How To Boost Mailing List Subscribers

As a digital marketing apprentice, I am always excited to try new ways of engaging audiences and working out the best way in which to do so.
Any marketer knows that the industry is always evolving. New platforms and channels are continually being created and shutting down a lot so constantly testing new marketing tactics is crucial to success.

Since January I have been running a client’s monthly email marketing campaigns; from writing the content of the emails to promoting the efforts once I have sent it off.
Having a holistic view of email marketing means that I gain a better understanding of what works well (and what doesn’t) can make all the difference.

Part of my role at Seaside Creative is managing social media accounts for both clients and ourselves.
I therefore have access to the Facebook page of the client I am running email marketing campaigns for.

Having access to this clients’ Facebook page, I was able to promote the email campaign after it was sent out; encouraging users who follow the Facebook page to subscribe to the mailing list.

The goal here was not just to grow subscriber rates, but also to raise awareness of the emails so that people know that the mailing list is active. This in itself would act as an incentive to sign up for the emails in the first place.

Mailchimp makes it easy to share email campaigns on social media with it’s ‘social share’ feature which creates a webpage version of the email; with just one click, a link to this webpage is copied to your clipboard and you’re free to use it anywhere to direct people to it.

This allows the email content to be repurposed into social media content as anyone with the link can then view it.

Since taking the email marketing over for the client in January, subscriber rates went up by 34% in the first month. 

On Friday 18th January, I sent out a ‘New Year Updates’ email to the mailing list of the client and then on the following Monday I published a Facebook post about the email to the client’s Facebook page; linking a webpage version of the email and informing users that this email had gone out last Friday. But if they wanted to get these updates before anyone else they can sign up to the emails through the Facebook page.

 

Instead of posting the Mailchimp link directly to Facebook, I converted it into a trackable Bit.ly link so that I could then measure the success of posting the email campaign to social media.

Through Bit.ly, I was able to see that 42 people had clicked on the campaign link and it’s safe to assume they read the content.

In February I sent out the second email and planned to also post a link to the Facebook page; however, client complications meant that I was unable to do so.

Nevertheless, from January to February there was a 44% increase in subscribers to the mailing list. 

These results suggest that just over half of the people who clicked on the email campaign through Facebook then subscribed to the emails. I draw this conclusion as there is no other way people could have been made aware of the emails through digital means. Mailchimp’s analytics software showed that no one had forwarded the January campaign on to anyone. 

The only other explanation is that the sending of the emails sparked conversations between people and subscribers were gained through word of mouth.

My findings from doing this with a client’s email campaigns tells me that using social media to promote email marketing efforts is very effective. From December to February, the client’s mailing list has had an incredible 95% increase in subscribers with no unsubscribers at all. 

This alone shows that both the email marketing and social media marketing efforts is capturing the right audience. Having engaging content for mailing list subscribers to read is also a big factor in retaining subscribers; as is keeping email campaigns consistent and regular.