How to Grow Your Email List With a Lead Magnet and a Landing Page

By nsndm001 | July 12, 2022

As a business owner, it is important to leverage your social media interactions to grow your email list.

This is because it takes several points of contact before you can close business.

In other words, you can’t expect to gain a follower on social media, and then immediately have them buy your service or product.

You can’t even expect them to turn into clients after they’ve liked, commented, and shared your social media content.

The truth is, it takes several meaningful interactions before a person is even ready to consider buying from you.

Harsh, right?

But actually, this isn’t something new. Remember in the old days when television advertising was a thing? And you’d see the same ad over and over again within an hour?

That’s because it took several interactions to get noticed by a viewer! Even back then!

And now, it takes even more interactions because today’s audiences are bombarded more than ever with promotional content AND they are more immune to it.

Pretty grim, right?

Wait — it gets worse.

Remember when social media was shiny and new, and getting a follower meant that follower would pretty much see every piece of content you posted?

Hahaha those days are long gone.

Nowadays, it is extremely difficult to get your audience to see everything you post — organically, and even with paid ads.

So, the way around this debacle is to get your social media audience moved over to an email list.

By moving the conversation to email, your content goes straight to their inbox, and you are more likely to form a relationship and close a sale over time.

Social media marketing is an important tool for growing your business and meeting your potential clients where they hang out online, but email marketing is better for closing sales.

According to Constant Contact, 60 percent of consumers say they’ve made a purchase as the result of a marketing email they received. Meanwhile, 12.5 percent of consumers say they’d consider using the ‘buy’ button on social media.

To learn more about Constant Contact and how it can help your business, click here.

Now comes the tricky part — how do you get someone’s email?

For one thing, you have to get them to willingly add themselves to your list. If you don’t get their consent, you will likely have an unresponsive (or worse — irritated) lead on your hands.

More importantly, adding people to your business email list without their permission is all kinds of illegal depending on where you’re operating a business. In Canada, we have a law called CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation) which is put in place to protect consumers and it outlines the different kinds of consent and which ones are okay when you add someone to your list.

So, the important question now becomes, “how do you get someone on social media to consent to being added to your email list?”

The answer: with a lead magnet.

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a gift you give away for free.

Yes, that’s right — FREE.

It is a digital product, so it won’t cost you to print or distribute.

It can be an ebook, a video file, an audio file, an infographic, a checklist, or any piece of content that provides important information for your social media audience.

While it won’t cost you much to produce, it will take you some time to put together, because you want it to attract a very qualified lead. In other words, you want to target your lead magnet to a very specific audience.

Remember — the purpose of a lead magnet isn’t to attract a huge audience, its purpose is to attract a specific audience.

Once you have produced your lead magnet, you will promote it on social media, and get your audience to click on a link that will take them to a sign-up form.

What is a sign-up form?

A sign-up form can be embedded in a page off your website, or a landing page (one-page website). It is quite simply a digital form that someone can easily fill out, so that they can get their free gift (your lead magnet).

Typically, you’d get them to provide their name and email address, and that’s pretty much it. If you want, you could ask more questions (address, date of birth, etc.) but it’s usually not a great idea to get so inquisitive right away. Asking too many questions could turn a person off and cause them to abandon the sign-up form, meaning you won’t get their email and they won’t get added to your list.

Once they enter their information, their name and email will get added to your email list and you can now send them their free gift.

Using an application like Constant Contact will not only create the landing page form for you, but it will automatically add the applicant to your list and automatically send them your lead magnet. Constant Contact can even organize your email list into sub-lists depending on which forms they filled and which lead magnets they downloaded (if you have more than one).

What do I do with my email list?

Now you’re promoting your lead magnet on social media, driving traffic to your landing page, getting followers to fill out a form to consent to being on your list, sending them the free gift, adding them to your list, and you’ve automated the entire process using Constant Contact.

Bravo!

Now what?

You send them emails!

Now, no one likes a spammer (I sure don’t), so you need to make sure you do 2 important things when it comes to email:

ONE:

Don’t send too many emails. One or two a month is usually enough, unless you have an important giveaway or launch or something like that, but that’s a whole other story.

TWO:

Your email needs to add value. That means, you can’t just advertise your product or service.

You still have to be useful and helpful, just like you were on social media. Yes, you can mention your product or service, or a sale you currently have going on. But try to also include a link to a recent blog or video you created, or an article you think your audience would like. Don’t just make it all about you. No one likes getting tons of email, so set your email apart by brightening their day somehow.

Your email should be brief, informative, and easy to read. Constant Contact has a bunch of templates to make it easy to create and send out emails.

If you’d like help with your business social media and growing your email list, get in touch with me! Let’s see if we can work together.

If you’d like to learn more about Constant Contact, click here.

If you’re ready to take your business blog to the next level…

Posted in Social Media Marketing and tagged Constant Contact, grow email list, landing page, lead magnet, nishi sood, Social Media Marketing, social media training for entrepreneurs