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10 SaaS Email List Building Methods

Building an email list of loyal subscribers is hard. 

Most marketers and bloggers struggle with it. But I want to make it easier for you. Use these ten overlooked techniques to build your email list faster, and nurture a healthier business.

As a SaaS marketer, you need an active email list of qualified customers, if you want to thrive and trounce your competition.

Your target audience would rather prefer a friendly email than a tweet. It doesn’t matter the industry where you belong, email yields the best ROI.

According to Hemsmail, “consumers who receive email marketing campaigns will spend 83% more when shopping online.”

Hearing all this makes you spend all your time building your email list. You write content, share on social media networks, connect with friends and do all sorts of things just to get people on your list.

But at the end, do you really see huge results from your efforts?

But it doesn’t have to be like that. Let me take you on an adventure that’ll change the way you get people onto your email list.

Use Hellobar at the top of your blog

The top of your blog is the first area that site visitors see when they visit your blog. Are you wasting or taking advantage of it? Guess what? Smart marketers aren’t wasting it.

They use a tool known as HelloBar to collect more email leads.

HelloBar is a company owned by Neil Patel of Quicksprout. I’m sure you’ve seen a bar at the top of most internet marketing blogs. It looks like this:

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Many use it to promote their products, promote a new post, or even promote an affiliate product.

You could use it to build your email list. You could redirect people to your landing page. You also have the option of using a lead box that pops-up when the Hellobar call-to-action button is active.

To start using the Hellobar for your email list building, visit the homepage. Plug your blog URL. Then login with your Google account.

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Derek Halpern used the Hellobar tool to add an extra 1,180 people to his email list in less than 30 days. Few years ago, Neil Patel generated 11% of his email leads using this same tool.

Use strategic content upgrades

Content upgrade is hot these days.

So what is content upgrade? A content upgrade is “bonus” content that is extremely relevant and specific to your post or page’s content—given away for free, in exchange for reader’s email address.

The term was coined by Brian Dean of Backlinko. In fact, the content marketing world embraced the tactic when they found that Brian used a content upgrade on his older (but popular posts) to increase the number of people who opt-in to his email list by 785%.

This is exactly how a content upgrade looks like on Brian’s blog:

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You could use multiple content upgrades to grow your email list faster. For example, Brian Harris of Videofruit.com generated over 20% of his email subscribers this way.

In your content upgrade, you could offer anything. You could offer a checklist of what you’ve shared in the post. You could ask them to optin to receive templates/scripts you used in the posts.

If you don’t have time to create something new, you could turn your blog post into a PDF document and give it away as a BONUS to your readers. Here’s an example from the master himself – Brian Dean:

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Write more case studies

People love reading case studies. A case study is one of the 15 types of blog content that will increase your traffic, and list.

It’s better than any kind of posts because people see what you’ve already done to achieve the result they want to get. This could be a good thing to apply to make people subscribe to your email list.

Shopify knows how to share case studies to show ecommerce entrepreneurs how to increase their bottom line. Here’s an example:

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You could ask them to subscribe to receive updates on the challenges you’ve and how you got better results. They could even subscribe to stay up to date in your challenge.

Pat Flynn does this well to make people subscribe to receive his income reports. They’re always the most popular posts on his site.

Put the opt-in box on your about page

For most people, the about page is the second most visited page on their site after the homepage. When people hit on a new site or blog to see if they can get answers to their questions, the second page they go to is the about page.

Because they want to connect with the author or feel the personality behind the site.

It’s a great opportunity that you don’t want to miss. Place multiple opt-in forms on the page to ask people to signup to hear more from you or download your report. Here’s how Ramsay Taplin does it.

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On a daily basis, Pat Flynn uses his about page to capture over 30 email subscribers.

Launch an affiliate program

Thousands of internet marketers depend on affiliates to send them high-quality traffic. You allow site owners and marketers to promote your product/service and you give them a commission for doing so.

That’s exactly how Groupon.com, Bodybuilding.com, Amazon.com and other big brands connect with thousands if not millions of affiliates and turn them into email subscribers and buyers.

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If you have written a book or developed a software, why not recruit affiliates to help get the word out?

As a matter of fact, you could convert your affiliates into email subscribers. Because they’ll subscribe to your list before getting access to the promotional tools. As well as their custom affiliate links.

Before they become affiliates, ask them to sign up to get notification on future product releases. You could start an affiliate program using Jvzoo.com, Clickbank.com, Paydotcom.com and so on.

Gather email addresses when customers make purchases

When people purchase any of your products, add their email address to your autoresponder and begin to nurture them.

This will this help you to build relationship and give great user experience. It will also yield a long-term relationship between you and your email subscribers.

People who have bought from you already trust you, and you’ll always have higher conversion rates from them.

Use the forward-to-a-friend option

Most email Autoresponders allow you to add a forward to a friend link in your newsletters. It’s a great way to get your email or newsletter in front of potential customers and hopefully get new people to opt-in to your list.

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Trust me, if your email newsletters are rich and helpful, your list members will forward it to their friends. And if their friends benefited from the forwarded email, they’ll likely join your list.

Use a feature box

Feature box is the box that you see above the fold that asks you to sign up to the email list to receive a free incentive or updates from the site.

It usually appears above the fold of your blog – it’s the first thing visitors will see. Give away a high-valuable lead bait and you’ll get more subscribers. Here’s an example from Noah Kagan’s blog:

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Using a feature box will double or even triple the number of email subscribers you get per day. When Derek Halpern added the feature box on his blog, conversions improved by 51.7%.

Brian Dean also increased his conversions by 134.58% in 60 days, using the feature box on his blog. Take a look:

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Most of the themes now have a way to help you add a feature box on your blog. But if you’re using WordPress, you could use a free plugin or go premium with the Plugmatter plugin.

The second option gives you the ability to create a feature box the way you want, and position the CTA button properly.

Ask them to subscribe at the bottom of your blog posts

Another great place to ask people to subscribe to your blog is at the bottom of your blog posts.

Most of the readers don’t continue reading till the end. But if they made it to the end of your post, don’t let them go. Because they’re indirectly telling you that your post was great.

Ask them to subscribe to your list at the end. Jon Loomer does it on his blog:

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You have to request your reader’s email address at the end of the post. Because they’ve already seen quality stuff from you, and they’ll be eager to learn more from you.

You can use a 2-step optin to get even more conversions. Put a subscription box or Leadbox pop-up graphics, so that when your site users click it, an opt-in box would appear.

Host a social giveaway

The fastest way to get more people to subscribe to your blog is to launch a giveaway. People want to get stuff for free. They’ll be happy to give you their email address.

Here’s a perfect Game of Thrones giveaway contest that was promoted on Facebook:

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You can even increase its chances of going viral, by asking contestants to share it with their friend to get more credits. They’ll be happy to spread the word out to get you more people and to increase their chances of getting the prize.

It’s the best way to get your word out fast. A while ago, Homage hosted a Facebook giveaway contest and grew to over 140,000 loyal fans who also subscribed to their list.

Conclusion

Building an email list for your SaaS is a tough process at the beginning. But once you get your feed soaked in it, it can become your second nature.

If you’re a beginner, you can avoid getting overwhelmed with all these list building tactics. Here’s my advice: pick one strategy and run with it.

If you stay consistent, you’ll definitely see a huge increase in the number of people signing into your email list.

Do you have any other strategy for building your email list that I didn’t cover?

Marina Pregl

Marina is a COO at Fortis. She's a beautician turned content creator. Besides marketing, she loves reggae music and yoga, and her favorite color is olive green. She has a tortoise named Petra, although the tortoise could very likely actually be male. :)

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