How To Build Email List From 500 To 2000 In 6 Months?

Beyond Execute
13 min readAug 24, 2021

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Image source: Snov.io

Before we step into how I build my email list from 500 to 2000 subscribers in 6 months, it’s important to know what is Email marketing and why we should give email Marketing first priority over social media.

If you are running a business, Email marketing is the most effective way to reach people universally. You can reach and engage with people who love your product or content.

Read: This Is How I Collected My First 500 Email Subscribers.

What is Email Marketing?

It’s a form of Marketing that uses Electronic Mail as a means of communicating about your business commercial or raising funds. Sending an email to a potential or current customer is considered Email Marketing.

Why Email Marketing gives better ROI to your Business?

  1. Almost 34% of people in the world use Email. It’s about 2.5 billion people and you can reach them through email marketing.
  2. Email Marketing is easy, effective, and inexpensive which allows people to reach the internet world.
  3. When you think for ten years in a row, Email is the only channel generating the highest ROI for Marketers. As per the research of the Direct Marketing Association, for each dollar spent, email marketing generates $40 ROI. The Email is Transactional by Nature, and you can use it to making direct traffic and sales to your site.
  4. When you use email marketing software you can track who opened the email and how clicked the links in it.

You can quickly get track of how your email campaigns are performing, and you can make adjustments or improvements to it. If you want to know how successful is your email campaigns compared to your competitors you can also have a look at the chart Provided by ConvertKit.

A lot of email marketing software lets you do A/B testing. A/B testing reveals the wealth of data about your subscribers. Are they generally responding for better to tempting subject lines like “it’s Free,” “Get 20 per cent off”?

They might be more open to a softer intro included in the script. All these factors can be tested, measured, and improved upon the testing.

  1. Mobile devices are so common, and people are checking their emails all the time when they are in the office, grocery stores, waiting rooms, or a doctor’s place. A study reports that 91% of people use smartphones to access their Email.

Steps To Build A Massive Email List In 6 Months.

1. Email Marketing Service

For Email Marketing Services I have used and experimented with many, but I would only recommend the one I liked the most: ConvertKit.

Convertkit

It’s an Email service provider it is specifically marketed towards bloggers, podcasters, and other small businesses that are building targeted audiences for their Business. I like ConvertKit’s Visual automation editor feature, especially when you are comparing it to some of the other automation editors’ tools out there.

This tool makes editing of each step in your automation workflow seamless. In ConvertKit, Each and Everything is done inside the automation editor itself.

  • Convertkit offers a free trial, so you can see if it fits you. (Update: it also offers a forever free plan also)
  • It’s less expensive.
  • You can build multiple email lists for different reasons.
  • You can put tags and create segments.
  • ConvertKit offers multiple email designs and landing page designs you can choose from.
  • Easy to start with.

Start by signing up for ConvertKit.

Recommended: ConvertKit Guide For Beginners That Save Time & Increase Revenue

2. Work On Optin Form

Once you decide to start email marketing for your Business Growth and development. The next thing you need to do is get OptinMonster:

It helps you to create smarter opt-in forms, and they do A/B tests without any developer. It’s easy and quick to create dynamic, targeted, and personalized Optin forms that can integrate into your site.

And you have an option to make it sometimes appear and to specific people who are browsing your site that can maximize your conversions. What many people do is just put in an opt-in form on their website and wait for people to sign up. But this doesn’t work very well. To grow your email list, you should attract people with offers.

Creating an opt-in form that converts is the first thing that you need to do to create an email list. The components to be present in the OptinMonster way are these.

The headline should clearly describe the benefit of your lead magnet. The description should be brief and to the point. Use bullet points to attract readers.

3. Places to put your sign-up form to grow your email list

Once you have your signup form, you need to place it in highly converting positions. These are the places where I have put and got a high converting rate and subscribers.

  • Splash page
  • Your site’s header
  • Blog archive page
  • Within your blog posts
  • Your sidebar
  • In a timed lightbox popup
  • Your footer
  • Your About page
  • Resource pages
  • On a designated sign-up page
  • In a scroll box
  • Welcome gate
  • Floating bar
  • In an exit-intent popup

4. Do email List Segmentation

Most of the Email Marketing Experts tell you to build a fantastic email list and give tips and steps to follow, but they don’t talk about the importance of segmentation. Email List segmentation is a process of breaking your subscribers into smaller groups based on the specific criteria and categories so that you can send them more personalized emails.

Instead of sending everyone the same kind of emails, you can segment it which allows you to assign each Email only to those specific subscribers who you think will be the most interested in the content.

Segmenting your email list has proven to increase your Email open rates, boost your click-through rates, and also decrease your unsubscribe rates. That’s why some smart marketers Make use of segmentation to improve the effectiveness of their email campaigns drastically.

Once you’ve “tagged” in your subscribers into different segments in your email list, you’ll be able to send powerful autoresponders–which are series of emails that are sent out automatically based on certain conditions which you applied.

  • New subscribers send a welcome email or a welcome series.
  • Different segments for subscribers who would like to hear about blog posts vs. the ones who only want sale notifications.
  • Notify subscribers who live in your area or location about your local event happening.
  • Reward and award your more engaged subscribers with a special offer just for them to increase the open rate.
  • Remind your subscribers who haven’t engaged for a while of the next step you want them to take up.
  • Send specifically targeted emails based on the topic of the lead magnet that they are looking for.
  • Remind your subscribers who put items in their cart that they haven’t checked out yet.

5. Increase your Email open rates

  • Improve your open rates, avoid spam filters, remove inactive subscribers to keep your list fresh.
  • Be perfect with your timing, timing has a significant effect on whether or not subscribers open and click your emails, perform a/b test and find the time and day you want to send your emails.
  • Your subject lines are everything. When it comes to free email and click-through rates, your only job is to make your subject lines stand out.
  • When you are writing your emails, put your corporate hat aside, and you write like a friend, and this is the only way to appeal to your subscribers and get them to open and click your emails.
  • You might think that once a subscriber opens your email, you’ve won the race. But, the actual content of your Email also plays an essential role, which you can see if they have clicked the link.
  • Inject some Humor in your email content. Humour has a way of making a secure, straightaway connect with the people, and it’s personal, entertaining, and sticks out in peoples’ minds.
  • Make sure the Email is mobile friendly and in a responsive format with loadable media. Also, you can consider the fact that mobile screens are smaller, so long subject lines won’t be viewable on mobile devices.

Techniques to Grow Your Email List

1. Create exceptional email content

Your content has to be fantastic if you want people to stay subscribed and forward the emails to their network. If it’s more entertaining, they always look forward to reading your emails.

2. Encourage subscribers to share and send your emails

Include social sharing buttons and an Email to a friend button in your promoting emails. That way, you may gain access to their friends, colleagues, and networks and expand your contact list. At the very bottom of your emails, include a “Subscribe” CTA as a straightforward text-based link, so the people receiving the forwarded emails will only opt-in to it.

3. You should segment your email lists by buyer persona

Use varying types of email subscriptions to send the additional targeted content to specific segments of your promoting personas. Email recipients will be more likely to click on the emails that have explicit material about their interests, so if you segment your email list according to your consumers’ interests, it’s easy to increase the open rate of your Email.

4. Create an attractive opt-in message

Emailing your engaged contacts may improve your deliverability, and it will increase the chances of your email getting shared with those outside your current contact information.

5. Link to your employees’ signatures

Hyperlinked email signatures will lead people to a landing page where they will sign in for your email listing. Plus, if you are already in natural email communication with them, subscribing to additional emails is an added advantage.

6. Promote a web contest

Use your social media accounts to host a free giveaway in exchange for contact info. Encourage entrants to click through to your website and sign in using their email address.

7. Promote one of your lead-generation offers on Twitter

Create one Twitter campaign which promotes an ebook or a pdf, free resource to your followers that need an email address to redeem.

8. Promote a proposal through Facebook that requires an email address

Promote content on your Facebook Timeline that your followers will sign up to access. Add all social sharing buttons to the landing pages and thank-you pages you send them to encourage your leads so as to share those offers with their networks.

9. Add a call-to-action button at the top of your Facebook Business Page

We have added call-to-action (CTAs) on our Facebook page for HubSpot Academy. The value in the list building technique is within the destination: Link your Facebook page’s CTA button to a landing page that needs an email address for access to a limited resource.

10. Publish links which are leading to offers via social media

Use your Facebook Business Page or a LinkedIn Company Page to post links to equivalent gated offers you may also host on your blog posts. You can do this inappropriate and relevant LinkedIn groups and discussions — be conscious of the subject being discussed to make sure your offer is a welcome addition to the conversation.

11. Use Pinterest to push gated visual content

Pinterest is a visual content that encourages guests to sign in to ascertain additional content. For instance, the brand company created a Pinterest board wherever we tend to pin the well-designed covers of our promoting ebooks.

Recommended: Guide on Pinterest Marketing: How to improve your reach?

12. Ask website visitors for feedback

People are happy to give feedback on info that pertains to them. On specific pages of your website, include a form that asks visitors what queries they could have all about your Business. You might also create a live chat that invites questions from visitors and their email addresses who had stayed on your website for a certain amount of time.

13. Shorten the length of your lead-capturing forms

You might be excited to collect all the details of a user as possible right away, but adding too many fields to your landing pages and lead-capturing forms can scare people off. Reduce the length of your ways to just two to three areas you can collect the information you need from them once they start a conversation.

Recommended: How To Setup Website For SEO That Brings Organic Traffic?

14. Link to offers across your website that capture email signups

Don’t make people find around your site to subscription options. Keep your suggestions up and front, and include calls-to-action on multiple pages of your website. Some key places to consider are your website’s homepage; you’re ‘About Us’ page and your ‘Contact Us’ page.

15. A/B test different campaign copy

You might be doing all the right things to generate leads — Like landing pages, gated content, contests, and much more. Here the problem might be that the design or copy itself isn’t driving the engagement that you need. A/B test or a split test different aspects of your list-building campaigns with different versions of the same content.

Include the call-to-action in your text, the consistent time of day you’re doing posting on social media channels, and even where on your website these signup forms are placed. Sometimes a small change can drive hundreds of more conversions.

16. Create a blog that your visitors can subscribe to

If you don’t already blog, you should! Blog because the articles that help you to increase your page ranking on search engines like Google, bing, and allow you to collect blog subscribers that you can then upgrade to more actionable email campaigns over time and which builds the high amount of organic traffic to your site.

17. Do Guest blogging for other websites with a call-to-action

There are many websites and publishers out there that can target your audience and more significant parts of it. Guest blogging for the websites helps you expand your contact list to the audience. When you are creating valuable and engaging content as a guest blogger for some other website and include a call-to-action, as well as a link in your author byline, for the readers and to subscribe to your blog or email newsletter.

18. Include customer reviews and Ratings on your website and on landing pages that you created.

Customer reviews are one of the best “social proof,” which encourages people to join. It’s one of the best things for you to tell the people to sign up, but it’s another thing for your happy customer to say it too. You can Publish your best reviews from communities like Yelp and others right to your website. Reports add genuine value to your landing pages when people are on the fence about submitting their contact information.

19. Run a webinar with other influencers

You can find an influencer who has an email list of 6K+ subscribers and ask the influencers to do a webinar with them on a topic that is relevant to their customers.

20. Recording a video course and give it away to your consumers

You might get the idea by now that you need to offer them something which adds value to the reader in return for their email address and info you are collecting. A video course is something special, and it shows you have covered the extra mile for them to create something with TONS of value for your readers.

Final things

The first and foremost thing is, you shouldn’t build your email list by sending a bunch of cold leads and especially using unethical tactics like promising something you’re not planning to give them.

The best way to grow your email list is to ask someone outright if they’d want to subscribe by offering free things or informative content. It is that simple. Mostly what you’re doing is offering something that your audience would find valuable, but accessing they’ll have to sign up to your mailing list.

That’s mostly it; there are no tricks or sneaky tactics. Letting people know that you have something to offer that you know they’d like for free. All they have to do is to access it through the signup form.

When we created our lead magnets, we had the goal of making our free stuff better than most paid stuff out there in the market.

All you’re aiming to offer as much value as possible in its purest form. The only tricky bit is making sure that you know your audience well enough to be offering something that you know they will like.

Recommended: 13 Content Marketing Tools You Need To Start Your Blog With

Are You Ready To Build Your Email List?

Whether you might be aiming to be the hottest or new tech startup in Silicon Valley, or just opening up a gym in your location, learning how to grow a successful email list should always be your number one priority.

If you’re smart enough about it, you might be able to generate 100 emails each month. If you’re lucky, you might even get on an average of around 2,000 new subscribers per month. But we made 20,000+ email subscribers in 6 months and I have listed out everything that I’ve done behind the scenes to get to this amount.

I don’t want to lie to you. It takes a fair amount of time and preparation to build your authority and grow your email list up to this point. But I can guarantee that if you start implementing the tactics that I’ve listed out here, you can increase your conversion rate and build one of the most important resources you’ll need as an entrepreneur.

What’s the story behind building an email list, and what tactics you’re going to start implementing to explode rapidly? 👇🏻🤩

Make sure you follow me on Pinterest, Subscribe to our email list, and check out the online course.

(This post may contain(s) affiliate links. That means I do get compensated every time someone buys from these links at no cost to you.)

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