Many marketers and business owners rely on social media such as Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn as their marketing tool of choice. While social media can be a great place to share your content with your followers, there are many downsides to using these platforms.
The inherent problem with social media for business owners is that you don’t own the relationship with your audience. Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, or TikTok control when and where your followers see your content. Over and above this, if their algorithm chooses to remove you from their platform, without warning you lose all of the time and energy spent creating content there. Poof!
Social media platforms rise and fall, and in this increasingly competitive online world, we don't know what will happen next. At SupaPass, we’ve seen this happen to countless creators, for no valid reason and with no path to recovery. That risk is too high.
The hard truth is that social media isn't your platform. If you view your business’ Facebook page, whose branding and user interface do you see? Facebook's. By making a Facebook page, a Facebook group, Instagram profile, or Twitter account, you build your business on rented land.
We aren't saying social media isn't a valuable asset for your business; we understand the power and reach these platforms provide. Leverage the power of social media to grow your audience - but then send your most engaged audience to your own website where you can capture their email address. Consider it a gift to yourself/your business by providing a way to contact them now, and in the future, no matter what platform you're on - or they are on.
Instead of building your business on the rented land of social media, you should be building it with your own email marketing database on your own branded website or app!
An email database is what it says it is - a database of emails! Email addresses are gathered from your website when your followers enter their email into a form to sign up for a newsletter, alerts on new content, or marketing campaigns.
In simple terms, an email database is a list of your loyal subscribers who want to know anything and everything about what you offer.
Email databases are essential to any entrepreneur, content creator, or marketer as they provide you the power to contact your email recipients directly. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, or TikTok, you own this relationship and know that every time you reach out to your contacts, you get through to them..
We've seen social media platforms rise and fall - Vine, MySpace, Google Plus, these were all popular and were once used as lead magnets for businesses and advertisers. So why risk putting all of your time, energy, and resources into treating your social media pages like a landing page or lead magnet?
Over and above this, the potential reach of your social media pages can be as low as 1-2% of your total followers due to the social media algorithms. Even when posting regularly and sharing amazing content with your followers, you aren't guaranteed to reach more than a handful of them. Isn’t it time to take control?
The power of an email database is all in that this is data that you own. No matter what happens to the platforms that you use to share your content, or what happens to the world of the internet in 5 or 10 years time, you will always own those email contacts and can market directly to them.
Emails are valuable on their own.
With advertisements on social media, they are there and gone. Most people scroll or flick past them without a second thought. If you see an ad earlier in the day and try to remember what it was about it is increasingly difficult to scroll back through and try to find it again due to the swarm of other posts and adverts littering the social media platforms.
Emails, however, are there potentially forever. Email inboxes are for what your subscribers' consider to be important and need to be read. Emails are easily searchable too, allowing your subscribers to search their inbox for that coupon code or the tips and tricks you sent them. How often do you do this yourself? Once an email is in their inbox, it continues to provide value to them long after they first receive it.
The first thing many people do every morning is to check their emails. Now imagine if the first thing they see in the day is an email from you and your business - you'd be on their mind all day. Your email database is an extremely powerful tool to have at your disposal.
Email databases aren't complicated to use or set up. Simply put, visitors to your landing page or website can opt-in to a newsletter subscription by entering their email address and clicking the sign-up button (otherwise known as a Call-To-Action button or CTA).
Email subscribers are then added to your email marketing database, allowing you to send newsletters, promotions, and alerts on new content directly to them.
You aren't limited to just one database too! Having multiple email lists is an exceptional way of segmenting your subscribers by their wants and needs.
If you have multiple lead magnets for your email database, you should separate each one into a new list within your email database. For example, if you have a lead magnet for a free eBook on how to make money from your content, you then know these subscribers will be more interested in hearing about monetizing content or content creation. This targeted email marketing lets you deliver highly relevant offers since you already know what their interests are.
Segmenting your email database and email campaigns is a smart way of improving open rates and keeping your subscribers subscribed!
Be sure to check which email marketing software tool allows for multiple lists and confirm that their pricing structure aligns with your business.
With the power of direct marketing to a list of engaged subscribers, the value this can add to your business is immense. With email databases, you know that your subscribers feel a sense of loyalty and interest in you, your service or product, and what you have to say.
In comparison to Facebook, many marketers have to use Facebook ads to guarantee that their reach will be big enough to get to their followers who actually care about viewing their content. Your Facebook content is surrounded by distractions from other creators, posts from friends and family, and cute animal pictures, of course.
Many people assume that Facebook or Twitter are where the most active people on the internet are. Despite their high numbers of daily users, the important numbers are in email addresses. According to Radicati's recent Email Statistics Report, email users are expected to reach an incredible 4.1 billion by the end of 2021. This is an unbelievable amount of potential leads for your business!
Email databases help keep things professional with your subscribers. Not everyone wants to be bombarded with ads on social media from a brand or service that they like - sometimes this affects their perception of you! By keeping it professional, your subscribers will know that the main way they can be informed of promotions, your latest content, or upcoming webinars is by signing up to your email list.
If you write a blog or produce a podcast, using email databases is a great way of bringing people back to your website again and again. Sending an email to your email database about a new blog post or podcast episode is a quick-fire way of not only getting more views, comments, or downloads, but also a way to bring them to your site to sell your other products.
Creating an email database is easy if you have the right tools. All you need is a form on the homepage of your website - this can be either at the top of your landing page, in the footer, or even as a pop-up. Website visitors can click on these forms, inputting their email address and signup for your mailing list.
There are, of course, other ways of creating an email database as all you need is their email address to create a basic one, but to create a powerful email database, you’ll want to collect more data on your fans than just their email address. This is a common issue with a lot of lead generation forms - they only try to collect their email address. By adding the collection of their name, too, then the value of that subscriber just went way up!
What's in a name?
The power of personalization, Shakespeare!
By collecting your subscribers' first and last name, you gain the ability to personalize marketing emails by dynamically inserting their name into your messaging. This is powered through your email marketing tool of choice. The ability to personalize shouldn't be downplayed - wouldn't you rather receive an email saying hello to you rather than making you feel like just another address in a list?
Did you know? With SupaPass, you have the opportunity to collect your subscribers' first and last name when they register to your own mobile app or website, allowing you to personalize your marketing emails to your heart's content!
Building your email database doesn’t typically happen overnight but there are many ways to consider helping new fans to discover your list. A great way to grow your mailing list is to offer incentives or rewards to your followers to give them a reason to sign up by providing their email address. This is called a lead magnet or opt-in freebie. Here are some engaging ways to do this:
Run giveaways to your mailing list every month. The excitement of a giveaway is incredibly popular on social media, and followers are guaranteed to appreciate the opportunity to potentially win something! Whether you sell a product, a service, or create content, there are plenty of ways to offer giveaways to your mailing list. Why not give away three months of your service to one randomly selected email sign-up each month? Or give away a shout-out at the end of your next podcast episode? There's so much you can offer, even if it doesn't look like that on the surface!
Offer a free eBook! eBooks are a great way to not only educate your followers in your product, service, or content; they are also an exciting incentive for followers to sign up to your mailing list. Simply send out a private download link for an eBook (the eBook doesn't have to be long!) to all new sign-ups when they enter their email address. New subscribers will have more of a reason to sign up! After all, it's a free eBook for the small price of providing their email address. What's there to lose?
Another valuable incentive is to offer a discount code to those that sign up. By creating a discount code that is emailed immediately after a contact signs up for your email marketing database, you not only get a powerful form of lead generation, but also the bonus of having them sign up for your marketing list. You now own their data in your own secure list.
If these don't seem like something you can offer, perhaps a free trial of your product or an exclusive invitation to webinars may suit your business more.
Incentives drastically improve the conversion rate of your newsletter CTAs and improve the overall engagement of your content.
If you have all of these incentives and are willing to offer them, why not offer all of them in different CTAs? That way, when you gain a new email subscriber, you will know exactly what interested them in signing up, providing more value to that contact. Add them to a specific segment in your email database and market things that interest those that signed up for your eBook - for example, if you were to release a new book on Amazon, you could send out a stronger marketing email to these contacts!
These incentives all share things in common: content and value. You're offering your email subscribers value with deals and offers or offering exclusive content that makes them feel like your super-fan. Using your own SupaPass mobile app or website, you can lock any content behind an email registration, whether it is exclusive behind-the-scenes videos, an eLearning course, or a special podcast episode you’ve created for your biggest fans. Once they've registered, you have the ability to market directly to them about new and upcoming content or remind them of the benefits behind your paywall on your app. With SupaPass you can create an exclusive club for your biggest fans or followers, giving them a great incentive to sign up and show they care about your content!
Now that you know you’re ready to dive in with email database marketing, what is your next step?
If you haven’t already, choose the tool to use for all of your email campaign work.. Your chosen tools will help with scheduling, managing, and curating your email database into sub-lists to boost the power of your email marketing.
Mailchimp offers both free and paid pricing plans suitable for everything from single-person start-ups to enterprise businesses. Their free tier allows for up to 2,000 contacts in your email database, and you can send up to 10,000 emails to these contacts per month with a daily limit of 2,000. Mailchimp is perfect for beginners, offering simple features that can be a big boost to getting you started. (Also, check out how your own SupaPass app connects with Mailchimp directly via Zapier here!)
If Mailchimp isn't for you, there are other free tools out there for email marketing databases such as Sendinblue, MailerLite, or Sender. Be sure to confirm how many contacts they allow in your database and how many emails you can send per month or day, as these can affect your plans for email campaigns!
Now that you've got the tools to send marketing emails to your email database, what do you send them?
Here are some ideas on engaging emails to send to your list!
Right now!
The earlier you start collecting emails, the better. Even if you don't have plans for email marketing campaigns right now, you will in the future if you are serious about your business or content!
By starting now, you will be ready for your first email campaigns to make an impact. It is time for you to build a powerful database of your top followers, subscribers, and superfans.
What are you waiting for? Get started building your email database today!
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