Let's start with the bad news. Your email marketing database is shrinking in numbers all the time and every day that goes by, it's becoming more out of date. The good news is that we have 7 simple ways to grow your email database that you can implement right away.
I suppose the first rule is to make sure that your email content that you are sending out is awesome. This will naturally compel people to forward it on to friends and colleagues who are not on your email list. You want to make it easy for them to share your email content, so make sure you include social sharing buttons, an 'email to a friend' button and include a 'subscribe' button at the bottom of your email as a plain text link so that receivers can easily opt-in.
Add a link to the bottom of your employees' email signatures which directs people to your blog or landing page where they can subscribe to get more content from you.
Try finding a non-competitive partner that already emails your target audience and run a promotion on their newsletter. Your promotion could offer one of your free ebooks, guides, whitepapers or tools and if you have chosen your partner carefully, your offer should be of interest them. You could even do the same exercise for the partner so that you both benefits from extra valuable email subscribers.
Add a strong call to action (CTA) to the bottom of every blog post that reinforces the benefits of subscribing to your blog.
Create a new lead generation offer like a guide, white paper or ebook and design it so that visitors need to provide their email address to download the content. Remember, if you are asking for a visitor to provide their email address to download the content, you must make sure your content is useful and relevant. You are trying to build a prospects trust and the best way to start the relationship is by giving them quality content.
As an alternative, you could create a free online tool or resource that users need to sign up for with their email address. Ideas could include spreadsheet templates, workbooks etc but again, remember that it needs to be useful to the user and worthy of them entering their email address to get it.
Find out what your best performing content offers are and feature them on your homepage so that visitors can easily find them. If these great offers require visitors to signup to get them, you don't want them hidden throughout your site, show them off and test other places on your site that generate the most registrations.
I hope that you find these tips useful, we plan to add more soon so please subscribe to our blog and we will keep you up to date.