7 Effective Ways to Grow your Email List - Autus Consulting
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7 Effective Ways to Grow your Email List

10 November, 2022

7 Effective Ways to Grow your Email List

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Many of us are quite guarded about giving up our email address, as we hate how it can be used to spam us with information and offers that are of no value. Nonetheless effective ways to grow your email list can be leveraged.

With this in mind it’s vital to start with understanding your target audience, and what problems they might have, and how you can help.

In the digital age, brands have based their entire marketing strategy on the AIDA model. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Each term represents a stage of a consumer’s buying journey.

Brands use the AIDA model to determine the way they should craft and distribute marketing messages to their target audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

The AIDA model is considered a hierarchy of effects model, which means consumers must move through each stage of the model to complete the desired action. Just like a typical marketing funnel, each stage has fewer consumers than the previous one.

Why are we over-cooking the AIDA model when all you want is more subscribers on your Email list, quite simple, even if your offer is FREE, you still have to adhere to marketing best practices to get people to sign up.

The bad news is your email marketing list will degrade over time; people unsubscribe if they are not getting value.

The good news is you can take the following actions to grow your email list and you can take specific actions to minimise getting too many unsubscribers too.

Lead Magents

1. High Converting Lead Magnets

Typically, a business offers something for free, but valuable, that website visitors will be willing to get in exchange for their information, like an email address to continue building the relationship.

The right lead magnet and supporting marketing activities will grab your prospect’s (A)ttention, pique their (I)nterest, activate their (D)esire, and finally they will take (A)ction to trade their email address for your lead magnet. Now that you have their email address you are ready to build more know, like, trust into your relationship and eventually convert your prospect to a happy customer.

The vital thing with your lead magnets is to ensure you align the lead magnet with your customers pain point and with your products/services, so that you end up with the right type of prospect. Lead magnets on their own won’t grow your email list – you need to leverage these in your day-to-day marketing activities across social media, email, Paid Ads and other tactics.

The Best Lead Magnets are inspired by your Audience

To help you create the right lead magnets you will want to understand more about your audience:

  • What do they need?
  • What problems can you help them with?
  • What could save them time?
  • What could help them reach their goal?
  • How could you help them for free?

With the answers above, you will create the perfect lead magnet for your audience, prospects and customers.

Effective Types of Lead Magnets

Lead magnets come in various formats and there isn’t a one size fits all approach:

2. Simple and Visible Sign-Up

Sign Up Now


You’ve probably heard it all before, the more complex a form on a website the more chance is it won’t be completed. Of course, there is arguments to collect more than just an email address too.

A simple subscriber sign-up form or lead magnet request with email address only will grow your email list faster than one with first name, last name, phone number, age, shoe size etc, so seriously think about a simple email address only on your email subscriber list sign up. We take this same approach with our email newsletter sign up strategy. See the call-to-action button below.

Another important factor here, is many businesses don’t have the ability on every webpage to sign up to their email list, think about adding a sign-up call to action button on every page. Check out the footer of our website pages, all of our pages have a ‘Join Our Tribe’ button on the footer.

3. Use Your Other Marketing Channels and Social Networks

Social and Other Networks AIDA

Many people prefer to communicate on the various social network and messenger platforms, but email is far from dead!

Sometimes it’s easy to forget about the connections, followers, and fans we have across all channels. Make it easy for them to sign up to your email list and post content to encourage them to take action and direct them to a link with a simple sign-up page, like this.

The key thing is to leverage your marketing activities across these channels and networks, regularly posting good content, blogs, videos etc, will help you create visibility. If you don’t have time, look at the types of marketing service you could purchase to support grow your email list and business in general.

4. Encourage Subscribers to Share and Forward your Emails

Sharing and Forwarding

Include social sharing buttons and an “Email to a Friend” button on your marketing emails. By doing this, you’ll gain access to recipients’ friends, colleagues, and networks to expand your contact list. At the bottom of your emails, include a “Subscribe” CTA as a simple text-based link so that the people receiving the forwarded emails can easily opt-in too.

Some email tools don’t support the above strategy very well, and a good tactic is to have your existing subscriber click on a CTA and have them fill in the email address of the person that would benefit from being on your email list, and then you can auto forward them your latest newsletter, taking care to inform them that John Smith recommended them and give them the option to double-opt in or unsubscribe.

5. Free Online Resources

Free online resources

Your business may have a free resource or online tool that requires sign-up. Of course, we have touched on lead magnets earlier, but this could be another angle. For example, try out our free ROI calculator or design tool, or get a free quote generator.

Not all content should be gated, it’s important to offer up things for free without the need for asking for an email address. An example of free content is our Blog and resource hub, which offers free advice and insight, with an expectation that if someone is looking for deeper expertise and advise then there has to be some win/win during that journey – that could be an exchange of email address to offer up one of our lead magnets or a free consultation.

6. Use Your Social Banners and Sign-Up Buttons

Leveraging Social Media

A simple and effective way to grow your email list is to design your banners across various platforms to promote your email newsletter. For example, you can add a CTA button to your facebook business page that links users to your sign-up page or a gated feature resource.

Or consider adding a link to your bio on Instagram to your sign-up form. Another example is through conversations on LinkedIn, you can share links to your sign-up pages and that allows users to continue the interaction you’ve just had and for them to realise more value from your collaboration.

You can add end screens to your youtube videos to direct viewers to take additional action after finishing a video, like clicking on a link to your website to sign up. Or adding hyperlinks in your end cards to grow your email list.

7. Other Tactics

Marketing Tactics

Running an online contest and free giveaway can be a great way to grow your email list. We have all come across these, win a new coffee maker, all you have to do is sign up here.

If you have budget, paid ads can be a great way to capture sign ups.

Why not take your visitor by surprise and use pop-up forms on your website. Popup forms are dynamic tools that can appear on the screen at certain times or for specific events. They also serve as lead magnets for generating leads.

The power of incentives in general can be a great way to grow your list, get 50% off on your first order.

Adding interaction and gamification is also a good way to attract your audience and build your email list – think out of the box a little, there’s plenty of interactive sign-up tools such as the spinning wheel, whereby your new subscriber can spin the wheel and win something – 10% off, buy 1 get 1… get creative with your wheel.

Personalised and dynamic content can also be useful, if your audience is more targeted then you can shape your message better, making it a no-brainer for them to sign-up

Final Reflection

If you have read this far, thanks for reading and hopefully we have provided some new thoughts or reinforced other ideas you were thinking about. We could have covered so much more here, as we are only scratching the surface of strategies and tactics to grow your email list.

Of course, none of the above are of value if you don’t have the right tools or know-how to leverage your overall marketing and monetise your email subscribers.


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About Autus

Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.

Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.

Find out more here.

Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.

Let’s keep in touch!

If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.

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