Email Marketing 101: Growing Your Email Subscriber List

You may not think it, but email marketing is still very much on the rise. 

With 4 billion daily email users expected to rise to 4.6 billion daily users in 2025, you should not underestimate the power of a good email marketing strategy within your company.

What Are Email Subscriber Lists?

Email subscriber lists are formed when people choose to sign up to receive emails from this company, often expecting to receive exclusive updates or offers directly to their inbox. Purchasing email subscribers to promote your company can sometimes be illegal, so it is generally best to grow your subscriber list organically. To do this, you will need a powerful and effective email marketing growth strategy. 

Why do you need an email strategy?

Putting an email marketing strategy into place can help your company to achieve higher open and click-through rates (which in turn can increase traffic to your website). You may want to invest in an email marketing tool, such as MailerLite or Mailchimp, to help you manage your email list. These tools will also help you to segment your email audience and allow for better personalisation within your company’s emails.

How Can You Grow Your Email Subscriber List?

You now know why you need an email strategy in place. But, how can you actually grow this list at a reasonable pace?

We’ve tried and tested a few different methods and come up with six ways to grow your email list:

1. Offer an Incentive to Subscribers

With this being one of the most commonly used tactics, it is clear why it’s so successful. Who doesn’t love a freebie? This should be something you know your audience would want to get a hold of. For example, if you are marketing a cafe, you could offer a recipe for one of your most popular cakes. Similarly, a local pet shop could offer a free sample of pet food for new email subscribers.

It may not work for every company but think about your own audience and consider what you could create which would boost email subscriptions. Remember, you just need to make the offer unique and relevant.

2. Minimise the Clicks to Subscribe

Make it easy for your audience to subscribe! It sounds so simple, but often companies can forget to consider the customer journey and the experience to become a mailing list subscriber. Minimising the number of clicks to sign up to your list will mean it is less challenging to become an email subscriber to your company. Ideally, you should aim for customers to have clicked less than three times - the fewer, the better!

3. Make New Subscribers Feel Valued

Feeling valued doesn’t only mean sending your subscribers a generic ‘thank you’ email immediately after they sign up and then forgetting about them. Making your subscribers feel valued is an ongoing process, and it is an important step in order to retain your subscribers. Personalisation throughout your emails can make people feel recognised and you should use this to show your audience that you value them. 

Consider what kind of data you can collect during the signup process to customise their email subscriber experience too. Perhaps you could ask for their birthday and send them an exclusive offer when they’re special day rolls around? It’s the little things that make a big difference. 

4. Add a Clear CTA in all Social Media Channels

Social media channels are at our fingertips, and they should be used to invite people to become an email subscriber. Try to have a clear CTA on your social media pages to allow your followers to see you have an email newsletter. It’s likely your followers will want to sign up for your newsletter, they might just not be aware you have one yet!

5. Show Your Personality in the Newsletters

Keep your newsletter fun and relevant to your brand. Typically, you will be much more informative in your email newsletter, than you may be in other channels so keep this in mind when creating campaigns. Giving your brand a personality is likely to enable your email subscribers to relate to your company, which is likely to encourage them to stick around.

A great example of this is Function of Beauty. Their catchy subject lines encourage subscribers to open their emails by giving a humorous touch to their subject lines.

Once you have a reasonable amount of subscribers, you should actively work to ensure your mailing list is cleansed. Our Email Marketing Metrics Template found in The Girls in Marketing Membership can be used to log all of your data, making it easier to sift through your mailing list and pinpoint inactive subscribers. This will improve your open rates and should decrease the amount of bounced emails you send.

To access our Email Marketing Metrics Template (and many more templates!) become a Girls in Marketing member for just £17.99 per month.

Written by Keira Penney