7 Quick List-Building Tips From Email Marketing Masters

Despite what you may have heard, a strong email list remains a key commodity for any content creator to grow their owned audience. It’s the rain dance that gets a flood of followers to your content, the channel that conjures a storm of social shares.

But building and optimizing that list is easier said than done. Last week, we co-hosted an intimate happy hour for some of the best email list builders around, and over cocktails we badgered them for their top tips. Here are seven that stood out and will hopefully help you build that badass email list of your dreams:

1. Jake Schonfeld, Marketing Director at Blood, Sweat & Cheers:

Produce good content. You want something that people want to sign up for.

2. Alex Buckley, New Business Development at Handy:

Give someone something in exchange for an email. So if you’re in the street, give them a cookie for their sign up.

3. Sheffie Elencweig, Business Development Product Manager at Mashable:

Include content that’s actually useful and not just promotional.

4. Casey Brown, Marketing Manager at Mashable:

Don’t send too many emails. Limit your number of emails to once every two weeks.

5. Tracy Cho, Marketing Manager at Refinery29:

Good site overlay. If they do sign up, you’ll be getting someone who’s interested in your content, so naturally it’s more engagement off the bat.

6. William Pearce, Head of Business Development and Partnerships at Book Vibe:

Giveaways, offering people a nice price, have been really successful for us. We’ve been giving away iPhones and iPads and say, “If you want to win this, you’ll have to sign up for our mail list.”

We usually have 1,000 or 2,000 people subscribe when we do that. Also, co-promotion—working with other companies so each one sends each other’s content to their existing users. It forms a cross-pollination where all the people from their site sign up to yours and vice versa.

7. Debra Liu, Media Marketing Manager at FoodtoEat:

Partnerships and doing events with partners is a great way to share subscribers.

Now that you have the tips from the experts, go build that list!