How to Grow An Email List Faster Than Competitors

The following blog post is a guest post by FlutterMail Co-Founder, Charles Abrahamson. FlutterMail currently has a $1 trial of its service, which you can signup to here.

Email continues to be one of the most effective ways businesses can market to their customers.

Even with the increase in attention to social media and other channels email remains steady. Nearly everyone that uses the Internet has an email address and checks it frequently. This is important for marketers to understand because email drives a variety of different actions.

For businesses this means that it's still necessary to focus on building the email subscriber list. If you're looking for ways to grow your list here are six more ways to grow the list faster than the competition.

1. Partner with Established Non-Competitive Companies to Create Content

Adding on to the audience concept is the idea of partnering with established companies. Reach out to companies to create educational material. These could be reports, videos, webinars, etc. Collaborate on these items and host the download on your website. The partner will send you the traffic they already have so their audience can download the content. Make sure you have calls to action to capture new leads on all downloads.

Slingshot SEO has been providing link building for their clients for a few years, which is great, but something else they do that's great for their own profile is to partner with other companies to create resources including their webinars. Here is just one example of a webinar they're doing with another company. It's a great resource that builds the profile of each company.

2. Create Research Products Specific to Your Industry

Leading companies create research products that are interesting to their customers. Put in the time to create something that your customers would be interested in like a big study or a report on an emerging trend. Offer this as a download on your site. If it's interesting, people will share it and give you their email addresses in return for the report.

Inbound marketing firm Hubspot is great with this strategy. They create research products for their followers to analyze. By providing these products Hubspot can collect tons of email addresses of potential clients for their software.

3. Take Advantage of Offline Email Acquisition

This is a big one that is often overlooked. In the early days of the online world some of the savvy marketers out there would go to events like conferences and shows and collect email addresses. They would just ask people passing by at their booth to write down their email address. It's still a great way to add people to your list, but as with all forms of email acquisition, you will need an incentive to capture their attention.

Here is one consulting company that has been using an iPad app to acquire email addresses offline. It's a great strategy that appears to be working well. Every address helps.

4. Create an Opt-In Forum or Community

Social media has been great for many reasons and when used correctly you can create your own community where your potential customers can see community-only with an account that requires and email address. A forum where customers interact or where you answer questions is something that is enticing to a lot of people and they'll give up email addresses to gain access.

Cabela's, a leading consumer company in the US has a great content program. Users can join their forums to chat with other outdoor enthusiasts. Subscription is required (hello email address).

5. Entertain Customers with Video, Stories, etc.

Don't forget about entertainment. We've mentioned how-to posts and educational content, but that's really only part of the equation. People still want to be entertained. There are email lists for daily quotes and interesting news stories and people love that stuff!nAn example is the Twitter account Shit My Dad Says.

Offer unique content that is entertaining like videos, stories, etc. People will subscribe if word gets around that it's entertaining.

6. Host Industry Surveys

Earlier we mentioned reports and studies. These often require surveys, but it's worth mentioning the surveys on their own. Creating an annual survey of your customers is a great way to get them involved. It shows that you're interested in their opinion and during the process you get their email addresses as they participate. Make sure to send them the results.

SEO company SEOmoz has been doing an annual survey. This is a great way to get email address. I'm not sure if SEOmoz uses the email addresses in their marketing, but this is a great example of using surveys to receive information while providing the results. It also allows you to acquire new email subscribers for your list.

There are six more ways to grow your email list.

In the online marketing game the king is still email. Nearly every Internet user has an email address and a large portion of the online audience still prefers email for receiving marketing messages. It's important to build out your email subscriber list as fast as you can so you can maximize profits.

Did I miss any tips? Share your ideas in the comments.

Note: The views and opinions of the author of this guest post may not represent the views and opinions of Affilorama.