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Stephen: Welcome to Episode 14 of the Needle Movement Podcast. Today we complete our four part series on email marketing. This is gonna be a solo episode where we discuss list growth. Specifically, the tactics to use to grow your email list and a list building is a great skill to hone, with newer channels such as SMS and chatbots coming around the bend. I'm Stephen Carl talking straight from Brooklyn, New York. Now let's get on to the show.

Hey, everybody, you know, first off to everyone listening. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to hear the podcast. Really appreciate that, and we're on a roll. You know this podcast. We've done four straight episodes on email marketing. It's funny because when I was planning this, I think originally originally only one episode was planned.

But it just reminds me how much there is to email because it's not only what's going on with email right now, but it just has corollaries to so much that's going on in digital business and eCommerce. So it's so glad to have the opportunity to go slow on this topic and talk about different aspects and really appreciate Dylan Kelly and Christina Hagopian for coming on the show, too. You know, they work inside of large email marketing accounts, and they brought some really interesting insights and tactics to this conversation. So you know you can listen to these episodes together. I think that would be interesting.

Episodes 11 Thru Episode 14 cover topics related to email marketing So this is the last one in that series, and today we talk about list growth, how to grow your warm audiences, how to grow a subscriber list, and we'll focus on email list growth.

But this is a larger conversation. I'm sure if you're on the client side and you go to a digital conference and you hear people talk up branding and they give advice to you about what you should be doing with branding, how branding is all about engaging your audience, telling stories, it's all about storytelling. I'm sure. I think I've heard that about 50 times now in the past few years about how important storytelling is, and it's true. But I think it's evolving, too, and that people want something else, too, because they want shorter dialogue.

Everyone's getting bombarded with media from so many directions, so they don't have as much time to work with each message. But with brands, people want to know what makes them tick. They wanna have a two-way dialogue with companies that they're interested in, that they want to do business with.

And they wanted to have fluidly with brands just like they would friends. So branding is still about storytelling, but now the stories are more vignettes and marketing is about conversations. An email is a part of conversational marketing and the chops that you learn on email. It's list growth. today it's email tomorrow, it's SMS And you know, next month you may even be thinking about building a chatbot.

That's where this is going, and email is Conversation Commerce. Cause these days, marketing is about talking with, not talking at your warm audiences. It's a conversation, and you just use platforms to nurture these people.

So going back to list growth. What I really like about email in general is, I think it's easier to optimize because you don't need a six figure CRM or $100K monthly budget. Great, if you have that, but it's not the thing that's necessarily holding you back.

And with list growth, I think it's built for creativity and even being a little scrappy.

The two main conditions for successful email list building are having a good amount of traffic to your website because your website is where you're going to get the best people for sign up. And then it's about how you handle the sign up boxes and forms from a strategic perspective, also from creative as well. But I do think with list growth, it's the mindset that holds us back a little bit. I was just thinking about this like,

What's the priority of list growth in many emerging eCommerce brands? Digital businesses? It's probably not that high. It's often not paid a lot of attention, and we've seen it like it's pretty common that wherever you're doing email list, sign up or wherever a company does it, it's rarely changed or even better, the number one reason it changes is because the site was being overhauled and redesigned anyway.

So okay, we'll just rebuild this email sign up box. You know, I also hear brands sometimes say, "Well, we don't really have a huge list, so that's why we don't invest in it." But I do think it's possible for most brands to have higher email lists than they currently have. And if they're not having success right now or they're not getting that many names, you know, just putting a little head space in it can really do wonders.

Just reminds me of that Peter Drucker quote. I'm probably gonna butcher it, but it's "You can only manage what you measure" That's why people have Fitbits, for example, because they want to make sure they're getting a certain amount of exercise so they have a device that holds them accountable, and I feel like with list growth, it just feels "out of sight, out of mind" for many businesses that it's not a priority.

But that could be easily changed something like in your reporting. Just start looking at new subscribers the new subscribers that are coming in each week, the new subscribers over coming in each month and consider that a KPI. (A key performance indicator) because it is a micro-conversion, because if people sign up for your email list, the odds of them eventually buying from you. It increases exponentially. So checking out how many science you have a day.

I think there's so much opportunity and thinking about it from a daily basis, because the great thing about websites is they operate. 24/7. 24/7/365. Your website is always running. It always has the potential to get orders, and it always has the potential to get sign ups.

So with list growth, don't think of it from the perspective of how am I going to get 500 emails or 1,000 emails really quickly. It's How can I get more list sign ups every day? How can I double the amount that I'm already getting? You know, on the other thing that's great is that the new leads you get are the best ones. They're the most likely to eventually make a purchase and then arm or engaged in your brand.

It's funny cause, especially in eCommerce, like we've all been well-trained to drool over customer acquisition and the importance of customer acquisition. There are conferences that are built around customer acquisition because we realize that we need new people to come in and we need to constantly be getting new customers. That's a very important part of the business. So I think with that, you know, given that it's pretty easy to add something related that a sub-goal of customer acquisition is new email subscribers.

So let's go through some of the macro tactics here, and we're talking about conversation Commerce that brands now need a digital conversation strategy because some customers, when they smell an ad, they'll run away. But they want to talk it out. They like having conversations with brands. So Brands just used marketing channels to have more conversations and having those conversations. It increases engagement and the emotional investment of the consumer. So what channels like right now we focus on email. But SMS and Facebook Messenger are also in this category as well. So think of list growth as a formula that can be duplicated in other places. It's not the same, but I think it's good practice right now because this is where things were headed and a company's list growth skills will only be tested in the future.

The best place to get sign-ups for email is the website because that is the highest quality. And if they've already come to the website, they passed one hurdle of interest. That means it's a little bit easier to get them to sign up for a list. To go along. The have to purchase the two most popular areas that people put email, sign up blurbs and emails ign up boxes are on the website footer on every page of the bottom.

There's an opportunity to sign up to the list, and there's also sign-up boxes. Most commonly we've all seen pop-ups and sliders and prompts that appear to encourage people to join a list. And that's what we're gonna focus on the most here.

You know, I'll just say quickly, there are other things come up is people talk about buying email addresses. Where, you know, about sending emails, to old names that are in the database, that maybe they're opted in and maybe they're not? You know, so some of these tactics... Please don't do these! I can't recommend them because between new privacy laws like GDPR, and we've also been talking a lot about deliverability the past couple episodes and how once you send to list that might bounce or Marked as Spam, it can lower your overall reputation score so it's not recommended to use these type of tactics, and it can do more harm than good.

So the best ways are really to focus on the website and the ways that you can sign people up to list there first set up. A lot of companies use a provider, So if you don't have a list growth provider, consider one in eCommerce. There are companies like JustUno, Privvy and even the email service providers like Klaviyo and Omnisend, they have list collection modules inside of them. Today, I'll speak more about JustUno, cause that's the platform I have the most experience with just to give you a breakdown of cost to start, I mean, JustUno, can cost $40-$100 a month, and those costs are based on how much traffic is on the website.

So the first step here if you don't have one is to select a provider or to optimize the current one that you have, you know, I like using a provider, cause I always feel like homegrown solutions don't really work as well, and they don't typically have a sophisticated level of tools cause of a lot of these pop-up providers. They just give you more options on placement and who sees the pop-up and who doesn't, which can work to your benefit. Would sign up before we get into the pop ups and sign-up boxes on the website.

I want to mention offline as an opportunity for list growth, too, you know, with your stores if you're running pop-ups or having events just like we were talking about how the website is open 24/7 whenever your store is open, even devoting a small area or having it part of your store checkout process. The physical store checkout process where you ask people for names that definitely increases the ROI (return on investment) of the actual store. It can increase the value of an event. To be able to consistently be getting email sign ups as a result of those interactions with customers in a physical store or at a physical event,

I should mention this is something that Needle Movement does with clients. Quick announcement: we do offer "done for you" list growth and email marketing services is for emerging brands, and a lot of the background for the past two episodes comes directly from our hands on experience working in Klaviyo and other providers. So send me an email at Hello @ needle movement dot com, and we can just talk. Or I could give you advice, give you some next steps on how to build your list or do a quick email audit for growth. The goal is always to generate additional email marketing revenue.

Now let's talk about the content for email sign-up boxes because I don't know about you, but I think we all have this common opinion that pop-ups can be a little bit annoying, right? So we have to be. We want to make them look as welcoming as possible. I looked at a lot of different eCommerce brand sites. I was also looking at B2B websites and entrepreneurs because list growth is definitely not just an eCommerce issue. It is just is much in B2B. I was looking for some consistency, and also, I think, with eCommerce and B2B, the lines are blurring more and more between these industries, and you'd be surprised how many good tactics you can learn from, actually, each of these industries are learning from each other.

So with content, I think it starts with your entire email program that you just think ahead of. Who is joining that email list? How is it offering value to the consumer? Why would you sign up? Last episode Kristina Hagopian. She was talking about this and she said, "We get 90 emails a day in our inbox in boxes are way crowded and that is the psychology we're up against as the consumer. The consumer is thinking when they see that sign up box "Another email list?! I'm not signing up. No way!" It's that mentality of like "I got 99 emails and your pitch is one."

Why should the shoppers sign up? What are you offering? That's not already available, you know, to them, What are you giving me? And the two main learnings that I kind of grasp just from looking at a ton of these pop ups and their messaging, because the consistency really comes out. So the two things are one, I think good sign-up boxes. They talked to the customer like a friend just going along with that conversation. eCommerce shoppers want to talk to the brands like a friend, and brands want to start conversations. It's best when the copy isn't boring. Don't sound like a robot. I think I see some messages like [robot voice] "Sign up for email.... and see the latest news..... free stuff.[end voice]

It can work, but it just doesn't sell well these days. And most importantly, it's about demonstrating value. Typically, companies offered discounts or information as the value, like information could be access to a community or tips. And people typically join lists for the following: You just think about how this would apply to your brand. They join list for these reasons.

** They want to get a discount.

** They want to hear about new products.

** They want to get tips that are based on your expertise.

** Or they want a lead magnet, which is an exclusive guide or document based on sharing knowledge they want to know

Think discounts are a good first tactic to get things rolling for eCommerce is typically shoppers respond to it as a benchmark, companies typically offer 10 to 20% off as an incentive to join a list.

So I'll read out loud a few examples of some email sign-ups that I liked. I'll read off three.

The first is from Kate Spade, Kate Spade. They have a really pretty sign-up box, and it says there, "We're giving you a 10% off welcome gift" and right below it, it says "You get free shipping, too!"

I really like that play of words on "Welcome gift" because this one is only offering a 10% discount. Other companies offer a lot more, but when you spin it as a "welcome gift", it just sounds like they're even giving more.

There's another one I liked was from a company called Versed Skin Care. And on that email signup pop-up. The headline is, "We know pop ups are annoying. Our emails aren't. Pinky-swear. Sign up to receive $5 off your first order of $40 or more."

I just love that phrase, "Pinky-swear", because that is the language you would use with a friend. And also the fact that they mentioned they're acknowledging the pop-ups are annoying. They're in the customer's mind right now, and they're acknowledging what the customers probably thinking right at that time, but with Pinky-swear, where it's like I feel like they're talking to me like a good friend.

Another example from a company called Lola, which does feminine hygiene products. And here's the text that they used. It's "we get periods, so we get it. Sign up to receive an exclusive discount." You know, in that pop-up, I like that they use the word "period" because it's an attention- grabbing word. It's not a word that people normally say out loud, so they're getting your attention through that and also the wording "exclusive discount". They're not even specifying the discount number and still attracting people with it. And I think that's smart as well. I guess I should mention with discounts.

I mean, another tactic that some brands used is called the discount Ladder strategy. And people always ask, like, "What's the benchmark? How much should I be offering? Should it be 10% 15% or 20%?"

I don't know or even more, and I mean the truth is, and this is an annoying answer. But it's just you just got to test it out and see what fits. So the discount ladder means you start low and you see how many results that you get. And if you're not happy with your results, you increase the discount because in some ways it's better to offer more to get people to sign up to a list. Because if you're offering more than 10% can break through to get that sign up, it could be worth while to do it.

So the discount ladder allows you to test a few things and come out with a winner that will generate an amount of email sign ups that you're happy with. The next thing to talk about with email sign ups is the placement and the rules, because placement and timing, they're very valuable. And that's what I like about just, you know in some other providers that you can really control the pop ups because ultimately you want to segment a pop-up just like an email, where you don't have to send it to everybody with just, you know, it's easy to set up dozens of rules based on visitors. Activity on the site and where they came from, like a newer tactic, is some brands. Now we're using scrolling as activity, so they'll only serve the pop up if a site visitor is scrolling a certain amount of the page because they want to find people that are active, not people that are just on the site for three seconds and then off.

That's why exit offers are popular too. An exit offer is kind of the opposite of what we normally see. Normally, we go to the website and within five seconds, we're slapped with a pop-up. With exit offers. What happens is you deliver a pop-up at the end of the cycle. So when someone is about to leave the website after they visited a few pages after they've been on the site a few minutes, then you create a prompt. It could have an offer. It doesn't necessarily have to, but with an email, you know, an email sign up. There are also other places that you could put a pop-up like. For example, if someone is abandoning check out, you could give them an offer and ask for their email address to receive the coupon. A newer tactic is with the order confirmation page right after they order. They just ordered the product. They're excited to get it so It's a great time to ask them to sign up for channels, and that's where you can mention signing up to the promotional email list.

Having the ability to do rules is nice for exclusions too. First off, limiting the number of times that visitor can see the same pop up. Let's just say people have seen this pop up 19 times. The odds of them changing their mind and giving their email address is pretty low on the same creative, you know. So you can definitely set limitations for people that have closed a pop-up. A basic rule that's smart is also to exclude visitors that are coming from email marketing. Because if someone is already signed up to your email list, they don't need to see the pop up. They should be excluded, and that's an easy rule to set up.

So now let's get into the placement of the box. You know what? Just you know, there's a lot of different options. on placement. You can put a popup in the center. You can put in a slider that comes in on the side. You can have something in the bottom corner because the UX community and like people that are looking at customer experience, pop-ups have always been a little controversial. But people don't agree on it. In general, the community is a bit torn. some hate it. Others tolerate it. Me recently just looking around. I'm seeing a trend towards people using pop-ups less. A few years ago, everyone was doing it, and now I'm seeing more people using sliders or placements lower on the page.

Another tactic that's placement-related is called a home page takeover or a landing page. A home page take over that's devoted to email sign up and actually the home page take over. A lot of it comes from B2B marketing. It's a very popular tactic there, and it can actually work in B2C as well, you know, one example I saw. This is a brand called Taylor Stitch. They're sustainable fashion brand because you know, instead of just having a slider or pop up having an entire page that the first page that visitor sees is a nice page with that's main mission is to get people to sign up for email. The nice thing is that pop-ups and sliders are limited space. A full page gives you much more real estate for branding and to give people additional reasons for that sign-up. It brings more attention. If you think you have a good value proposition, you could really romanticize and explain their reasons why signing up for email is a good value. And for that website visitor.

Now let's get into another list growth strategy. And this is something that brands air using with paid advertising, especially paid social media. And this is where a lot of times with list growth and with advertising with paid social someone is coming from Instagram. You know, someone sees an ad. They're not looking to purchase someone, but they'll go to the website. Odds are they're not gonna make a purchase just from that ad visit. But the goal is really to get people further along towards the path to purchase. You know what brands do with on social media ads is sometimes the goal isn't for a purchase. It's just to get a sign-up. And, you know, the loop there is really designed so that once that person comes to the website. They're going to see a highly relevant pop-up or some sort of home page take over it so that that campaign can results in many email sign ups when this is a popular tactic in e commerce in the fall, you know, during September and October, what a lot of brands do is it becomes list acquisition season because they want to build up their lists to prepare for the holiday season. And what companies sometimes do is they say, "Oh, we're gonna have a great black Friday we're gonna have all these sales, but we're only offering it to people that sign up for the email list" So they get people to FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) and use that attractive sale strategy to get people to sign up,

Going to offer one last bonus tactic, which is quizzes. Quizzes are sometimes used for email sign up, and quizzes now are just a natural part of media consumption daily. Like if you've ever looked at BuzzFeed, I mean the media platform BuzzFeed was practically created from quizzes, and I think you're familiar with some of them, like "What is your style personality?" or "This 2000s Movie quiz will test if you're a true millennial." or "What's your home design persona?"

Here's another example. Spotify and the pop star Lizzo even just got in on this trend. It just teamed up on a Lizzo DNA quiz. This is related to her monster single "Truth Hurts", which has 516 million listens on Spotify when there's a lyric at the beginning where she says, "I just took a DNA test. Turns out I'm 100% that bitch." So now enter the Lizzo DNA test quiz with Spotify.

There are 10 questions related to relationship status and dating behavior, and I just took the Lizzo DNA test quiz and I'm engaged. So my fiancee will surely be fascinated by my quiz responses. But the results I found out that I was (oh well!) only 46% that bitch.

Where I see this in eCommerce sometimes is with beauty brands, where beauty brands on the website will have a "What's your skin type quiz?" or "How do you take care of your hair?", a quiz focused on that or something relevant to the brand.

And I guess the advantage of quizzes is that I mean, first off, people love them. They're entertaining, they're interactive. And after answering a few questions, people are dying to hear the results. So that's where brands will prompt them for an email sign up in order to get to those results that they want to hear. The everything people do with quizzes is you can structure a quiz so that it's segments, your audience and the answers to the quiz could lead to you recommending more relevant products to their situation so it can help segment your email and your marketing list further. And one example of a quiz is from BeardBrand, and this is a men's beard care company. You might have seen them before they were on Shark Tank many years ago, but they have a popular quiz on their website, and actually, I even read a key study about this quiz. But the name of the quizz is "What kind of beardsmen are you?" and I will put this in the show notes, but they had an incredible amount of success with this tactic on quizzes.

So much success that I just looked at the website and they have three different quizzes, you know, So it just speaks to how it helps them with list growth and also with segmentation

Going to wrap up this episode soon go through some final takeaways. You know, we talked about a lot of email related topics this month. It was a lot of fun to get into the details, you know, but just want to keep things really basic.

we know what the number one takeaway is on all of this. It's really to prioritize things to focus on.

1. How can you double your email performance from what it is today

2. How to grow your email list

And how to double email marketing revenue. I mean, it can sound daunting, but think like we were talking about, you know, with email. It's not a technology issue. A lot of times there's other things that hold the performance back, so we just reverse engineer it. Think about it.

"If I wanted to get twice the email revenue, what's preventing that?" you know "Is it a lack of resource is on my team?" "Is it staffing-related?" Or it could be. "Is it because the president of the company is sending out the emails and if somebody else did it, you could probably send three times the amount?"

I mean, there's there could be a lot of surmountable challenges and bugs that you can fix that are surprising with list growth. It's having that daily mentality because doubling the number of new emails you get every day that come off from the company website, I mean, it can grow a list. Significantly think email is a great place to start with building conversations, because with conversation commerce, things were only moving further in this direction.

The two best ways to get email signups from your website are focused on the email popups, the email signup boxes and also on your website footer. I mean, those are the two areas to really hone in on. Think about the placement of the box. It doesn't just have to be a popuup on the first page. There's a lot more options, you know. For example, you can get Maur, engage customers signed up through exit offers and even check out related tactics. Think the main variables to be conscious of is the content, you know, making it personal. You know, the placement of it and also the rules that you set to display to and also even the people you're excluding.

The offer content is really the key because it's just to give people conversational language and also give people what they want. You know, the offer should match what the audience desires. You're really providing an answer to a question you already know. And that's why now is a very good time to get involved with list growth. Because, as we were talking about, it's great to start doing list growth before the holiday season. And as we're seeing with additional channels, this growing is gonna be a tactic that will use again and again. So that's all for now.

And, you know, really excited about the next batch of shows as well.

For March, our theme is going to be #MissionToMarch, where we talked to agencies and conscious brand founders who are involved in sustainability

That's all for now, Adios!!