How to Grow Your Email List: 16 Highly Effective and Easy Ways

Wondering how to grow your email list quickly?

To run successful email marketing campaigns, you must have an email list that keeps growing.

Even if you’ve got a big email list, it naturally shrinks by 20-30% every year. People on your list change their email addresses, or they simply unsubscribe because they’re no longer engaged with your business. They might no longer need your service, or are no longer interested in your products.

That’s why it’s essential to continuously work on growing your email list. But what are the best ways to do that effectively?

In this article, we’ll share how to grow your email list in 16 different ways.

How to Grow Your Email List Daily

Here’s a quick summary of ways to grow your email list every day. You can skip ahead to any step you’re interested in reading, or scroll through to read them all.

1. Create a Simple yet Attractive Sign Up Form in Your Sidebar
2. Use Attention Activation Feature for Inline Campaigns
3. Add a Signup Checkbox to Your Contact Form
4. Add Floating Bar Signup Forms on Your Site
5. Add a Countdown Timer on Your Website
6. Create Exit-Intent Popups
7. Use Gated Content Method
8. Run a Giveaway on Your Website
9. Use Social Proof to Get More Subscribers
10. Add 2-Step Optin Campaigns on Your Content
11. Use Fullscreen Welcome Mat on Your Website
12. Use Coupon Wheel Optins
13. Add a Sign-Up Button on Your Facebook Page
14. Create After Post and Inline Optin Campaigns
15. Add Polite Slide-in Scroll Box Forms on Your Site
16. Add Timed Lightbox Popups on Your Site

1. Create a Simple Yet Attractive Sign Up Form in Your Sidebar

Assuming that you’re aware of email marketing, you may have already added an email sign up form on your website sidebar. It’s the most common location for email signup forms so that interested users will look for it.

But are they simple and user-friendly to fill out? Are they good looking and attractive?

To have your website visitors subscribe to your list, you need to create attractive yet straightforward email sign up forms. For example, you can see the signup form in OptinMonster’s blog sidebar.

You can create a simple email sign up form like this by using OptinMonster, the most popular lead generation tool in the market. For more details, you can check OptinMonster’s sidebar optin forms page.

2. Use Attention Activation Feature for Inline Campaigns

If you are using an inline campaign to grow your list of email subscribers, then there is an amazing feature you can use for any piece of content. OptinMonster offers Attention Activation feature which helps to pull visitors attention towards the email sign up box.

How does it work? As users scroll through a page, the content on the page will fade away when they reach your inline campaign. And as they continue to scroll down the page, everything returns to normal automatically.

With Attention Activation feature, you can make your posts or landing page a lead magnet and draw the focus of your visitors right where you want.

To use this feature for building your email list through OptinMonster, simply head over to the campaign builder, click Inline Settings, slide the toggle for activating Attention Activation feature, and Save your campaign.

3. Add a Signup Checkbox to Your Contact Form

Another simple tactic for growing an email list is to add a signup checkbox in your contact form.

If you have a contact us page with a standard contact form, then you can add a signup checkbox to it and start collecting emails. Therefore, users can join your newsletter with just a single click while filling out your contact form, and you’ll get more email subscribers.

This technique is very simple but effective because the users submitting your contact forms are the people interested in your business. So, having them in your mailing list is highly beneficial.

You can create contact forms with signup checkbox in WordPress using the most beginner-friendly WordPress form plugin WPForms. It lets you connect your contact form with your favorite email marketing services and collect emails.

If you need more details, check this tutorial on how to add an AWeber signup checkbox to your contact form.

4. Add Floating Bar Signup Forms on Your Site

Adding floating bar signup forms is another highly effective strategy for growing your email list.

A floating bar is a sticky and easily noticeable campaign that attaches to the top or bottom of the web page. It moves with the users scrolling through your website, and it’s less annoying.

You can create beautiful floating bars on your website using OptinMonster. For more details, see OptinMonster’s floating bar feature.

5. Add a Countdown Timer on Your Website

A countdown timer is another highly effective email list building strategy you can use. It uses the FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) strategy and creates a sense of urgency which tempts the users to sign up fast.

You can also use a countdown timer to boost sales on your online store. If you’re offering discount offers on your products, then countdown timer is the best campaign you can use.

Creating a countdown timer is also easy with OptinMonster. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to add a countdown timer in WordPress.

6. Create Exit-Intent Popups

Exit-Intent is a smart technology with an ability to detect user behavior on your site and show a popup at the exact moment they’re about to exit your site.

Built by OptinMonster, it’s one of the highly effective email list building techniques ever.

Using this technology, you can turn your abandoning visitors into subscribers and customers.

7. Use Gated Content Method

Gated content is any online material like an eBook, a report, an article, a video tutorial etc. that you lock behind a signup form. In other words, you’re offering some useful content to your users in exchange for their email address.

This content locking method works amazingly well because there’s a clear incentive users will get if they fill out the form.

You can easily create the content upgrade forms on your website using OptinMonster’s content lock feature.

8. Run a Giveaway on Your Website

Want to know how to grow your email list as fast as possible? Running a giveaway or content is one of the fastest ways to get more email subscribers and customers on your website.

Giveaways include fun and excitement of winning, so they naturally attract and engage more visitors on your website.

For example, you can add more points for users subscribing to your newsletter, following you on social media, etc.

If you’re using WordPress as your website platform, then you can use RafflePress plugin to create highly engaging giveaways. For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to do a giveaway on your WordPress site.

9. Use Social Proof to Get More Subscribers

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people follow the actions of others. In other words, it’s the tendency of people doing socially approved and trusted activities.

You can use this technique to get more subscribers. For example, showing the number of people who have already signed up for your newsletter encourages new visitors to sign up.

You may also want to see our list of the best WordPress social proof plugins.

10. Add 2-Step Optin Campaigns on Your Content

The 2-step optin campaigns use a psychological principle called the Zeigarnik Effect. According to this principle, people are more likely to complete an action if they themselves started it.

Using this principle, OptinMonster offers MonsterLinks 2-Step Optins feature. It allows you to turn any text, image, or icon into a 2-step optin campaign. So, when visitors click on the text or image, an attractive email option appears.

And users will more likely complete the optin form because it’s triggered by themselves. This way you can get more email subscribers and grow your email list.

11. Use Fullscreen Welcome Mat on Your Website

Another fantastic feature of OptinMonster is the fullscreen welcome mat. A fullscreen welcome mat is an overlay campaign that appears the minute a visitor lands on your website.

It allows you to present an exciting offer or coupon, new product, or your brand information as the visitors enter your site. This helps you to show the best deal or product on your website at first and grab users’ attention.

12. Use Coupon Wheel Optins

Similar to giveaway method, coupon wheel optins are also highly effective for collecting more emails.

Coupon wheel optins use the psychological trick called gamification to attract more users to join your mailing list.

Like a real coupon wheel, you can create a spin wheel with different coupon plans, and users need to enter their email address to try it. It quickly grabs the users’ attention because it looks impressive for everyone to try some luck.

You can learn more by visiting OptinMonster’s Coupon Wheel Optins page.

13. Add a Sign-Up Button on Your Facebook Page

If you’ve got a Facebook page for your business, then adding a Sign-Up button is an easy way to grow your newsletter list.

Facebook has introduced this feature to help businesses grow their traffic and sales so that you can use it. It allows you to add the call to action buttons like Sign Up, Show Now, etc. easily.

14. Create After Post and Inline Optin Campaigns

Another easy email list building trick you can use is to create after a post or inline optin campaigns. It’s a great way to collect emails from your engaged readers.

If you’ve long blog articles and users are reading it, then they’re the engaged audience. Collecting the emails of such users can give you more benefits.

Using OptinMonster’s Inline Forms, you can easily create an email newsletter signup forms or content locking forms and display them after the content or within it.

For more details, you can see this beginner’s guide on how to create inline campaigns with OptinMonster.

15. Add Polite Slide-in Scroll Box Forms on Your Site

Sometimes popups are annoying as they interrupt the users reading your content or simply browsing through your site.

Slide-in scroll box forms are the alternative to such annoying popups. The slide-in scroll box campaigns appear at the bottom right corner of the web page as the users scroll down. They’re easily noticeable, but they don’t disturb users to view other content.

Hence, slide-in optins are polite but effective for email list growing.

16. Add Timed Lightbox Popups on Your Site

Lightbox popups are one of the most common strategies used for list building. However, many users find them annoying as they appear at an inappropriate time.

You can solve that by creating timed lightbox popups with OptinMonster. OptinMonster allows you to set various display rules for your popups and trigger them at the right time.

You can set up time-based trigger, scroll trigger and exit-intent trigger for popups and display them when users are more likely to fill that out. For more details, you can see this OptinMonster Lightbox Popups page.

Now you know how to grow your email list quickly! You may also want to see our guide on how to get brilliant blog post ideas from Google Analytics.

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