There are lots of ways to grow your MailChimp list and I will cover many of them here. Having an interested list of email subscribers can help you sustain and grow your business, so as soon as possible you should start building your email list. This tutorial goes through a number of ideas to grow your list. In upcoming tutorials, I will show you how to do each one of them using MailChimp.
Grow Your MailChimp List Method 1
Add a new subscriber manually if they explicitly gave you permission allowing you to email them.
You will normally add one email address at a time when you manually add email addresses to your list. There’s a fancier, faster way below if you have lots of email addresses waiting to be added to your list. But first, let’s look at two examples of people you might be considering adding to your list.
Good Example
You met someone and asked if you could send them your free tutorials. They said yes. This means you have their permission. Now you can add them to your email list!
Bad Example
You were networking. You collected 20 business cards. You didn’t ask anyone if you could add them to your list but you added them anyway. This is what gets people in trouble. You’ll likely get bunches of unsubscribes when you send an email to your list. And, even worse, you’ll annoy them. This is not the path to an email list that grows your business.
Pro Tip
Make sure you are on your list. If you want to test a sign-up sequence for a list, you can always delete yourself from your own list and sign up again. But before you send an email, make sure your email address is on your list so you see what everyone else sees when the email has been sent.
Pro Tip
Even though I just said make sure you are on each of your lists, you don’t want to wait until the email is sent to make sure everything is as planned. There are ways to test your email before you send it to everyone. I recently wrote an article about testing MailChimp emails; it was focused on making sure your MailChimp hero images appear properly, but it will give you an excellent starting point to learn how to test your email prior to sending it.
Grow Your MailChimp List, Method 2
Import previous email subscribers from another service or email account.
Yes. You don’t have to start all over with MailChimp. If you’ve been emailing people already, bring all those email addresses into your new MailChimp list.
You can export your email addresses from services like Gmail and then import those email addresses into MailChimp in bulk.
Grow Your MailChimp List, Method 3
You put a signup form on your website. Someone comes to your site and fills it out.
We love these people because they liked what you had to say and are telling you they want more. I have so much to say about this topic. I will have a ton of tutorials coming out soon about this.
Grow Your MailChimp List, Method 4
You can share your email sign-up form link on social media.
For instance, in the case of Facebook, you could create a business page. Next, you could add a cover image that asked people to sign up for your list that has a link to your sign-up form in the description area for your cover image.
You could assign your call-to-action button to your sign-up form. Your Facebook page’s call-to-action button sits on top of your Facebook cover image.
Getting people to sign up for your list involves giving them a reason to want to, so until you have a really good offer, don’t be surprised if sign-ups are slow. However, once you figure out an offer that gets people excited to sign up, sharing that offer on social media can be very powerful. The ways to get people excited about signing up for your list will be something I’ll cover in future tutorials.
Grow Your MailChimp List, Method 5
You can share your email sign-up form link in your email signature. Again, this is great once you have an enticing offer.
Grow Your MailChimp List, Method 6
Go out there and give talks. Offer your attendees something for signing up to your email list. Consider offering a recording of your presentation or a digital version of your slide deck.
You can hand out a paper sign-up sheet and pass it around if you are presenting to a small group.
You can also use LeadDigits from LeadPages to set up a text number ahead of time that you will then give to your attendees so they can sign up to your list during your talk. This is super easy for them, enabling them to sign up quickly. And this is less work for you than typing in the names manually from a handwritten sign-up sheet. A big danger point with this is that you are inviting your audience members to LOOK AT THEIR PHONES, so you might want to hold off on sharing this number with them until the end of the presentation.
Grow Your MailChimp List, Method 7
Sign people up at your trade show booth. Offer them something extra special for doing so, like a free consultation, a free white paper, or something of high value that relates to the trade show or event at which you are exhibiting.
For trade show sign ups, you could use an app, like MailChimp Subscribe, on your iPad that will allow people to sign up. This would be weird to do unless you were standing next to the person to make sure they didn’t have any tech issues and to keep track of your tablet. So if you’re at a trade show, this can be a perfect solution.
Your Next Step
- Making progress builds momentum. Overwhelm will stop you in your tracks. So do this to help you make the most progress today:
- Write down three of the approaches listed above that sounds the easiest.
- Choose ONE of the tactics listed above to do today.
- Schedule in your calendar when you will do the second approach.
- Now go and complete the first approach today.
- When you have completed the second tactic, schedule in your calendar when you will complete the third tactic.
The Next MailChimp Tutorial
If you don’t know how to actually do the tactics listed above, I’ll be creating tutorials for many of the techniques and will link to those tutorials from this tutorial. You can also go to MailChimp’s support documents.
Affiliate? Who me?
Please note that I am not an affiliate of MailChimp or any other service I mentioned in this post and am not in any way being paid by MailChimp (or any of the other services mentioned) to talk about them. I like MailChimp. That’s it. As I write these tutorials, my goal is to share how I use MailChimp to grow my business so you can learn from my successes and failures and so I can become better at serving my clients by growing my expertise in email marketing.
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