Leveraging competitions to get more consumers on board with email marketing

Email marketing can be an effective way to reach consumers, but a substantial list of subscribers is needed to get the best results. After all, emails will struggle to make an impact if only a handful of customers are receiving them.

While this is apparent to many small business owners, the problem commonly lies with generating more email subscribers. Most consumers want to keep their email addresses private so only friends and family can reach them through the channel, not brands with their promotional messages.

Even if businesses have large email subscriber lists, there is always reason to keep building it up. According to various studies, people may unsubscribe for one reason or another, so it’s crucial to always be collecting new addresses.

“Even seasoned email marketers who follow best practices for email list development, relevancy, and deliverability still lose about one-third of their subscribers annually due to bounces, unsubscribes and spam complaints,” Ross Kramer wrote on the HubSpot blog. “And the attrition rates are even higher for less vigilant marketers.”

Leveraging contests to supplement email lists

One strategy that many entrepreneurs use to bolster their subscriber lists is running competitions and contents. To enter, consumers generally have to submit some information and their email address, enabling businesses to learn more about their shoppers.

However, simply launching a contest won’t work – they have to be lucrative enough for customers to want to give away their email addresses. Hubspot offered some suggestions for encouraging more consumers to enter giveaways.

First, entrepreneurs should keep contest length short. This may seem counter-intuitive at first glance – business owners would expect longer competitions to generate more email addresses – but Hubspot advises against this. Time-sensitive giveaways encourage consumers to sign up sooner rather than later, which generates better results over a shorter time period.

Companies should also drive brand recognition by giving away their own products and services rather than gift cards or third-party goods. “A cash prize may entice more entrants to your sweepstakes, but by awarding your own merchandise instead, you will get a more qualified group that is clearly interested in your company’s brand and what it has to offer,” the news source notes.

Thanks to the word-of-mouth capabilities of social media, entrepreneurs can generate more awareness of their contests through Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. Small business owners should encourage followers to get their friends and family to sign up for contests by offering additional entries. This helps brand fans while also leading to more email addresses.

Once they subscribe

After running a successful contest, businesses will have a number of new email subscribers. It’s crucial that entrepreneurs make these new readers feel welcome. This can be accomplished by sending them introductory offers and a message thanking them for subscribing. Keeping consumers engaged in this fashion is key to maintaining subscriber numbers.

Because email marketing is so effective at reaching consumers, many businesses leverage it as one of their top promotional tools. According to a recent report from the Direct Marketing Association, the channel has been consistently efficient over the past two years as well, as both open rates and click-through rates have remained consistent at 5 percent and 22 percent, respectively.

How do you gain subscribers for your email marketing lists? Have you ever run a contest or giveaway? Has it been an effective way of generating new subscribers?

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