When it comes to marketing, there are many different areas and types. These range from Facebook marketing to magazine ads to podcast sponsorships. However, one of the best forms of marketing is still email marketing. A recent study that Campaign Monitor has written about concluded that your message is 5x more likely to be seen through email marketing than on Facebook. Even better, click-through rate is 6x better in emails than on Twitter.
Getting Started with an Email Mailing List
So, if email marketing is so good, why are more people not doing it? Well, there are many reasons why email marketing can be difficult, but growing your mailing list is one of the challenges that you will face. The reason why so many people have difficulty growing their list is because most people treat the mailing list as an after thought. They place a small subscription form at the bottom of one of their webpages or have a small checkbox in a widget on certain pages asking for users to sign up to their newsletter.
However, to have success in growing your mailing list, you have to offer something of value to the user that they feel is worth giving you their email address for. For example, a marketing expert may offer a 5 day email course where they teach a user about marketing. To gain access to the course, a user would have to register using their email address. Then, the course will start being sent to them and they are now on your mailing list.
If you do not have a mailing list yet for your site or business, you should start one right away. There are many studies like the one I have already mentioned that show that email marketing is one of the best ways to reach new users and retain them. I personally use ConvertKit for the Quiz And Survey Master mailing list and have found it to be one of the best that I have ever used.
Using Quizzes and Surveys
Another way that you can encourage users to sign up is to place feedback behind email. You can do this by creating a quiz or survey and then telling the user that they must sign up for your mailing list to get the results. For example, one Quiz And Survey Master user has created a carbohydrate tolerance quiz. The visitor is told that the results will be emailed to them and then asks for the visitors name and email. The visitor is then emailed the results as well as being added to the mailing list. Since starting this quiz a few months ago, she has been able to increase her mailing list by over 1,500 subscribers. Even better, the quiz converts 54% of users that land on the page. Compare that to the usual popup that converts around 10% to 15%.
So, how do you get started? First, think of your target audience and what they are going to your site for. Now, think about what would they like to see personalized a little more for them. If you are running a recipe blog, perhaps you could have a quiz that helps the user discover a list of spices that might be good to try in their cooking. If you are running a fitness site, have a quiz that tells helps a user discover areas they can improve in.
Once you created your quiz or survey, it is now time to add the quiz and survey takers to your mailing list. There are a variety of ways you can do this within Quiz And Survey Master. You can manually move one at a time as they come in. Just copy and paste from the Results page or from you admin emails as they come in. If you want to automate it a little, you can use the Export Results Addon to export a list of all the emails and names from the quiz to import into your email service. However, I find the easiest solution is to use an addon for your email service that automatically adds them for you. I have created addons for all of the most popular email services and can be found on the Addons page. Lastly, if there isn’t an addon available, you can use the Zapier Addon to use Zapier to retrieve the name and email of the user and then send it to your email service.
Have you already been using a quiz or survey to grow your email list? Share your quiz or survey with us in the comments so everyone can see how you did it!
