How to start nurturing your email list toward conversion

So, you've collected an audience of email subscribers. If you've done things right, that means: 

A. They've explicitly given you permission to send to them. 
B. You DID NOT purchase or rent a list of people who never asked to hear from you. 

Those two qualifications ensure you're marketing to the right folks –and that you'll stay out of the spam folder. But now that you've built this eager audience, what do you do with it? 

Step 1: Assess the data 

Take an inventory of the information you've collected about the members of your audience.

Do you know their location?
Do you have any demographic information about them, like age or gender?

If you’re like many brands, you may only ask for an email address during the signup process. But think about the bigger picture: Can you track where your new subscribers came from (a social channel versus your website, for instance)? If they did sign up on your website, do you know if it was on a particular page? 

Whatever data you have to work with should inform how you begin to slice and dice – known in our world as segment  – your email list and start sending relevant, personalized email from the get-go. 

Step 2: Build a welcome series 

Even if you begin with no data other than an email address, your welcome series is one of the first tools you can use to begin learning more about your audience. So each time you send a new email in the series, serve up elements you can use to determine a subscriber’s interests – different topics, different types of content, etc. 

For subscribers who signed up on an iPad in your restaurant, for instance, the initial welcome series could look like this: 

Step 3: Analyze their response 

Automated emails do much of the heavy lifting for you, but that doesn't mean you can just set 'em and forget 'em. Pay attention to how your subscribers respond to each new email in your welcome series. Did they open all of them? Did they only click on one?

Based on those first few pieces of information, you can begin to group subscribers into segments, or even set up branching logic (it’s sort of like choose your own adventure, email-style) to serve them different emails based on the links they clicked.

That, my friends, is how relevant, personalized, and super effective email marketing happens. 

None of the steps I just described can happen without first building a quality email list. And hey – finding ways to collect more (and more engaged) subscribers can only help your brand.

That's why you should join us and the experts at Privy for a free live Q&A about list growth on May 25th.

You'll:

• Learn all the right methods to carefully curate an email list.

• Discover the tools you can use to grow your list quickly and easily.

• Get your burning list growth questions answered.

Hope to see you there!

About the Author

McKenzie Gregory is a senior content manager on Emma’s marketing team. A Nashville native, she can be found covering all things email on the Emma blog, debating hyphenation rules, and watching obscene amounts of Netflix without a trace of shame.

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