We’ve talked about list building strategies before, but now we’re diving in with my personal favorite list building methods.

These are our bread and butter at Ideal Me, and some of the absolute best ways to build your list and boost traffic.  

Giveaways

Giveaways are amazing list building methods because they offer an immediate incentive for your audience to sign up.  

Not to state the obvious, but people love free stuff.  Readers are more likely to exchange an email address for something they perceive to be of value.

But aside from the fact that a freebie is a crowd pleaser, giveaways are also strategic choices.

Why?

Because they’re engaging.  Offering a free product, be it digital or physical, requires a reader to actually interact with your brand.

Giveaways are easy, and you can ask audiences to interact and share, which is both free publicity and really fun for both you and them.

Giveaways are great because they result in extremely high open rates. When someone enters their email address to win whatever you're giving away, they are highly likely to open your emails as they want to find out if they won.

So that period between when they opt-in and when you announce the winners give you an opportunity to bond with your audience, connect with them and form a relationship beyond just giving them a chance to win that thing.

Note: a great giveaway should be on topic to whatever your blog or newsletter is about as you want to grow your list but what's more important is growing relevant high-quality list

Quizzes

Quizzes are another list building method that we use at Ideal Me.  Quizzes are really successful at list building because they have natural social sharing appeal.

People like to complete quizzes because they like to learn about themselves. Quizzes give them an opportunity to do that.

We use Lead Quizzes to create our quizzes.  

You can custom tailor quizzes to appeal to different target audiences.  It’s important to segment your email list in general, so creating target quizzes can actually take you a step in that direction.

We have different quizzes for our different niches from crochet to pet care.

To use quizzes as a lead magnet, ask that participants enter their email address before they can receive results.

We ask for the email address after the quiz instead of before they start so that ideally, participants are invested enough to offer their information to see their results.

Quizzes are trendy right now and people love sharing their results online.  So, make sure that your quizzes are interesting enough that people will want to share them.

Free Plus Shipping Offer

This is a type of giveaway, but it’s a great option for anyone with a lower budget or someone who wants to offer a physical product.

Free Plus Shipping offers are really popular right now too.  

What is it?  It’s where you offer to give away something for free but charge the cost of shipping.

The real attraction of a free plus shipping offer is you're building a list of buyers as even though you frame it as ‘free' you're actually charging them for shipping. In an ideal world, the shipping fee covers your cost of the item and the shipping fee so you're not at a loss but your customer still gets something of value.

If the item is desirable enough for your audience, paying a small shipping fee won’t deter them.  Plus, then your budget isn’t a barrier because you’ll be covering costs incurred from shipping.

This is a particularly valuable list building method because you’re adding buyers onto your mailing list.  We love all of our site visitors, but a buyer is always more valuable.  

If they sign up for the offer and pay shipping you know already that they’re a buyer and may be more receptive to your paid offers.

You can have your audience sign up by entering their email address and shipping information to receive the item.  The items people sign up to receive also gives you some nice insight into their interests and needs.

We use ClickFunnels to create landing pages for this because it’s SO easy.  Plus, if you use our link you’ll score a 14-day free trial plus a free landing page template (yay!).  Sign up here.

Content Marketing

We use content marketing all over our site to help grow our list.  Content marketing includes everything from digital items, blog post access, photo libraries, podcast and more.  

Except instead of offering these items publicly to everyone, people must join your list in order to access them.

We offer lots of free content, but offering something else of value to a reader can help convert them into a subscriber.  Maybe you have a great worksheet, free stock photos, or a podcast episode that’s just really dynamite.  

Offer that in exchange for an email address on your site.  You can segment these offers based on the categories of your blog.

For example, I might offer exclusive business content for anyone browsing the Finance & Career section.  

We offer exclusive crochet cheat sheets for anyone browsing our Crafts sections.

We use opt-in pages through SumoMe to do this.  We use the welcome mat, pop-over, and slide-in to present opportunities for readers to opt in.

You can sign up for a free trial here.

When you use these it’s really important that what you’re offering is of value.  No one is going to opt-in for something that isn’t useful, special, or particularly exclusive.  

It’s also important not to use too many opt-in pages.  You want to be effective, but you don’t want your readers to feel harassed by pop-ups on your page.

Video Hosting

This is a simple but effective strategy we like to use.

You upload a content video to your site that your audience will like and require an opt-in to access the entire video.

We like to show a small portion of the video to help get audiences hooked before we ask for an opt-in.

For example, on our video for how to Make A Cupcake Out Of Soap, we allow viewers to watch the first 30 seconds before we request an opt-in.  For us, that seems to be the perfect amount of time that it takes for viewers to get hooked on that video enough to opt-in.  

We use Wistia video hosting for our videos.  It’s super easy to use and helps us integrate our videos without having to be tech wizards.  

Boost Traffic and Grow Your Business

These are the list building methods we swear by, and they’ve helped us grow our list from x to x.  Building your list is the first step to boosting traffic and identifying buyers to grow your kick-butt lifestyle business!

Which methods do you use?