While building your social media following is important, you’re more likely to create conversions by moving your social media audience to your email list.
Email marketing remains the best marketing tool with the highest ROI – it boasts a return of 44$ for every dollar spent.
Getting your followers’ emails allows you to connect with them directly, more so than you would on social media. If you segment your emails, you can personalize content to increase your email open rates and boost conversions.
Building your email list also acts as a backup plan. It’s difficult to ensure that you’ll be able to reach your social media audience in an organic way.
By driving more of your followers to your email list, you can reach out to them directly by sending an email blast.
In this post, we’ll look at ways you can build your email by leveraging social media. Let’s begin.
Create giveaways
A giveaway is always exciting as everyone loves to get something for free. It gives you the opportunity to connect with your audience on social media and boost your brand visibility.
With the help of a giveaway plugin, create a giveaway contest and add features where your audience member can participate by signing up with their email.
Since they’re getting a benefit from participating, people will be more willing to drop either emails.
Add a ‘Send an email’ button on your Facebook page
There’s a simple step that many businesses miss – make it easy for users to email you. You have the option to add a ‘Send an Email’ button on your Facebook page. Potential customers who want to reach out to your can use the button and you’ll have their contact details and message land in their inbox.
Use this opportunity to respond to them and to also ask them to subscribe to your newsletter. Remember, you can’t send email content to people who haven’t explicitly stated that they want to get your emails. Adding them to your email list without permission violates GDPR laws.
The step of adding an email button to social media, however, gives you new avenues to build an email list.
Add calls to action
Adding a single line to your social media posts can make a difference to how your audience responds. At the end of a social media video or in the text portion of your social media posts, ask your audience to subscribe to your email newsletters.
Create a compelling reason for them to do so. How about creating an awesome lead magnet? With the holidays already here, you can offer a guide for last minute shopping ideas or give your audience a simple discount. By creating a lead magnet and sharing it on social media or adding it to your posts, you’ll build greater engagement and see your email list grow longer in a very short time.
Leverage ads
Breaking through social networks and making your posts go viral is a hit-or-miss game. With misses being the norm. Social networks keep how their algorithms work a secret and it takes considerable effort and luck to consistently get views and engagement on places like Facebook.
However, if there’s a guaranteed way to get more eyeballs on social media, it’s by using ads.
Working with advertising options is a good idea because you have access to two things:
- The ability to define your audience based on demographics and interests
- Reports that enable you to test and scale your efforts
All social networking sites have business platforms where you can create campaigns to achieve specific goals. Take a look at ad campaign options that allow you to build leads. Many social networks will let you upload your leads to your CRM automatically, making it easy for you to manage your lead base.
Interestingly, you can learn how to leverage social networks and their advertisement options well by doing online courses. Facebook has online classes that share best practices, lead generation tactics, and more. It also has courses for making great Instagram ads. Pinterest also has a Pinterest Academy where you can learn how to engage with your audience on the platform.
So, you can either dive in, build social media ads, and learn on the go or you can learn from the social network academies and grow your business.
Promote gated content
Your audience will be willing to give you their email address when you have something of value to offer to them. Exclusive content that’s available only behind a gated page is one such item of value.
Gated sites or membership websites are places where only members can access content. This content can be in the form of blog posts, educational videos, or even forum discussions. Such a gated type of offering allows you to create a feeling of exclusivity and preference. It also helps you keep conversations on a specific topic, especially when the content being gated involves specific community-generated content.
A plugin like MemberPress will help you turn your WordPress site into a membership platform easily. What’s cool is that you can always add features to make it just the kind of membership site you want – from online courses to forums.
By building gated content, you create curiosity and also a powerful reason for your social media audience to be a part of your email list.
Conclusion
We’ve looked at several powerful tactics to turn your social media audience into members of your email list.
Remember that building your email list is just the start of your conversion strategies. You also need to segment your list, send timely and relevant emails, and gather feedback.
Keep working on social media and deliberately move your followers to be part of your email list. You’ll always have a way to connect with your audience directly and protect your business.
—
Syed Balkhi is an award-winning entrepreneur and online marketing expert. He is the co-founder of OptinMonster, WPBeginner, MonsterInsights, and WPForms.