What’s the secret to a successful email campaign?

Great design? Engaging subject lines and email copy? Your offer?

It's actually none of these things - while each, in itself, is important, the most crucial aspect of a successful email campaign is a quality email list.

A quality email list is one you've built through connection with your audience, based on their registered interest, and ideally, segmented by each person's preferences.

So how can you build a great, effective e-mail list? How can you get more warm leads onto your database in order to target them with your future offers?

Here are some tips.

1. Website/blog is the best place to take the first step

Your website or blog is generally the first thing people visit - so leverage the power of your website and place an email sign-up form on it.

When a visitor lands on your blog or site, give him/her a reason to subscribe - offer something valuable in exchange for their information. This could be an educational resource, eBook, white paper, special discount, free demo, or some other incentives.

See how Blurb does this:

2. Use the power of content upgrade

Brian Dean says that content upgrade increased his conversion rate from 0.54% to 4.82%. That’s 785%.

Nathan Ellering, Content Marketing Lead at CoSchedule, shared his take here:

“Content upgrade is an absolute best way to build an email list of active subscribers, just like how we've built a list of more than 100,000 subscribers at CoSchedule."

If you’re not using the power of content upgrade, you’re missing a great opportunity to build your email list.

Create an informational and interesting article, and offer an actionable cheatsheet or quick guide as an upgrade. Add a line at the beginning, middle or end of the post which encourages visitors to download your cheat sheet or guide.

Here’s a content upgrade example from Brian Dean:

3. Put a signup button on your Facebook Page

Social media is a great medium through which to build an audience, and you can also use it to grow your email list.

Add a 'Sign up' call to action button to your Facebook Page to collect email addresses - it’s a great way to convert your fans/followers into your subscribers.  

See how Birchbox does a great job by placing sign up button their Facebook page:

4. Hosting a Webinar

Hosting a webinar can be a great way to communicate with your targeted audience - and collect email addresses.

The best way to do this is to find trending topic relevant to your service, then conduct a webinar based on that subject. You can then ask potential attendees to provide their contact information in order to join the webinar - and don’t forget to promote it across the social media platforms.

See how SEMrush adds a registration form to their Webinar page:

5. Run a Facebook contest

Facebook is also a great channel to run a contest or special offer (Instagram, too, can be beneficial on this front)

Create a compelling graphic, engaging title and an irresistible giveaway, then ask your audience for their email address in order to join the contest.

Take a look at London Drugs’ Facebook contest:

Now It’s Your Turn

Now that you have five simple, and proven, ways to build a quality email list, it’s time to implement them. Hopefully these tactics will help you to get a good amount of subscribers - start building your list today.