The best email acquisition tools

 

The goal of email marketing is to have a highly engaged list. This involves monitoring engagement levels and trying to re-engage the segments of your audience that seem to be losing interest.

 

Ultimately, if it feels like there isn’t a connection with someone on your list despite your best efforts to re-engage them, you’re going to want to remove them completely.

 

Emails from large lists with low engagement are more likely to end up in spam folders. However, if you keep removing people who are disengaged, your overall number of subscribers will dwindle.

 

Finding ways to add new subscribers will help to keep your list growing. There are lots of tools charities can use to help potential supporters and service users to become email subscribers.

 

 

Landing pages

 

Setting up a landing page for your mailing list can really help to encourage potential subscribers to take the plunge and sign up as they learn what they’re missing out on!

 

Leadpages allows you to build drag and drop landing pages. It uses intelligent design to help you optimise your page to increase your chances of converting visitors to your call to action – subscribing to your newsletter.

 

You can also add pop ups and alert bars to certain areas of your website to capture those most likely to sign up to your list.

 

Unbounce offers a similar service. It also has a ‘smartbuilder’ that allows you to optimise your landing page for performance as you build it.

 

They complement their landing page building functionality with ‘smart traffic’. Once you have landing pages set up for each of your email newsletters, smart traffic will start automatically directing people from your site to the most relevant landing page.

 

They have also recently added an AI copywriting extension and integrations with apps like Stripe for payment.

 

 

Smart form and pop up tools

 

Using smart form and pop-up tools can help you to capture more email sign ups as your audience browses your site. Smart tools are triggered by users’ behaviour – for example, when they move the cursor towards the search bar to navigate away or click on certain areas of the site.

 

Sumo includes different options for intuitive pop-up forms, embedded forms, share buttons, and scroll boxes that react to your website visitor’s behaviors.

 

For example, the ‘welcome mat video’ allows you to host a sign-up form overlaid on a video background that pops down from the top of the screen to fill the users screen.

 

Optinmonster includes even more options for pop-ups and also the ability to develop campaigns to target particular audiences based on how they find your site. As part of the campaigns, you can also A/B test different pop-ups to optimise the journey to email list conversion.

 

 

Social media lead generation

 

You can also use social media platforms to generate email subscribers.

 

Twitter allows you to add a newsletter subscription sign up on your profile through their partnership with Revue. You do have to use Revue as your email provider in order to activate this service.

 

Facebook lead generation adverts can also be very effective at capturing email data. Particularly for targeting people who have interacted with you on Facebook, Instagram, or your website. 

 

 

Contests and quizzes as lead magnets

 

Rather than offering a simple download or access to a video for your lead magnet, you could try developing a quiz or running a contest to attract sign ups.

 

Rafflecopter integrates with all the major social platforms in line with their contest terms and conditions. It offers templates that can be adapted to reflect your brand and it manages the data capture and random winner selection process for you.

 

Woobox offers landing page functionality for giveaways, quizzes and polls that require email data capture from each entrant. It also has options for embedding your campaign onto a website, converting it into a Facebook app or setting up pop ups to drive entries.

 

Online forms tool, Typeform, offers a quiz builder to help you create quizzes from templates that can be overlaid with your brand. Using a quiz as a lead magnet could help you learn more about your audience while they learn more about themselves!

 

 

QR codes for offline venues

 

If you are out and about at an event or exhibition you can use tools like SignUpAnywhere to generate a QR code linking to your email sign up form. The tool includes a customisable template sign up form and data is captured on a spreadsheet that can be downloaded in one click and uploaded to your CRM or email marketing provider.

 

Using some of these template-led, brandable, no-code tools can help fast-track the people who need or might support you onto your email list.