6 E-mail List Building Tips For Handmade Business Owners

Craft Maker Pro » 6 E-mail List Building Tips For Handmade Business Owners

There’s all this hype right now about Social Media Marketing. And, why not?

6 E-mail List Building Tips For Handmade Business OwnersSocial Media can send you a ton of traffic. But what do smart business owners do with that traffic?

They turn it into an email list.

However, your email marketing database degrades by about 22.5% every year. Why? Your contacts’ email addresses change as they move from one company to another, opt-out of your email communication, or abandon that old AOL address they only use to fill out forms on websites.

As a marketer, it’s your job to make sure you’re constantly adding fresh contacts to your email marketing campaigns so you can keep your numbers moving up and to the right.

So how can you do that? Here are the basics:

1. Provide Free Downloads On Sign-ups

Everybody loves freebies! A free giveaway works wonders to get people into your email list. Make sure you’re offering real value with whatever you’re giving away such as downloadable eBooks, 100 tips, checklists, and how-to guides work great for this. (Hint – check ours out here, we have a ton of great things we give away)

2. Offer Coupons Or Discounts In Exchange For Sign-ups

Do you have a wallet full of store-specific discount cards and the like in your wallet? Most people do. Use that same principle to build your own list – tie discounts and coupons to your newsletter, and give customers a good reason to go out of their way, even if they’re not the newsletter type.

3. Add Call To Action On Your Social Media

There are plenty of people out there who would like to be on your email list, but don’t know about it yet. So put out the call on your social media accounts, to get everyone up to speed. You’ll find that many of the same people who like or follow you will be eager to sign up and get more insight, news, bargains, etc.

4. Call To Action On All Content

If you run a blog, tweet funny graphics, post on forums, send out emails on other lists, advertise on associates’ newsletters, or promote another type of content, don’t forget to make an appeal to viewers to sign up for your list at every reasonable opportunity.

5. Ask Customers During Craft Shows To Sign Up

If participate in a craft show, don’t fall into the trap of separating your web activities from your physical activities: marketing is marketing, outreach is outreach. Let customers fill out sign-up sheets at the booth, hand out flyers or put up posters with QR codes linking to sign-up pages, etc.

6. Set Up A Referral System For Customers

Word of mouth works wonders for email list building, as much as it does any other marketing endeavor. Which means that if you give customers a good reason to shill your list to everyone, you’re going to get a lot more signups than you would keeping all the responsibility to yourself.

To find out more about email list building, watch this video by Derek Halpern.
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Then, if you don’t have an email list provider yet, I highly recommend you check out AWeber.

So what other creative ways to grow your email list did we miss? Please share your ideas in the comments.

Gary Capps
Latest posts by Gary Capps (see all)

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