The Best Ways to Grow Your Email List as an Ecommerce Brand
Introduction
For drop shipping online stores, the newsletter is like a digital shopping flyer and one of the best marketing tools out there. Make no mistake – email marketing can dramatically contribute to your business. To highlight some of the stats for using email marketing in your online store:
- It has a 4400% ROI ($44 earned for each $1 spent) (Campaign Monitor)
- Average order value is three times than social media (McKinsey)
- 61% of customers prefer email contact from brands (Adobe)
Email helps you keep in touch with your customers, but also to grow and build a community of potential customers and interested audience. The more time and effort you put into your email list, the more you will profit from it.
Growing a high-quality, converting email list is not easy, but you can use some of these hacks to speed up the process. We are bringing you some of the best ways to grow your email list and increase sales for your dropshipping business:
1. Offer Special Discounts for Newsletter Subscribers
No one can resist a good discount deal. If someone is browsing through your online store and a sign-up form pops up, offering a 10% or 15% discount on their next purchase, they are very likely to sign up (even if they don’t plan on buying anything yet!).
Discounts and sales are a marketing tool as old as time. Utilize this powerful psychological trick to boost your sales and don’t be afraid to hand out some perks in return for a qualified lead.
Some of the biggest eCommerce brands use this email capturing technique. Alibaba and AliExpress, the leading Chinese dropshipping providers, offer coupons and discounts for new users who sign up using their email address.
2. Organize a Raffle with An Email Subscription Entry Condition
Instead of buying email lists, it’s much wiser and effective to invest some funds into a prize raffle. As a pre-condition to enter the game, users should enter their email address.
Organizing such a game will introduce consumers to your brand, they will see who you are and what kind of products you sell. Most importantly, the entrants to the raffle have shown a wish to own your product. In some cases, a negative result from the raffle will motivate some users to purchase the product themselves.
You will be surprised by how many email subscribers you can capture through a simple product giveaway. After it’s done, you will be left with a precious list of potential customers who have chosen to keep in touch with your brand.
3. Offer Exclusive Stuff for Email Subscribers
People will sign up for a newsletter with absolutely no problem if you offer them content that interests them in return. Many dropshipping brands offer secret discounts and promo codes for users who subscribe to their email newsletters.
Here, you can let your creativity loose and offer perks that will inspire your visitors to subscribe. You can opt for physical products such as brand swag (pens, T-shirts, posters, etc.), but it’s much more cost-effective to go with a digital product.
Another great and effective idea is to develop a hidden section of your online store with exclusive and limited products. People love mystery and feeling like they are let in on a secret.
If you share the password to this hidden store section with email subscribers, they will feel privileged and will be more likely to make a purchase.
4. Connect Email Subscription Forms to Social Media
Use the immense power of social media! If you’re using MailChimp for sending out email newsletters, you can integrate it with Facebook using a few simple steps. If you have automated your dropshipping process with ShopMaster, you can easily import the email list from your database and use it in your marketing efforts.
After you do that, an email subscription form will be shown on your online store’s Facebook page. If you visit Facebook pages of some of the biggest dropshipping brands, you will notice that they usually have an email subscription button as their Facebook page custom call to action button.
Next to Facebook, Twitter is also a very effective social media platform when it comes to integrating email subscription forms.
5. Display Your Email Subscription Form Frequently and Visibly
Maybe there are some users that want to subscribe to your email newsletter, but the form is hidden somewhere in the footer section. Pay attention to user experience and design and place your forms strategically.
They shouldn’t be too intrusive and aggressive, but they should be visible and attractive enough so that they manage to get the customer’s attention.
Depending on how strongly you want to prioritize email marketing, you can also introduce a pop-up window with a subscription form for each new visitor. This strategy is still under debate, as some marketers consider it too intrusive for UX. However, it’s a guaranteed way of each and every one of your visitors seeing and having access to your form.
Less aggressive positions for placing email subscription forms include:
- Menu buttons
- Sidebar area
- Blog posts
- ‘About us’ section
6. Add a Newsletter Signup Checkbox at Checkout
This is the most commonly practiced way of capturing email addresses, used by the majority of drop shippers. According to new data privacy laws, customers have to give their consent that they want their email to enter your store’s database.
However, in the checkout section, when your customer is entering payment and delivery info, you can add a newsletter sign up box that’s automatically checked.
To opt-out, users will have to manually click on the checkbox. Some users will do this, but you will still be left with a hefty rate of users who agree to sign up for your email newsletter. And the result? A list of high-quality leads that have already purchased some of your products and asked to hear about more!
Conclusion
Even though social media has experienced an explosive boom, email marketing is still the number one marketing method for eCommerce drop shippers. It enables you to tap into audiences that have expressed interest in your brand and your products.
Also, it allows a much more personalized approach than communication via social media and other channels. Custom communication is one of the most valuable new marketing strategies which guarantee a higher conversion rate.
No matter if you’re an active user of email marketing or you’re just at the beginning, there is always room for improvement. Your email list can theoretically grow to billions, and the more addresses on your list, the bigger the profits!
Source: ShopMaster
