An email marketing strategy that increases conversions is a great way to stay in touch with your audience. To be always connected to your audience is necessary if increasing sales is your top priority goal. If you have a lot of email addresses from those who have signed up to receive your newsletter, creating an email marketing list is the first step to start email marketing.
But how to grow your marketing list if there are not many email addresses in your database? Or, there are but you want to expand it even more? Well, advanced technology gives all the answers and eases everything these days, thanks to the era we are living in.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy that works by sending regular emails to prospects or customers in order to keep them engaged with your business. Your emails can be about the latest news of your business, offers, promotions, new collections, etc. According to Neil Patel, regardless of the emergence of eCommerce SEO marketing and social media marketing, email marketing is still the most effective marketing channel based on 2018 data.
Why Is Email Marketing Important for Your Business?
If you know that email marketing generates the highest ROI, would you still stay away from it? For investing each dollar, email marketing generates 38 dollars in ROI on average. Therefore, it is a highly cost-effective marketing option for marketers to resort to.
In addition, consider your behavior as an instance. When you buy something online, one requirement to complete your online purchase is to insert your email address. When you want to create a new account anywhere, you need to insert your email address. Therefore, email marketing can have a great reach since you have a lot of email addresses.
As many of the email addresses are possessed by your customers, you can already be sure that they will engage with your email. Moreover, those who have just joined your email marketing list are more likely to convert in comparison to other forms of marketing. Plus, email is the most-used communication instrument and is considered to be a professional way of building up ties with leads.
Furthermore, emails are measurable. You can monitor your email marketing campaigns by analyzing email metrics such as the number of opens, forwards, social shares, bounces, etc.
Why Use Instagram to Grow Your Email Marketing List?
With billions of active users on Instagram, we can say that many people start their day by checking Instagram first thing in the morning. People tend to check Instagram during their coffee breaks, lunchtime, after work, and before sleeping. Many of them buy whatever they need from the brands or they have found on Instagram.
In addition, as there are many influencers on Instagram who have built a great trust for their followers, their word-of-mouth recommendations have convinced a lot of people to buy the brand products they suggest.
Regarding such fertile land to grow your marketing seeds, you can consider the users out there to join your email marketing list. In other words, not considering Instagram to fulfill your email marketing strategies is just a great loss to your revenues.
Read More: Instagram Marketing: 4 Things Business Owners Need To Know
How to Use Instagram to Grow Your Email Marketing List?
Given that you are convinced to use Instagram for your email marketing, let’s now read about some tips to grow your email marketing list using Instagram.
1. Use the Power of Instagram Bio
Your Instagram bio is the most important part of your account. When people see their friend’s User-Generated Content (UGC) of your product or hear about you from an influencer, they get curious to check your profile. As soon as they move to your Instagram account, they see your bio in the first place. Your bio can determine whether they will follow you, see what you share, and know more about you and your business. Your bio is, therefore, the ideal place to capture emails.
Instagram lets users share a link in their bio. So, there you go! You have just found where to promote your mailing list with a link to your email sign-up landing page. Being creative matters and you should do your best to keep your Instagram bio eye-catching and attractive. Share your email sign-up landing page in your Instagram bio. Visitors can tap or click on your link and get redirected to your email sign-up landing page on your website.
But how to turn Instagram followers into email subscribers? Here are two tips to keep in mind:
Offer Something Special
One great way to first attract your Instagram profile visitors and then grow your email marketing list using Instagram bio is to offer something worthy in your bio section. Something catchy, captivating, yet informative. Actually, this can be in the form of a special offer, exclusive discounts, or a free trial of your products and services. Such an offer can encourage visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.
For instance, in the following image, you can see that people will get 30% off on products and services by subscribing to the newsletter:
Or if you are a fan of minimal styles and don’t like to directly invite people to join your list, write something simple and classy just like the following example:
After clicking on the bio link in the screenshot above, you will see the following page. Here, you will be invited to make your photography dreams come alive by joining their online courses.
Promote Your Newsletter
Another way to lead people to your email marketing landing page is to directly invite them to sign up for your newsletter. This way, people do expect to receive emails on a regular basis, and the probability of unsubscribing decreases for sure.
So, add an intriguing Call-to-Action (CTA) to your Instagram bio and invite people to sign up for your newsletter. Also, you can briefly describe what emails you will send at every stage to encourage people to read your emails and interact with them to gain more profit. Here’s a good example of what I mean:
So, by clicking on their bio link, people will see the following page in which they can sign up for the newsletter and receive emails frequently.
2. Don’t Miss Instagram Stories
Another way to promote your email marketing list is to share “swipe-up” Instagram stories for your business. Fortunately, using the swipe-up feature, you will be competent to directly share links. This way, you will let your followers easily subscribe to your email marketing list.
According to the Omnicore agency, there are more than 500 million Instagram stories daily active users. One reason for such a huge engagement with stories is that Instagram stories automatically disappear after 24 hours. Additionally, since they appear at the top of the Instagram feed, they are more accessible.
Therefore, Instagram stories have a great potentiality for higher engagement. It is up to you how you decide to be creative about the design and content of your stories. Instagram stories are fabulous for displaying your email sign-up landing page. Instagram stories are entertaining and interactive due to the latest Instagram features for stories. Hence, they can attract more followers and convince them to join your email marketing list by tapping on your link through the “swipe-up” feature.
The “Swipe-up” feature or “See More” button is a feature that is available to Instagram business accounts with more than 10K followers. Using this feature, you can add an external link to your story. It is quite easy process so do not get stressed out. Tap on the attachment sign on top of the story and enter the URL of your email sign-up landing page. Done! Now, the viewers of your story can simply push your story up and go directly to your URL link. There, they can sign up for your newsletter or enter their email address for any other reasons and become a member of your email marketing list. Remember that given that they do not join, you should still be happy because you have led good traffic to your landing page.
So, by sharing stories you can get more engagements and this definitely results in more email subscribers. Furthermore, this helps you to effectively segment your email lists by providing you the opportunity to share different landing pages for each category of products or services that your business offers.
To be more specific, here is an example from Manchester United’s official Instagram account:
Swiping up the first story, users will be redirected to their podcast page. They will be asked to subscribe to the email list to get notified about the news:
And swiping up the second one, users will see another page. They’ll be subscribed to an email list that sends emails containing amazing success stories of United members:
All you have to do is to share stories, add your subscription link to it, and add a CTA to inform people that there is a link waiting for them. Moreover, you can add selected stories to your Instagram highlight section and let your followers access them whenever needed.
Also Read: 12 Effective Way to use Instagram Stories for Your Business Growth
3. Add an Intriguing CTA to Your Post Captions
Unfortunately, Instagram does not let users add clickable links to their posts and captions. However, this does not mean that Instagram posts are fruitless in expanding the email marketing list.
Actually, when users follow you on Instagram, they will not check your bio frequently. Consequently, if you change your bio link and share special offers and discounts just on your bio section, people are going to miss it and you will lose the chance to grow your email list.
However, it has been suggested by professionals to share 1-2 posts per day in order to boost your sales and grow your engagement rate. Instagram posts can be used as reminders to inform people about new offers, discounts, product launches, and other news.
All you have to do is to post some photos and videos of your products and services on Instagram. Sharing business-related posts e.g. a product, service, free information, etc. on your Instagram account is a content plan that you are already carrying out. But use such content to indirectly ask your followers to subscribe to your newsletter.
Ask them through a CTA to download or access the product (e.g. a free ebook), service (e.g. a free trial), or information (e.g. free tutorial) by only checking your bio and clicking on the link in your bio. The link in bio or story can enable them to access the page(s) you want. But, they cannot access what they have come for without subscribing to your newsletter. Because you have already set a condition under which they have you first subscribe and then be able to take the action. So, here we go. You have just grown your email marketing list.
This way, in addition to growing your email marketing list, you have also driven traffic to your website landing page. So, they get the offer and become a member of your email marketing list in return.
Here are two examples:
4. Run Instagram Giveaway Contests
Another way to grow your email marketing list using Instagram is to run giveaway contests. This also results in more Instagram followers, likes, comments, engagement, and even brand awareness. Actually, using these contests, you can skyrocket the number of subscribers to your email list in a few days.
The only thing you have to do is to define your goal, set the prizes and rules. Just make sure that subscribing to your newsletter is one of the rules. Finally, you can run your giveaway contest. Now, you will see how fast people join your newsletter. Consequently, your email marketing list grows in a short period of time.
5. Encourage Instagram Sharing
Among the billions of business posts on Instagram, those which are the most creative win the attention. Therefore, Instagram content marketing is a serious issue for all your Instagram marketing strategies. Create mind-blowing, thought-provoking, and catchy content and make them encouraging enough to be worth sharing. If you do this right, you will get the chance to make your posts go viral by your followers.
This is how you make each and every one of your followers an advocate advertiser for you by sharing your posts to their friends or mentioning them in a comment under your post. They will get curious to check your Instagram profile, and by seeing your bio, it is highly probable that they subscribe to your newsletter. Regarding the popularity or engagement rate of your page as well as the number of your followers, you can expect a small to a huge number of new members to your email marketing list.
6. Use Your Other Social Media
One creative and yet remarkably strategic way that you can use to lead your followers to grow your email marketing list is using the content of your other social media. For instance, you can share the videos on your Youtube channel. Your video can be promotional, narrative, informative, etc.
Using a Call-to-Action (CTA), encourage the people who watch your video to subscribe to your newsletter either directly or indirectly using a banner under the video. When your video is ready, share it on Youtube. Then, share your Youtube video on Instagram stories, posts, or bio. People can click and watch the video and subscribe if they find your video interesting enough.
This is an example of sharing a Youtube video as a post on Instagram:
7. Ask Followers for Subscription
The last way yet the simplest way is to frankly and honestly ask your followers to subscribe to your newsletter so that you can add their email address to your email marketing list. However, it is an option but not a strategic one. There are always some circumstances that strategies do not work and all you need to do is to come clean and sincerely ask what you want. Here is the same thing. If none of these strategic ways suit your business, you can always directly ask your followers to subscribe to your newsletter if they are interested to get the latest news of your business.
Conclusion
To sum it up, due to the rapid growth of Instagram users, it would be highly profitable if you can find a way to grow your email marketing list using Instagram and create a list that improves your email deliverability. In this article, I explained four simple ways that you can use to expand your email list. So, check them out together with the email marketing trends in 2020 and build a targeted email list right now!
About the Author
I am Parichehr Parsi, a born writer, and a freelance copywriter in the fields of travel, fashion, and Instagram marketing. I currently write for SocialPros and help people with getting more followers on Instagram. I love reading, writing, and researching.
