How to Use Your Blog to Grow Your Email List

With so many blogs in existence, the bloggers who go the extra mile tend to reap the greatest rewards. Nowadays, going the extra mile can mean focusing on creating and growing an email list. Email is one of the most powerful channels to communicate with your valuable audience. It reminds people of what you offer and is very personal. Plus, if you have a blog, enticing your readers to sign up for your emails isn’t hard. This article will share helpful tips on how to use your blog to grow your email list.

Make it easy for people to sign-up

Occasionally you’ll observe a website or blog that has an email list, but the sign-up form is buried in some obscure place people can’t find. You don’t want to make it difficult to sign-up. If you’re going to put in the effort to craft great emails, you should boldly promote it. Have several prominent sign-up forms to make it easy for anyone to sign-up!

Add a call-to-action (CTA) to the end of every article or post

When it comes to online content, the more direct and the less vague the better. A CTA button points a blog reader in the right direction of subscribing to your email newsletter. You could tell the readers “Did you like this post? Exclusive content is free on our email list.” The CTA button could say “Sign me up.”

Send unique content in your email newsletter

A way to lose subscribers is to copy blog posts in your email newsletter. There must be an incentive to subscribe and that means different, unique content. If the reader starts reading your email and realizes it’s something they already saw on the blog, it will annoy them and they may unsubscribe. Even worse, they may mark you as spam. So, whenever you craft your newsletter, make sure to include at least one piece of content your audience can’t find anywhere else.

Use cross-promotion

Cross-promotion is a great idea. Just as you want to provide links to your social media channels on your blog and in your email list, it’s smart to remind your social media followers about your newsletter. Don’t hesitate to post about it on all your social channels and mention that your emails offer something worth subscribing to.

Use a freebie or contest to grow your email list

Giveaways and contests are great ways to grow your email list. Many bloggers use e-books or a free audiobook that is given to anyone who signs up. Depending on what kind of business you have, a relevant contest can bring in new subscribers and help you expand your list in a short amount of time.

Remember it’s not about how many are on your list

Something to keep in mind about your email list is that it’s not all about the numbers. If you have a huge list full of poor-quality email addresses, you can’t expect good results. There are consequences, and the most important one is that your sender reputation will start to decline.

An email sender reputation is a score that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) assign to every email sender based on several factors:

• how many emails you send and how frequently you send them
• your open and click-through rates
• the number of people who unsubscribe, delete, or ignore your emails
• also, the number of people who forward your emails

As you can see, your email list quality plays an essential role in your overall sender reputation. If your list gets spoiled by bad contacts, you’ll notice:

• more bounces and spam complaints
• a decline in engagement: lower open and click rates

So, how do you grow a healthy email list that will make email marketing a pleasure – and a great source of traffic and income?

First, your list should grow organically, with people who subscribe because they are fans of your blog. If you’re thinking of buying an email list, don’t do it: you’ll get lots of unsubscribes and spam complaints. Instead, work on getting your subscribers by sending out valuable, entertaining content. It may take longer to grow it, but it will be your list, with people who know you, want to hear from you, and engage with your emails.

Poor-quality email addresses are a risk to your list

Even when you grow your email list by following best practices, it will still deteriorate over time. To give you just one example, people abandon their email addresses or change jobs and your emails end up bouncing.

On top of that, there are several email types that cause a decline in quality that will result in lowering your sender reputation score.

• Fake or temporary email addresses: some people sign up using fake addresses or get a website generated email address just in order to take advantage of a freebie or offering you promote. They have no intention of remaining on your email list and your emails to them will bounce.
• Abuse emails: whether out of habit or maliciousness, some people mark newsletters and promotions as spam even though they signed up. Spam complaints have a dramatic impact on your sender reputation.
• Role-based email addresses: email addresses such as “office@,” “info@” or “admin@” are typically read by many people who monitor that inbox. The marketing value for such addresses is virtually none.
• Invalid emails: these addresses may have been misspelled at the point of registration which made them invalid to begin with. They may have become obsolete over time when the person decided to deactivate the account or – as is often the case in B2B marketing – the person left their job and their email address was deactivated.

What can you do about these bad email addresses? Fortunately, there’s a safe way to grow your email list – and make sure it’s accurate, too.

Email validation maintains your list quality

Savvy bloggers, who want to make sure they communicate with real human beings via email, use an email validation tool to clean their list periodically.

An email validator is a system that detects and prunes out bad data from your list: abandoned, misspelled, fake, abuse emails – all the poor-quality addresses we talked about.

Here’s how you can verify your email list:

• In bulk: this is the best option if you already have an email list. If it’s been more than 6 months since the last cleaning, upload it on an email verification platform and allow the system to verify it. You’ll get your database back free of invalid, abuse and other risky email addresses.
• In real time: once you’ve verified your email list, you want to make sure it stays clean for as long as possible. Installing an email validation API on your sign-up form is a great way to ensure your email hygiene. The API checks every new email address in real time and allows only legitimate subscribers to get on your list. Furthermore, installing the API is easy: just ask your email verification company for the API key, then copy and paste it onto your blog.

Grow your email list the smart way

Your blog can be a great platform to grow your email list. The readership you’ve built over time is the best audience you can market your newsletters to. They’re already receptive and eager to get even more content from you. However, as exciting as it is to see your list grow, keep in mind that its quality is more important than its size.