According to Campaign Monitor, “For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI.”
Such is the power of connecting with your audience via email.
If the figure isn’t enough to convince you of the importance of building an email list, then here’s another pertinent data that you need to know about it.
“61 percent of consumers enjoy receiving promotional emails weekly. 38 percent would like emails to come even more frequently.” (Source)
When you think about the massive 3,800% ROI and how consumers are itching to get promotional emails, it becomes clear as day to any business owner that list building should be one of their priorities when marketing their businesses on the internet.
The good news is, that’s not all there is to list building.
In addition to helping you with your ROI — which in and of itself can be satisfying enough — let’s look into some of the other reasons why building your list is important for your business.
1. Relationship building.
Establishing your relationship with your audience becomes a lot easier when you have them on your email list.
Because your audience already signed up to your newsletters, they’ve already given you their permission to send them regular messages.
This makes it easier for you to connect with your audience on a deeper level since they will most likely accept (and read) your email messages.
Contrast that to how they would react to cold email messages. #ReportToSpam
Bonus tip: Be strategic with your relationship building efforts.
While building a relevant list with the right buying intent is crucial, another consideration that you can include is your audiences’ number of followers.
In short, focus on targeting the influencers in your industry.
After all, if these influencers will take the time to tell their followers about your brand (their followers usually number by the thousands, by the way), then your brand visibility and reputation will improve.
Not only that, but your list will grow exponentially as well.
If you’re oblivious about finding your influencers’ email address, then you can use email checker tools like VoilaNorbert.
Just by adding your prospect’s name and their website in VoilaNorbert’s search box, the tool can “crawl” the site to find your prospects’ email address.
Here’s how the result would look after you click the “Go Ahead, Norbert” button.
You can even send your email messages from within the platform.
2. Make your brand memorable.
If you’ll give Worldometer a quick gander, the chances are you’ll see that there are over 2.5 million blog posts written daily.
The figure is rapidly increasing, by the way. And depending on the time of the day you’re looking at their site, you might see a bigger figure.
What I’m pointing out is simple.
Your audience is faced with bajillions of distractions on the internet every.single.day.
And if you aren’t engaging them regularly, they’ll most likely forget about you.
That is why it’s crucial that you get them to sign up to your list so you can send them regular newsletters sharing with them tips, inspirational messages, or even special offers.
Sending them these regular messages will remind them about their connection with your company.
Bonus tip: In addition to engaging your audience through your newsletters, you can also send them text messages.
This bit is worth pointing out since 80% of internet users own a smartphone.
Remember that if these smartphone users aren’t connected to the internet, then they won’t be able to receive your email messages.
Such is not the case with text messages, however, since you don’t need an internet connection to receive texts.
You can use mobile marketing tools like Linktexting.com to send your audience a text message with the right link to your web page, making it easier for them to download your apps or visit your website.
At this point, not only will your company be visible to your audience through their email’s inbox, they’d even be reminded of you while scrolling through their mobile phone’s inbox.
(Source)
3. Capitalize on repeat business.
Here’s a question: After your audience buys from you, do you take the time to store their email addresses?
I hope you answered that with a “yes,” because if you didn’t, then you’d have left truckloads of money on the table.
Here’s the thing. When you have your customers on a list, you’d be in a better position to gain their trust.
You can do this by sending them helpful tips, featuring them on your community, or sending them freebies, even.
Of course, the more trustworthy you seem to them, the easier it becomes for you to keep on selling them your new products at reasonable intervals.
This means that you’ll be able to leverage repeat business.
As you can probably imagine, if you didn’t store your customer’s email addresses, then you’d have to reach out to them in the future (once again) as if you are both total strangers.
Bonus tip: If you’re struggling with building your list, one of the best marketing methods you can use is webinars.
There are several ways webinars can help you with your list building.
For one thing, you can run webinars demonstrating to your audience how to solve their problems (through your products). Then at the end of your webinar, you can have them sign up to your newsletters.
Depending on how you structure your presentation, you can either have them sign up at the beginning of your webinar, after the webinar, or even before the webinar starts.
Whichever route you’ll choose, I urge you to add value first before asking them to sign up. Doing so will increase your conversion rate.
Conclusion
With all the data that we shared, the points we covered, and even the benefits of email marketing, the importance of list building is undeniable.
Companies who don’t take the time to build their list will only miss out on all its benefits. Or worse, they might even be outgunned by their competitors, leaving them on the gutters.
Now you don’t want that to happen to your business, do you?
What’s next?
Have you been building your email list?
What are some of the strategies that you’re using that managed to bring you truckloads of sign ups?
If you have something epic to share, then please take the time to add your ideas in the comments section below.