How To Get More Email Subscribers in 2023

Building an email marketing list is often thought of as a specialist task, with marketers requiring a set of expert skills to grow a subscriber list. It may seem impossible to build an audience of people that not only happily give up their email addresses, but that are also genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

Here at beehiiv, we want to bust the myth that only top email marketers can build strong email lists. Growing a subscriber base is easy when you know how, and we want to help you scale your email marketing so that you can reach as many people as possible with your email newsletters.

How To Get More Email Subscribers (Key Steps)

Here are our top tips for getting more email subscribers - and ones that will want to receive your emails.

Make It Easy To Subscribe

When building a subscriber list, it’s important to start with the basics - make it as easy as possible for people to sign-up for your newsletter.

This may sound overly simple, but it’s true. If your website is difficult to navigate, or you have a long sign-up form that takes forever to complete, chances are you’re going to lose potential subscribers before you’ve even started.

Make sure your sign-up form is easy to find on your website (a pop-up when a user has been on your website for a few minutes often works well) and don’t ask users for too much information. Usually, just one field requesting their email address is the best way to collect information, as people are happier to part with their email address than their name and phone number for example.

Engage With Potential Subscribers

There’s no better way to build subscriber numbers than by building relationships with potential followers. At the end of the day, a list with thousands of subscribers may look great, but ultimately a quality list is the goal, and engaging with your audience is the way to do this.

This is best done via social media, by interacting with people that have already shown an interest in your brand and may enjoy receiving other content from you such as a monthly newsletter for example.

Engage with these users and encourage them to sign-up - these loyal followers could end up making up a large proportion of your email list. Here are some top tips for converting social media followers into email subscribers.

Create an Incentive

Incentives are great for growing email lists - sometimes you have to give something away to receive something in return.

This could come in the form of an offer code that is emailed to the subscriber once they’ve signed up to your mailing list, or a different benefit such as free shipping for example.

The nature of the incentive is up to you, but whatever you choose, make sure it’s exciting and advertised on other marketing platforms such as your website and social media channels to achieve top levels of exposure.

Provide Subscriber-Only Benefits

Subscriber-only benefits are ideal for building email lists. This involves transforming your email list into an exclusive club where subscribers gain access to something that no one else does.

This could be early access to content, exclusive sales/discounts, or even free material that non-subscribers would need to pay for. Whatever you choose to offer, make sure it’s compelling to get people excited about signing up and desperate to join your exclusive email list.

Encourage Sharing

Our last piece of advice is to encourage sharing amongst your current subscribers. Don’t forget that your existing audience members are already brand ambassadors in the making, and if they like your content they’re bound to have friends on their contact lists who will like it too.

Encourage your subscribers to share your newsletter with others - you could even set up a referral scheme to reward existing audience members for getting their friends to sign up for your mailing list.

Here at beehiiv, we’ve done most of the hard work for you already by creating our own referral program. It’s super simple - it involves uploading the rewards you want to offer to the referral program and creating milestones through which subscribers can be rewarded.

Interested? Learn how to build a successful referral program for your newsletter here.

How To Get 1,000 Email Subscribers?

If you’re trying to build your email list, it’s important to set a goal so you know what you’re aiming for. Many brands start this off at 1,000 subscribers.

So how can you achieve this objective? We’d recommend breaking this down into further increments and setting realistic time scales to enable you to reach these milestones. For example, you could break it down into 500 subscriber chunks and look at achieving 500 subscribers via your website and 500 via your social media channels.

By following this method, you can easily measure your efforts to grow your email lists. Not to mention, setting smaller goals is proven to improve success rates when striving for new targets.

How Can You Get Free Email Subscribers?

Getting free subscribers is the best way to build a marketing list. Paid lists are still available to users who want them, but they tend to be a little sketchy when it comes to transparency on where the customer data has come from and whether it was obtained ethically or not.

Free subscribers are where it’s at, not to mention it’s cheaper for you, and your subscriber will be signing up to your list willingly.

The best way to do this is to take advantage of your existing marketing platforms. If you have a website that receives a lot of traffic or social media platforms with plenty of followers, be sure to populate these channels with ways to easily sign-up to your mailing list. This makes it free for you, and easy for your existing audience to sign-up.

If your brand sees customers physically, perhaps your brand is a hairdressing salon or a garage, make sure to ask your customers in person if they’ll sign up for your mailing list. This won’t cost you a penny and it will help you to build good relationships with your customers - double whammy!

Is 500 Email Subscribers Good?

500 subscribers is a great milestone to hit when building your email marketing list, so give yourself a pat on the back if you’ve recently hit this goal.

If you’re concerned that 500 subscribers aren’t enough, do not stress. Everybody has to start somewhere, and if you take into account just a few of the tips we provided, you’ll be on your way to a bigger email list in no time.

Remember - quality is better than quantity when it comes to email marketing. It’s far more beneficial to have 500 quality subscribers who can’t wait to receive your newsletter than 1,000 subscribers with low open rate statistics and high unsubscribe rates.

Getting More Email Subscribers (Closing Thoughts)

You must be raring to go after learning all about building your email marketing list from this article! So how do you get started?

Check out the beehiiv email marketing system to start building your email subscriber list. With our newsletter platform, you can store up to 2,500 subscribers for free, with unlimited sending, and advanced analytics. We don’t penalize our customers for building their email lists, which is why we believe in having set paid plans rather than increasing our bill for every subscriber our customer signs up for.

You’ll gain access to a whole host of other benefits too with the beehiiv newsletter system, such as custom domains, beautiful ready-made email templates, and even access to our online referral system.

Start a free trial with beehiiv today and start building your email list!