at the top of my post…and a download image at the bottom.
- Now it’s time to give your resource away. I added a pitch in a yellow box at the top of my post…and a download image at the bottom.
- When someone clicks on the link in the yellow box or on the download image, a leadpages box appears where they can enter their email.
- To date that single content upgrade has brought in over 3500 new subscribers.
- Devesh: need a way to visualize this info on 1-2 slides. Each subscriber is worth about $12 to my business. $12*3590=$43k. The total cost of the campaign was $90 for the checklist design and $47/month for lead pages (x6 months)=$3712. Needless to say, the ROI is fantastic.
- Once I saw that increase in conversions on that post, I decided to add the content upgrade to every high-traffic post at Backlinko. And as you can see, my site-wide conversion rate increased by 180%.
- You may be thinking: that works great in the SEO/marketing industry, but what about my business? Well Josh, a backlinko reader, runs a golf site called my golf tutor.
- Like me, he had a post that got a lot of traffic…but converted poorly.
- So he created this simple checklist that summarized the post. And his conversion rate shot up to
- Finally, let’s talk about a very powerful technique that I was introduced to by my friend Bryan Harris, where you can build your email list from other people’s websites.
- A few months ago I read a post by my friend Bryan Harris at VideoFruit. As you can see here, he outlines a process where he got 500 subscribers from a single guest post using something called the expanded guest post. I’m honestly not even sure I’ve received 500 subscribers from my last 4 guest posts combined. So I decided to give it a shot. And here’s what happened: 933 subscribers in a week and a half.
- Now before I get into why the expanded guest post works so well, let me show you why it’s so hard to get traffic and subscribers from guest posts. Take a look at this. Where are your eyes drawn to? Here and here right? You’d be forgiven for missing the link back to Varda’s site. Forget subscribers: you’re lucky to get any clicks! So what’s the solution? The expanded guest post. Here’s how it works.
- First, create a content upgrade for your next guest post, just like you would on your own site. It can be a checklist, a video, a mindmap. Whatever entices people to sign up. Here’s an example of my content upgrade. It’s a video, a pdf checklist and a curated list of links to other helpful content.
- Next, pitch the content upgrade in the conclusion section of your guest post. If the site uses leadpages, you can use a leadbox link.
- Next, pitch the content upgrade in the conclusion section of your guest post. If the site uses leadpages, you can use a leadbox link.
- If not, you can send them to a special landing page. And you’re set.
- I know it’s tempting to spend time on social.
- Betting on email works. This growth is almost 100% due to the growth of my email list.
- But if you’re serious about REALLY getting to know your customer.
- And make it rain (do people still say that?).
- Then it’s time to go all-in on email.