How to Find and Get Loyal Subscribers

TL;DR: Grow your email list to enhance your marketing efforts and meet your audience where they’re at.

Finding Your Audience

Finding your audience is a challenge we all face. The good news is, you don’t need to be a social media guru or a tech-savvy savant. The solution is simple: meet your audience where they are. To grow your list, you need to first discover where your audience likes to engage.  

Email is your bread and butter, making your email list an incredibly valuable asset. Unlike social media, where followers can be affected by platform changes (hello, “TikTok scare”!), your email list is entirely in your control. Plus, you don’t have to be a marketing expert to see real results. The more engaged and relevant your subscribers are, the better you’ll be at achieving your goals – whether it’s generating more sales, finding more volunteers, or simply getting your name out there.

Let’s Start with the Hard Stuff: Growing a List

Growing a contact list is no small feat. If it were easy, you’d consistently exceed your goals. Whether you're a new brick-and-mortar store, a restaurant, a blogger, someone who has left the corporate world to strike out on your own, or you have a passion you’re turning into a side hustle, the process can be overwhelming. And simply asking someone to sign up for your contact list isn't enough.

To grow your list, you’ll need:

• A recognizable brand and compelling offering

• Traffic, both online and in-store

• Effective methods to convert your traffic into subscribers

Here’s a plan to simplify your marketing efforts and ease your mind:

Develop an Acquisition Strategy: Setting up landing pages or sign-up forms is just the start. Actively run campaigns and consider offering incentives to attract subscribers. Design these campaigns to engage your audience and provide value, making them more likely to sign up.

Sort Subscribers into Lists and Segments: Collecting email addresses is just the first step. Sort your subscribers into different lists or tag them based on their interests and behaviors. This allows you to send personalized campaigns, which are much more effective at building loyalty than generic, one-size-fits-all messages.

Create Instant Loyalty with Automations: Set up a welcome campaign to train new subscribers to look for your brand in their inbox. This initial engagement can set the tone for a long-term relationship and increase the likelihood of future interactions.

Choose Your Channel: More consumers are opting for text messages from brands they trust. Text messaging offers a dedicated number that contacts can use to subscribe to both emails and texts. Since people are on their phones daily, this channel can significantly enhance the accessibility and reach of your campaigns. Note that SMS is only available to United States Customers! 

Create More Loyal Contacts: Use automated campaigns and behavioral segmentation to ensure you send the right message at the right time. This personalized approach helps build stronger, more loyal relationships with your contacts.

Find Your Fanbase: Increase your brand’s visibility and build your base faster by using integrated forms, event promotions, social media posts, and text-to-join options with the SMS add-on. Upgrade to a Premium plan, which can provide additional tools like look-alike audiences and SEO optimization, further enhancing your ability to reach and engage potential subscribers.

Meet Your Subscribers

Before you started your business plan, you had a good idea of who you wanted to appeal to. The next step is finding subscribers who align with your mission. You need to determine who they are, where they are, and what you want to say to them – or, conversely, what they want to hear from you.

Create compelling reasons for people to share their emails and stay in touch with your updates. To keep the word-of-mouth marketing domino effect going, you need to consistently build connections and provide value.

Now that you have the strategies, let’s find your audience:

You already have a small list: This is a perfect place to start. Email your current list,  include a link to a landing page, and ask them to forward it to a friend. Word-of-mouth is very powerful. And don’t forget to set up automations to email your best customers after certain milestones to turn them into your influencers.

Prospects coming to your store: Post a QR code for quick email opt-in at the counter. Use the ListBuilder tablet app to capture their emails, or integrate your point-of-sale platform with Constant Contact to automatically add them to your marketing list. Consider running a sweepstakes to get people to opt into your mailing list. Or incentive sign up by  automatically sending a discount right to their inbox when they subscribe.

Prospects are showing interest: Host an event! Events can be done in person or via an online webinar. Then turn those RSVPs into email engagements. Use the event promotion tool to capture sign-ups, sell tickets, send emails, and create an event landing page.

Prospects on your website: Set up sign-up forms on several of your web pages to capture their attention. Offer incentives, like discounts or whitepapers (educational materials), in exchange for their email address. Use Constant Contact’s sign-up forms by adding code to your website, or if your website platform has sign-up forms already, integrate it with Constant Contact for instant list-building.

Low traffic on your site: Consider upgrading to Premium for personalized SEO optimization tips to help drive more traffic, or use paid Google and Facebook ads to capture attention and drive site visitors. Premium also offers Facebook look-alike audiences, so you can target people who resemble your current customers.

Prospects are on social media: Set up an integrated landing page, fun interactive quiz with Constant Contact, and then create social posts or social ads that link to your landing page. Run your promotion or posts multiple times to truly drive those subscriptions.

Prospects prefer texting: Add text marketing to your toolbelt and set up a text-to-join option so your fans can text their information to a dedicated phone number for instant opt-in. Use texts to send links to your emails. In the 21st century, it’s hard to resist opting in, especially when the message comes right to their device!

Once you have prospects populating a list, it’s important to manage your lists. This helps you discover different ways to capture leads and refine your process. The last piece to growing your subscriber lists is maintaining and pruning them as you begin to grow. Continue growing and ditch the unengaged. 

Why List Buying Doesn’t Work

You might be asking yourself, “this seems like a lot of work. Can’t I just buy a list?”  It’s common for small businesses to get offers to buy lists, but purchasing email lists often leads to low engagement and high bounce rates. However, we want our customers to only send emails to contacts who truly want to receive them. That’s why we require you to have permission from all of your contacts in order to email them or send SMS marketing campaigns to them. 

Building an organic email list through value, content, and incentives is an incredibly effective and sustainable strategy in the long run. Learn more about why purchasing contact lists is a bad choice for your business and why you should avoid that route at all costs.