Grow Your Email Subscribers List: 9 Data-Backed Ways

Bamidele Onibalusi

2 months ago

What is the value of email subscribers to you?

For digital marketers, the term ‘email subscribers’ is as familiar as a morning coffee. But what does it mean, and why is it vital for your marketing strategy?

In essence, an email subscriber is someone who opts into receiving correspondence from your brand via email, providing a direct line of communication between you and your existing or potential customers.

According to Litmus, every dollar spent on email marketing has an ROI of $36. That’s impressive stuff.

Of course, the more email subscribers you have, the higher your potential conversions and revenue. The question then becomes: “How to grow your email subscribers list?” And how can you do it without spending a lot of money?

Take a look at 9 super-smart, data-backed ways to rapidly build up your email list on a budget:

1. Run Email Giveaways

People love free stuff. It’s human nature after all! And it’s why giveaways as a marketing tactic get results. In fact, 34% of new customers are acquired through giveaway contests.

A giveaway promotion that requires people to provide their email address to enter is a great way to increase your email subscriber list. People will be more tempted to provide their email address if it comes with the promise of a return.

Follow these steps to create an email giveaway campaign:

Choose the giveaway gift: Your giveaway offer could be anything, from a digital coupon for a free online order to a physical gift, such as an iPad. Depending on your business, you could offer an experience, such as a free dinner for two, a free workshop, or a three-month free subscription to an app or service.

Remember, your giveaway offer does not have to be expensive to be successful. As long as it is relevant and desirable to your target audience, the email addresses will flow in.

Decide how to run your giveaway: Create the rules for the giveaway. What date does the competition end? What regions are eligible? This is particularly important if you are shipping the gift, or if the winner must visit your store or business to collect the prize. Take advantage of online giveaway tools to set up the backend of the contest.
Promote your giveaway: Promote your giveaway contest via social media, native advertising, your website, and even in-store QR code posters and flyers. You will need to set up a landing page complete with a registration form to collect email addresses.

People love free giveaways, but any kind of incentive will help boost your email subscriber rate. That’s why 84% of US businesses use incentive marketing in one form or another.

If you don’t want to run a giveaway contest, then offer some other kind of incentive in exchange for signing up for your email list. The idea is to make signing up for emails attractive to the target audience.

Incentives come in many forms, such as discounts, free content (like e-courses, e-books, or guides), a free trial, free samples, and more.

Check out how fashion brand H&M does it. In exchange for signing up, email subscribers get 10% off their first purchase. Plus, the promise of future rewards, such as special prices and discounts.

Sometimes you don’t have to do giveaways or incentive marketing. You just need to include more opt-in forms at different times during the online journey on your website.

For example, rather than just having one opt-in form on the sidebar of your blog, you can include several email subscription forms, such as an entry popup (appears when the visitor lands on your website) sticky bar (a signup bar that stays at the bottom of the screen when the visitor scrolls), or an exit popup (appears when the visitor is about to leave your site).

For example, BigCommerce notes a nutrition brand that increased email opt-ins by 400%, just by adding an exit intent popup.

Achieving a similar result shouldn’t be hard:

Take a thorough look at your website and note how many different options users have to sign up.
If you have less than five different ways for people to sign up to your email list, you can most certainly double the available sign-up options or increase it significantly. Most email service providers will let you create different kinds of forms (including popups, exit pops, slide-in forms, and sidebar forms) that you can easily place all over your website.

Engaging through social media is an effective strategy for expanding your email subscriber list. It’s about leveraging the reach and interactive nature of social platforms to draw attention to your email content offerings. Begin by strategically placing your sign-up form link across your social media profiles – whether in the bio sections, pinned posts, or about pages.

Create attention-grabbing posts that highlight the exclusive benefits subscribers receive, such as early access to new products, insider tips, or special discounts. Use exciting images or GIFs, powerful calls-to-action (CTAs), and even snippets of valuable content to give a taste of what subscribers can expect. Align these posts with peak engagement times on each platform, so you get maximum visibility.

Consider using the interactive features of social media, such as polls in Instagram stories or X, where you can gauge interest in specific topics and direct followers to sign up for more in-depth content via email. For example, a beauty brand may use an Instagram poll to ask followers what skincare problems they’d like addressed, followed by a swipe-up link or bio link directing them to sign up for personalized skincare advice.

Video is also an important tool for social media engagement. In fact, 44% of people prefer learning about a new product or service on social media with video. Why not incorporate video in your email signup promotion? Combined with a giveaway or another incentive, this could be a game-changer for your email subscriber strategy.

5. Create Content/Category Specific Incentives

As discussed above, offering a sign-up incentive can give you a big boost in email subscriptions. Do you know what can boost it even more? Offering an incentive that is specific to a particular piece of content or category.

For example, many blogs have several different content categories. However, they offer just a single sign-up incentive throughout the site. Now imagine what happens when each of these categories has its own targeted sign-up incentive.

Here’s how Josh Earl did it with his blog, resulting in an immediate boost in subscriptions of 372 percent:

Identify your top five posts/categories based on traffic and performance.
Create a special sign-up incentive for each of these posts/categories, ensuring that each incentive is super-tailored to the post.
Using several relevant opt-in forms (in-content forms, pop-ups, etc) on the particular post involved, introduce the relevant sign-up incentive to readers.

6. Use Content Upgrades

Imagine if you could increase email subscriptions from key pages on your website with just a few hours of effort. Brian Dean of Backlinko did it, increasing email signup rate from 0.54% to 4.82%. How? With content upgrades.

But what is a content upgrade?

A content upgrade is an advanced version, more complete version, well-packaged version, or supplementary content, related to a piece of content a reader has just finished consuming.

The content upgrade is introduced immediately in the piece of content being read. What’s different about it, however, is that readers need to provide their email address to get it.

Here’s how to set up a content upgrade:

Determine how to package the content you want to add the upgrade to; you can do this by creating an advanced version of the content, by creating a different format of that content (PDF, video, etc), or by creating supplementary resources to help with using that content (worksheets, templates, etc.).
Hint at the fact that you will be offering a content upgrade in the introduction – you can also add a link for visitors to access the content upgrade right at the beginning of the current page.
To ensure user experience isn’t affected, use a triggered popup to get users to subscribe to the content upgrade. Make sure they can sign up using the popup without having to leave the content page they are currently reading.

7. Use a Website Overlay

When people visit a website, the usual options they have for signing up are a form featured on the sidebar, footer, or as a pop-up.

There’s another way that can convert a lot more than all the above options: the website overlay.

By using an overlay, people are shown an opt-in form that takes over the whole web page as soon as it opens. This opt-in form then disappears when they scroll down or click a button to remove it.

It turns out that an overlay opt-in form can be very powerful for boosting conversion rates. In an article for eConsultancy, WhichTestWon’s Justin Rondeau reports an increase in sign-ups of about 400 percent by using an overlay opt-in form.

8. Nudge Your Website Visitors

You’ve probably visited a website before and seen the following type of slide-in form:

In many cases, when you see a form like this, it is from websites looking to gather user feedback about a particular feature or even the entire website experience.

Many do not know, however, that this quiz-like, slide-in-style, opt-in form, known as a “nudge,” can be used to boost email subscriptions. In the example used above, the University of Alberta was able to boost subscriptions by 500 percent without experiencing a negative impact on open rates.

9. Try Native Advertising to Grow Email Subscribers

Native advertising, such as Outbrain, can be a highly effective strategy to promote your email subscriber list. Why? Because native ads appear on popular websites that your audiences like to visit, so the ad fits in naturally with their browsing experience.

The native ad then leads to a landing page, where you can promote content to draw the user in and allow them to opt-in to your email list.

To begin, create engaging, high-quality content that provides real value to your target audience. Include a clear, compelling CTA to encourage the user to sign up for emails; this can be combined with an incentive or offer for a stronger impact. Use eye-catching visuals and concise, persuasive text to highlight the benefits of subscribing, such as exclusive content, updates, or special offers.

Another huge benefit of native advertising is the targeting options. Focus your targeting on relevant audiences using demographic, behavioral, and interest-based data to ensure they reach potential subscribers who are more likely to be interested in signing up for your emails.

Grow UP Your Email Subscriber List

As you can see from the above examples, boosting your email subscriptions by as much as 500% (!) does not necessarily require you to pay massive amounts for ad traffic or hire expensive consultants. Instead, all you need to do is spare some extra hours or invest in the relevant apps that will allow you to implement the above ideas and you’re good to go.