5 Quick and Easy Ways to Use Social Media to Build Your Email List

Email marketing is huge and likely will be for many
years to come. In fact, in Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s
recently released 2015 State of Marketing Report , 73
percent of 5,000 marketers agreed that email marketing
is core to their businesses and 60 percent went so far as
to say that it was a “critical enabler” of their products
and services, an 18 percent increase over 2014.
Here are five quick and easy ways that you can use
social media to build not just a large, but a highly
targeted and engaged email list.
1. Integrate your email service with your
Facebook page.
Most major email service providers will have an app that
allows you to collect emails right from within your
Facebook page. These apps will let you have a fully
functional email opt-in form, and your fans will never
even have to leave Facebook.
Related: 8 Social Media Mistakes That Are Killing Your
Brand
Your fans will simply need to click on the tab
underneath your cover photo to access the form. As
always, it’s a good idea to offer something of value here
rather than just asking your fans to sign up for your list.
2. Hold a contest.
Hold a contest that makes handing over a valid email
address an entry requirement. Try to choose a prize that
only your target audience would care about, otherwise
you could end with a whole lot of subscribers who really
don’t care about your business. A strategically designed
contest can yield amazing results.
To increase interest in my annual social media live
event, Social Boom, I ran a Facebook contest where the
winner would receive an “All Access Pass” to the event.
Within 48 hours I had more than 800 entries, each one
willing to give me their email address in exchange for
their entry.
The best part is that these are not just “any” email
subscribers. They are interested in social media or they
would have not entered a contest to win a free ticket to a
social media event.
There are a lot of great, low-cost apps out there that
make it quick and easy to build your own Facebook
contest.
3. Use Twitter to reach more followers and
build your list.
With it getting harder and harder to reach fans on
Facebook without using paid advertising, many
(including me!) are finding great success distributing
free offers using Twitter. For instance, my free ebook, 23
Quick & Easy Ways to Get More Twitter Retweets , has
been downloaded over 10,000 times, resulting in
thousands of new email list subscribers, as a result of a
continuing series of tweets.
Even more exciting, I do not have to actually be on site
to post the tweets. There are tons of tweet schedulers
out there. I use Hootsuite for my normal tweet
scheduling but, for evergreen content, such as a free
offer, I use SocialOomph and build something called a
queue reservoir. The software lets me set the times,
frequency and campaign duration as well as recycles the
tweets for later use. It is about as close to an automated
email-building machine as you can get!
Related: How to Get Online Customers to Find You and
Trust You
4. Use visual-based content to increase
conversions.
Tweets with graphics get way more engagement in the
form of “retweets” and “favorites” on Twitter than those
that don't. People focus in on and would rather engage
with pictures than words. That means greater reach and
virality for you and more people clicking on and taking
your free offers, newsletter opt-ins, etc., and joining your
email list.
This does not just work on Twitter. It also works on
Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and most other social
media sites.
5. Promote your offers.
Did you know that 42 percent of Facebook fans like a
fan page primarily for the discounts and coupons they
expect to get there? Facebook offers are a great way for
getting your fans to "claim" a discount or coupon. As I
discussed above, you can also use offers to give away
your free info product.
While you can also promote these via your status
updates, using paid Facebook offers gives you an added
benefit: those who "claim" your offer get an email with
details of the offer. This gets your name and business in
front of them -- not just on Facebook -- but in their inbox
as well.
While you don’t get access to their email address at this
point, you will want to make sure you collect emails on
the signup page people are sent to when they claim your
offer.
On a recent offer, I spent $200 in Facebook advertising
and 488 people claimed the offer. However, I got much
more traffic than that because many of those people
shared the offer with their fans and friends. The bottom
line is I added 1,000 targeted list subscribers in just a
few days.
Hopefully you can use one or more of these five quick
and easy ways to use social media to help you build
your email list.
Related: 3 Facebook Hacks to Help With Organic Reach