It’s a question older than email marketing itself:

How do I grow my contact list?

Your list is one of the most valuable assets to your company. No matter the communication channel, you own your list. Nobody can take that away from you.

With a return on investment for Email Marketing of $45 for every $1 spent, of course you want to grow your list!

Consider Your Options

There is no shortage of tried and true methods to grow your email list.

Let’s take this time to get a little creative and consider what else is available to you. Are you getting the most out of the tools and apps you’re already using?

With every new social media tool that debuts, the questions of “is email marketing dead?” soon follows. The opposite is true. Email marketing thrives in tandem with social media. It’s actually a new avenue to support and strengthen your email list.

While it may sometimes seem like Facebook and Snapchat are engaging in an all out battle to the death, both are exciting options for growing your email list.

The Power of Social Media and Its Users

With each new feature released by a social channel, new marketing opportunities arise. Why? Because no marketer can ignore the numbers.

The stats on Facebook are staggering:

• 1.9 Billion active monthly users
• 1.2 Billion logon to the platform daily
• 20 min is the average time a user spends on Facebook when they log on
• 4.75 Billion pieces of content are shared daily
• Over 16 Million Business pages on the platform

Snapchat is rapidly growing each day:

• 300 Million monthly active users
• 100 Million daily active users
• 1.7 Billiion snaps are shared each day
• 30% of US Millennial Internet Users use Snapchat regularly
• 60% of college students would purchased from a brand off of Spapchat

With all those users, some will surely subscribe to your email list. Right?

Right. Let’s look at how.

Harness the Power of Facebook

You can promote your email subscription to your existing Facebook fans.

To do this, you can put a signup form on a Tab on your Facebook page. You can best accomplish this with an iFrame app.

Using the iFrame app, you can paste the HTML code of a signup form you’ve previously designed or even link the URL of a landing page built for gathering subscribers. The result will be a signup form that matches your branding, directly on your Facebook page.

Once you’ve added a signup form to your Facebook page, you can also create ads to promote it.

You can drive traffic directly to the Tab on your page that has your signup form with a simple ad. The best part, is that you can target to whom you promote your ad.

When you’re in the process of creating your ad, you have the option to customize the audience for your ad. There, you’ll see the immensely valuable option to create a Lookalike Audience. That means you’ll target your ad towards people on Facebook who are similar to your most valuable customers.

Snapchat, Crackle and Make Your List Pop

As Snapchat is still the relatively new kid on the block, it doesn’t hurt to take some steps to grow your audience there.

Snapchat users have found many creative ways to share their snapcode:

• Print it out and put it on your storefront, car or anywhere!
• Set it as your profile picture on Facebook, Twitter or any other social media channel
• Put your snapcode on your business card
• Simply forward it to your list of contacts (in a post on how social media can boost your email marketing, let’s not forget email can promote your social media efforts as well)

Now, you can turn your new and existing Snapchat followers into subscribers. This can be done with the new attachment feature on Snapchat.

The way this looks from a user experience, is that your follower can swipe up on your snap. This will take them to the website you’ve chosen.

Much like Facebook, you can direct them to a landing page with your signup form on it. Tailor the page to your Snapchat followers and give them good incentive to subscribe.

Also like Facebook, there are unique targeting options available to you in Snapchat.

Using the Our Story feature, you can target your signup form snaps to a specific audience. This feature allows you to add a snap to a local story, whether it be a location or even an event.

Adding a snap in Our Story means anyone watching the story for their location or the event they’re attending or following will see your snap.

Snapchat has more recently added an option to view snaps from anywhere in the world. That’s right! Now your snap you’ve sent to build your list can even go viral.

Go to a highly dense snap area or look for events in your area and upload snaps to the public story with your attachment. This will bring in new subscribers to your landing page.

Don’t Forget the Details

No matter what methods you use to grow your list, make sure to keep your lists well organized and segmented. Try not to group all your new subscribers together in one list.

You can do this with the fields in the signup forms you’re using on Facebook and Snapchat. Or you can even create separate lists for each one. That will let you send campaigns tailored to the audience on each channel.

Conclusion

There are many creative and interesting ways that you can incentivize your social media followers to become email subscribers. The method you choose is the first step.

Getting someone to subscribe to your email list is all about the “why.”

Think of an email address as a currency. You better give value for the exchange.

Otherwise, why would anyone signup?

How Do You Grow Your List?

Have you found effective ways to use Facebook, Snapchat or any other social tool that we didn’t discuss?

Share your successes in the comments! We love to hear about what others are doing.

If you’re inspired to put these ideas to use, signup and get started today.