5 tips to expand your email list with quality leads.
By Donna Shryer
Social media marketing came in with a bang—bringing with it beguiling emojis, visually entertaining stickers, instant dialogs and instant customer engagement. For a fleeting moment, many marketing experts predicted that social media would replace email marketing.
Statistics proved otherwise, with marketing gurus left scratching their heads in disbelief.
It turns out that email marketing remains the strongest online medium to connect with new and existing clients. Simply put, email provides analytic tools that social media can’t deliver, making it easier to track an email’s success, identify what’s working or not working and then adapt your email marketing efforts accordingly.
“People are engaging with emails, particularly millennials, but they’re getting selective about who they invite into their inbox,” says Tom Tate, product marketing manager with AWeber, an email marketing software company. “To expand your contact list with loyal customers, you have to put the right offer in front of the right person. Marketers call these incentives, or lead magnets.”
Those “magnets” don’t need to be 40-page e-books, expensive giveaways or even original downloads, Tate adds. A brief how-to guide or shared article (as long as the original source gets credit) will work fine. Here are 5 tips to build your email subscriber list.
1. Pop the Question
Tate recommends a sign-up form programmed to automatically pop up on your most popular website pages, such as your listings. The incentive to subscribe is free content, such as 5 Tips to Sell Your Home Faster, 5 Tips Every Buyer Needs to Know or 5 Trends in Bathroom Remodeling.
Dave Charest, Constant Contact senior manager of content and social media marketing, agrees fully. “You have to offer an incentive that someone is willing to exchange their email address for.”
The stats support Charest. In Yahoo’s 2014 report, The Balancing Act: Getting Personalization Right, 78 percent of consumers appreciate an offer to receive emails with personalized content.
That means you need the subscriber’s name, email address and desired content. To achieve the latter, add clickable boxes to your pop-up that lists content topics. Then divide subscribers into segments, making sure that each segment receives what they want. Consider dividing your subscribers into buyer, seller or homeowner segments.
Travis Waller, CRS, with Friedberg Properties & Associates in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, recommends that content steer clear of hardcore self-promotion and instead go for “soft marketing.”
“You have to prove to readers that you’re a valuable information resource and not just a salesperson,” he says. “Do this and you create a strong incentive to subscribe—and stay subscribed.”
2. Talk of the Town
Sebastian Frey, CRS, broker/owner, Realty World Virtuoso, emphasizes the fact that valuable content can also lean toward geographic location. In Frey’s case, he serves the greater Santa Cruz area and nearby counties of Santa Clara and Monterey, and he lives in Aptos, California, a beach town that rests on Monterey Bay. “Folks living in or visiting Aptos rarely care about what’s going on in real estate—unless they’re ready to buy or sell. But everyone is always interested in what’s happening around the block.”
So Frey created the Aptos Community News (aptoscommunitynews.org), a website that’s 90 percent town doings and 10 percent real estate updates. The site’s pop-up promises subscribers ongoing content about “all the little things that make Aptos an incredible place to live and play.”
It’s a strategy that has scored Frey a lot of subscribers who are keenly interested in the area. And when they’re ready to buy or sell, Frey is at the top of their minds.
3. All Roads Lead to You
When you meet people during networking events, social gatherings, at the coffee shop or an open house, you have two choices. You could whip out the cell phone and collect contact information, but that could lead the conversation off topic and make you appear more interested in collecting contacts than being this person’s preferred REALTOR®.
Or you can focus on the conversation at hand, offer to follow up with additional information and in exchange, all the potential client has to do is subscribe to your email list. Here’s how it works. Create a designated contact page on your website specifically for signing up. Make sure your business card, handouts and email signature include the URL to this page—something as simple as YOURCOMPANYNAME.com/signup. Your business Facebook page and professional Twitter profile should also have this link.
4. Partner Up
Another way to expand your email base is by partnering with local businesses. “Say there’s a community business with an established email newsletter. Offer to write content for this newsletter,” Charest says. “I’d stay away from dedicated real estate and go with something like how to create the perfect guest room, energy saving advice, seasonal content or something that ties into the newsletter’s sponsor.”
Close your article with your contact information and make sure there’s a direct link to your website where people can join your list and receive the incentives you offer in exchange for their email address.
5. Don’t Buy Your Way In
Lastly, here’s an anti-tip. “Resist the urge to go down the purchased list road,” Charest says. “Those lists are often outdated, which can hurt your reputation more than help it.”
Charest compares purchased lists to cold calling. “You may hit a home run, but more often, when someone doesn’t recognize the email sender, that email is immediately deleted, or it may be opened, but only to officially unsubscribe from further emails, or to be tagged as junk or spam.”
At the end of the day, that’s the best and fastest way to deplete your email subscriber list.
Want more ideas on how to grow your list? Read 25 Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List.
