Last Updated on by Vairo Kremanis
In a word, the answer is yes. In fact, if you aren’t using social media to grow your email subscriber list, then you might be missing out on a lot of awesome opportunities! A lot of people might think that Email is a thing of the past – but that certainly isn’t true.
Using your email as a marketing tool can certainly pay huge dividends nowadays, and in this blog post, we are going to talk about how you can use social media to increase your number of email subscribers, thus tapping into a huge amount of potential.
So let’s get started.
Is Social Media Better Than Email?
Why do so many people today seem to be overlooking email in their marketing and networking efforts? It is true that social media is bigger than ever – but does that really mean that email is phasing out?
The truth is that social media is an excellent tool for reaching out to customers and keeping them engaged. But when it comes to direct marketing engagement, nothing quite beats email.
Email is extremely cost effective. In fact, some sources say that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, it tends to generate $38 in return. Email goes directly to your customer’s inbox, and as soon as they check their mail, it will be there.
Social media, on the other hand, is nowhere near as consistent. If you update your Facebook status, only a small percentage of your followers will actually end up seeing it. The same is true with Twitter. If you update your Twitter, it will only be visible to your followers for a short while before it is lost amongst the thousands of other ‘Tweets’ going out every day.
It is also true that social media sites do not necessarily last forever. Looking at Myspace and Digg can tell us that. And if a social media page goes stale, you could end up wasting some of that hard work that you put into building a presence there!
This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t use it, of course – but it does give you a good reason to use email along with it. In fact, a lot of long-term website owners agree that not starting an email subscriber list early-on is one of the biggest mistakes that new web developers can make.
But how do you do it? How do you start building that email subscriber list?
Here are some tips.
What You Need To Get Started Building An Email List
To be quite honest, building an email subscriber list is not that complicated. You need a website (or blog), an email marketing service, and some lead generation software… and that’s about it!
These things are pretty self-explanatory. Obviously, in this case, we are talking more directly about a WordPress website or blog. An email marketing service helps you to collect email addresses, send out email, and manage email lists.
(Note: One little-known benefit to using an email marketing service is that they can help to keep you from violating any potential spam laws… which takes a lot of worry and burden off of your shoulders.)
We actually recommend a service called Constant Contact if you are looking for an email marketing service. They do a good job, and come highly recommended by most professionals that we’ve spoken to!
And finally, you will need some lead-generation software. For this, you can use a service like OptinMonster… but once you have all of these vital pieces in place, you will be ready to start growing your email subscriber list.
But how do you start? Here are some steps that will help to get you started off on the right foot (no pun intended!).
Step One… Collect Email Addresses On Facebook
If you have managed to amass a rather large Facebook following, then you can most certainly use this presence to help you grow your email subscriber list. One way to do this is to post a link on your Facebook that leads directly to an email signup form on your website.
This is super easy to do now that Facebook gives us ‘Call To Action’ buttons… but you can also put the links in your posts.
Adding buttons is easy. You just click on the blue ‘Add a Button’ button on your page to add one – and follow the prompts from there.
Step Two… Use Facebook Ads In Combination With Special Offers To Get People To Sign Up
Sometimes, people can be a little bit leery of sharing their email if they don’t have something to gain from it. One of the best ways to counter this problem is to offer them something of value in exchange for their email.
Offer to give them a free ebook, a cheat-sheet, a template, a report, or something that will help them that they can use… and offer to just give it to them if they subscribe to your email mailing list. You can set this up by creating a landing page on your website, then you can use paid Facebook ads to drive traffic to it.
You can use OptinMonster to do this, and it works quite well.
Step Three…. Use Facebook Retargeting/Remarketing Pixel
Have you ever visited a site, and then logged onto Facebook later… only to find ads for the exact site you visited now scrolling through your feed?
This isn’t happening by accident! It is all a part of Facebook Pixel, which is Facebook’s retargeting/remarketing technology. This technology doesn’t put anything onto your site… but it does send a browser cookie to visitors, which allows Facebook to recognize them.
This way, when they leave your site and then visit the social media site, they will see ads that are literally targeted toward them because of the cookies.
You can install this technology from Facebook and use it on your website. It’s easy to do on WordPress, and there are a lot of helpful tutorials out there that can show you how.
Step Four… Ad Links To Your YouTube Videos
If you have a YouTube channel, then adding links to your email signup pages in the description can be an awesome way to generate new traffic. But… you can even ad links to the videos themselves as well, which you can use very strategically – especially if you formulate your videos around the idea of doing this.
If you go to your YouTube video manager, you can visit Edit >> Cards >> Add Card to make these changes.
Obviously, you will want to send them to a landing page on your website, where you can greet them with the opening page of an OptinMonster campaign. And you will still want to offer to give them something for free in exchange for their email.
Social media can be an excellent funnel for bringing people back to the ‘hub’ of your online presence (your WordPress Site). But then, it is very important that you make use of the funnel by trying to get them to subscribe to your email campaign. So just remember this sequence… you create links that bring people back from your social media to your site, you create a landing page where they are offered something in exchange for their email, and you compel them to sign up.
Then, once you have their email, you will be much better set-up for a long-term marketing strategy that will more directly engage your visitor base over time.
You can also use Pinterest Boards to generate leads as well. Pinterest may seem old-fashioned to some people… but it is still quite relevant in a lot of ways.
Step 5… Use Older Posts To Generate New Traffic
You can use the Revive Old Post plugin to use your older content to keep your social media audience engaged more regularly. This is not only automatic, but also very effective in continuing to engage your followers on social media without letting older content grow too stale.
You can also create targeted optins for visitors who click on these older posts. Just like we discussed before, this can offer them something for free in exchange for their email, etc. To find out more about this plugin, see our review here.
Step 6… Run A Twitter Ad Campaign
Twitter ads might even be a better bet than Facebook ads in some cases. Using Twitter, you can run lead generation campaigns right in the user Twitter stream. They can literally join your mailing list without ever leaving the social media platform!
You can also use these ads to direct them to your landing page.
Step 7… Ask Other People To Share Links To Your Special Offers
Getting the word out for special offers and gaining attention is sometimes easier if you enlist some help. Get your friends and/or family to help you share posts, or you can even offer to trade posts with other influential social-media gurus! This can benefit both of you, and might end up getting you some awesome click-throughs.
