4 Email Content Strategies to Grow Your List

4 Email Content Strategies to Grow Your List

In today’s world, Email Marketing is hands down, one of the best marketing strategies a business can have. It tends to be one of the biggest converters in sales, and it’s a place for you to really connect with your audience and build that know, like, and trust factor. Well, this blog post is intended to dive a little deeper into email marketing, and is all about 4 Email Content Strategies to Grow Your List. In this blog I’m going to talk about Evergreen Content, how to test and track your content, making funnels out of your content, and how to connect your opt in offer to your existing content.

So let’s get started!

Strategy #1 of the 4 Email Content Strategies to grow your list we’re going to talk about, the first is Evergreen Content.

Focus On Evergreen Content With Your List Building 

Evergreen content is content that stays fresh for a long time after posting it. Depending on the type of niche you’re involved with it may not actually last forever. But the idea is that the content should last as long as possible without an update, meaning that it’s relevant as long as possible. 

If you have a non-technical niche, chances are the content you create today will still be good tomorrow. That’s what you want to shoot for, anyway. But, remember that not everything has to be evergreen, but you do want to focus on evergreen content for list building so that when you set up your funnels they work for a long time for you without having to change them. Doing it this way enables the work you do today to build and still pay off for you tomorrow.

Types of Evergreen Content

While evergreen content can literally be in any format the most common evergreen content consists of the following types of content. 

Lists

If you have any sort of list you can develop it into evergreen content to build your list. For example, let’s say you have a 365 Motivational Quotes to share. You could share one quote a day, then link to the 365 quotes as the freebie to download to get on the list. 

Top 20, 50, 100

If you know Top anything you can do the same thing as the lists. They can be both blog posts and additional add-on content to download. What’s more, you can put it in different formats it doesn’t have to be a PDF it can be video too.

Tips

Providing tips for doing something that doesn’t usually change is a great type of evergreencontent. For example, “10 Tips to Clean Your Kitchen Fast” then provide a content upgrade with more tips to cleaning your entire home. 

How to Tutorials

Writing a blog post about how to do anything is a great idea for evergreen content unless it has something to do with technology since software changes so fast. An idea that comes to mind is, “How to Cook a Chicken in Your Pressure Cooker”. You could write a post about that, then link to a content upgrade with a video tutorial. 

Definitions

In each industry there are terms that the audience should know or needs to know, a great way to introduce your audience to these terms is through a list of definitions that you provide via a freebie. 

Reviews

In most cases product reviews can last for years. This is a great way to create useful content on your blog through reviews. Then, you can create a freebie that helps them use the product if they purchase it better or get more understanding of it with a whitepaper or report of some kind attached to the review.

The more your content is focused mostly on evergreen content vs news and trending content the faster you’ll be able to build your list. You can then share news and trending content to your list which is a much better place for that type of content anyway because it makes people happy that they joined your list if you’re on the cutting edge of your industry. 

Strategy #2 of the 4 Email Content Strategies to grow your list is Testing And Tracking Your In-Content List Building 

No matter what you’re doing for your business testing and tracking is an essential element that you should not skip. After all, how will you know exactly what is performing well versus what is not performing at all? You may assume something is working that isn’t thus wasting your time continuing with doing it. 

But, imagine how much better everything you do in your list building efforts if you know what’s working? Testing and tracking your in-content list building is the only way to know for sure what to do more of, what to stop doing, and what’s producing the results. Let’s look at a few ideas of what to test, and how you might prove conversions based on those outcomes. 

Know Your Most Popular Content

What this will do is help you determine what type of content you need to create more of for your audience. Plus, it’s the perfect place to add in-content upgrades. The thing is, sometimes your most popular content might not actually match up with your products and services if you didn’t plan the content well. 

Therefore, compare how many people who look at the content with how many downloads the freebie. Then look at how many of those people convert to buyers. Also, check how many people complete the double opt-in process to get your freebie (depending on how you have it set up). If there is a discrepancy between readers, opt-ins, and buyers determine if the content is really right for your audience or not and make needed changes to keep testing. 

Social Media Engagement

When you promote a blog post on social media, how many people click through, how many make a comment, how many downloads your in-content upgrades or freebie opt-in offers? How many of those convert to buyers? Which social network produces the most results? Does the offer match the content you’ve included it with?

Try to use the 80/20 rule. Let go of anything not getting more than 20 percent of the results and focus on what’s getting most of the results. That will save you time and increase engagement because you’re not just doing something to do it. You’re doing things that get results.

Landing Pages

You should create a landing page for each of your freebies. It can be a short pop up form or a longer landing page, it doesn’t matter. The point of creating the special landing page is to help you track results. Let’s say that you market a specific opt-in by posting a blurb, and a link to the blog post containing the opt-in offer on Facebook. Then you boost the post.

20 percent click-through, 50 percent of them get the opt-in offer, and 50 percent of those people answer one of your calls to action in an email autoresponder series that you sent to them. Then you’re likely doing well. But what if 90 percent of the people who get the opt-in offer choose to quickly unsubscribe from your list instead of reading your emails or responding? Do you know why? More than likely it’s because either content itself, or the opt-in offer, did not match your audience well enough. Find a way to make it more targeted to see improvements.

Everything online is trackable and the stats you collect can help you improve if you use logic to help you figure out why something is working or not working. None of it really is an accident. As you improve through testing and tracking dropping what doesn’t work and doing more of what does work you’re going to improve your efforts exponentially.

Strategy #3 of the 4 Email Content Strategies to grow your list is Crafting Your Funnel From Content To Offer 

When you engage in list building using content, content upgrades, and lead magnets you’re creating a funnel. Even if you never thought of it as a funnel it is. Let’s go through the process starting with website content, adding the lead magnet, and then leading your audience through an email marketing series so that you can make an offer that will monetize all your efforts.

Create the Content

After you’ve done your due diligence and thought about who you want to attract to your website, what they need to know, what problems they have and how you can solve them. Create the initial content for your blog, guest post, or another platform. Make sure it’s super targeted toward your audience, gives them the information they want to know about, and is only valuable to your audience.

Develop a Complementary Lead Magnet

Either create or re-purpose other content that you have that furthers the audience’s interest in the topic of the content you’ve created. Look at how you can expand on the content in the original article, how you can explain something further, and how you might give them something of value to go with the original content you created for them. Make that into a lead magnet. Make it simple though. A checklist, an explanatory video, a cheat sheet, or something else that you can put together in less than a day is usually best. It should be easy to put into use fast.

Push Traffic to Your Content

Once you have published the content, and the lead magnet is attached to the content and ready to download, it’s time to find ways to drive traffic to the content. There are numerous ways to do this. Publish a blurb and a link on social media platforms, paid advertising, allowing affiliates to use the content as a promotion method and more. The important thing is to get targeted traffic to consume the content.

Educate & Nurture Your List Members

Once they sign up for your list due to downloading the lead magnet now it’s time to educate and nurture the list members. Ensure that you create at least 7 to 10 emails in a series designed to teach them from day one what to expect from you but also about their problems and the solutions that you offer. As you create the series, think about the article they read to find the lead magnet, as well as the topic of the lead magnet. Expand on it, poke it, explore it, and make them think about it.

Pitch Your Offers

Within the emails that you send you should be making offers. If you’re nervous about making offers remember that you’d be doing your audience a huge disservice not to offer them solutions to their problems when you know about them. Since they signed up due to your content and your offer you already know that they want and need the solutions you have. Try to pitch an offer at least every two or three emails if not every single one.

Make the Sale

Once you make the sale your relationship is not over. It’s growing. Now you’ll need to create an email series for the buyer designed to lead them through another funnel. Creating deep and wide funnels is very useful and will increase your revenues exponentially. Plus, once you set them up it’s basically set it and forget it except for updating outdated information occasionally. Use a good autoresponder system and landing page option like Leadpages.net for landing pages and Drip.com for email.

Remember, all of this must flow seamlessly, not only does the topic need to be closely related for best conversion but, it should be easy for your audience to take advantage of, use, and respond to your CTAs. When you’re creating your funnels simply thing about the process “what’s the next step my readers need to take and what tool or product do they need to do it”. When you put yourself in their shoes you’ll be much more successful. 

Strategy #4 of the 4 Email Content Strategies to grow your list is Making Connections: Mention Your Opt-In Offer In Existing Content 

Every time you write a new blog post it’s an opportunity to use one of the lead magnets you’ve already created. You don’t want to put the opt-in offers on only one page or one blog post or article. You can put each opt-in within any type of content you create that matches and helps expand on the information.

Blog Posts

If you’re writing about something that reminds you of another blog post you wrote, or about a lead magnet that you created, it’s a great time to link to either one. Call it out so it’s noticeable. Say something like, “Get more information from this content upgrade I created for you on this blog post about this topic.”  (sub your own words)

Social Media

You can also mention your content upgrades on social media. What if someone asks a question that your blog post that has the content upgrade in it will help answer. If it’s permitted by the rules of your group, provide a blurb to the blog post and a link to it so that they can read your information and grab the opt-in offer too.

Analyze Your Content

Start with the content that gets the most views as long as that content is laser targeted toward your ideal audience. See if you can match it with content upgrades you’ve already created, PLR content that fits with the subject matter, or create something new to help expand on the content and promote more understanding for your audience. By having multiple points of entry onto your lists via the content you already have you’ll build your list faster.

Slow & Steady Wins the Race

You’ve probably heard the childhood story of the Tortoise and The Hare. While the rabbit jumps all over the place and moves fast, the turtle makes steady progress without distraction and beats the rabbit. Think of yourself like the turtle. Don’t feel as if you need to do everything at once. Focus on most read content, and developing entry points with opt-in offers to your audience that helps them so that they can get on your list.

Develop a Habit

When you create new content for your blog, guest blog posts, articles – anything that other people will read, if you have a space to do it, or you can link within the content always add a content upgrade of some form to help your audience, add value to the content, and move them to your email list where you can educate and nurture them.

Over time you’ll create a lot of connections with your content that will create targeted opportunities and entry points to grow your list. Don’t feel pressured to create 20 opt-ins today, but make it your goal to create as many as you can that make sense for your audience.