Best practices for growing newsletter sign-ups as a small business

Ask Me Anything Q&A Emailmarketingama
1

Dear Josh,

We’re a new and growing platform for independent music artists and are just starting to explore email marketing. While we have active users, we’re looking for the best strategies to encourage more people to sign up for our newsletter and stay tuned. We would really appreciate if you can give advice on:

  1. What are some effective ways to drive newsletter sign-ups for an audience that may not initially see the value in subscribing?
  2. Are there any common mistakes small businesses make when starting out with email marketing that we should avoid?
  3. How can we segment and personalize content to keep independent artists engaged and coming back to our platform?

Any insights or best practices for small businesses in their early growth stages would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you for your time,
Valeriia

2

Thanks for your questions!

  1. That’s great that you already have some active users. One idea could be to leverage those active users to refer new subscribers to the newsletter. You can set up a referral program that can give perks to your active users who refer new users to sign up for your emails. If the audience sees their peers, friends, colleagues, etc. signing up for the email, it not only helps illustrate the value of signing up but also helps you develop a sense of community surrounding your emails.

  2. I think the first step that some company’s miss out on is valuing email marketing from the get-go. Your brand already seems invested in the marketing channel which is the best first step! One trap some smaller brands can fall into is expecting email marketing to be a short-term solution. Instead, email marketing is a long-tail marketing strategy where results come from the development of deeper relationships and audience growth over time. If you don’t see immediate results in your email marketing efforts, don’t give up!

  3. Depending on the platform you’re using, you should be able to segment your overall email audience into smaller groups. Your segmentation can be on demographic info or on engagement data. For example, if you collect new artists’ location or genre, you can create emails that appeal specifically to those unique characteristics. You can also segment based on engagement. For example, if you identify recipients of an email who clicked on a specific call to action, you can then follow up with another email that goes only to those artists who engaged.