Drive newsletter signup from social media
Looking to grow your email list? Social media is a great place to influence individuals to signup to your program. It’s a key part of your digital ecosystem, and I highly encourage brands to strategically think about how these channels are interconnected.
Although you might solely focus on email, email marketers should understand the pre-email and the post-email ecosystem that your brand offers.
What I mean by this is:
Have an understanding of how individuals end up on your email list
Know what influential factors are driving subscribers to you
Understand the experience after they click through your email and reach your landing page or app
Although the intent of this article isn’t to discuss the latter, I stumbled across a great opportunity to influence your email list growth this week, and I am excited to illustrate how driving newsletter signups from your social channels has never been easier.
Industry changes
I’ll start by noting that social media has drastically changed in the last 3-5 years. CEO takeovers (Twitter), individual app shutdowns (Clubhouse), and new algorithms (Meta) make it difficult to deploy a long-term strategy.
Brands that have spent the past few years solely focused on social media marketing as a way to build their following, are now at a detrimental loss when realizing that their reach is far less than ever before.
Artist James Blake took to Instagram with a carousel post recently, outlining his concern over lack of reach, and inability to ‘own’ or ‘access’ the following he’s spent years building. Ultimately ending the last story, with a call for others to get out of this mess via 'mailing lists’ — ie, email.
In addition to weird algorithm changes — such as James Blake’s scenario, countries like Canada have seen full shutdowns of some industries’ ability to communicate over social media. Canadians are currently unable to access news outlets due to changes in legislation. Once again, removing the control from the posters hands to reach it’s audience’s following.
I’ve been saying this for ages. Social media is a great top-of-funnel generator — but if you want any kind of action or relationship, email is where you must invest time and energy.
What should I use social for?
Social media is for first impressions, and brand awareness. I frequently discover products on social media, but then look to email marketing to let me know about updates, new products, and discounts. Consider social media like a business cart. Where you want to show off and encourage:
UGC
Brand affinity
Driving individuals to your site
If social media is a first impression, your welcome email is the first handshake. And if you want to build relationships, a handshake is important!
How should I drive awareness of email?
There are basic foundations I recommend having ready before you go touting your email newsletter to your social following:
Dedicated email marketing sign-up landing page (or in other common terms, a splash page)
A sign up pop up on your website (either triggered by exit intent, or time spent on page)
A sign up option embedded in your site footer
Those three make it easy to:
Drive followers directly to your newsletter signup
Capture the attention of those that make their way to your website by their own means
Capture the attention of those who make their way to your website by their own means, but don’t see the pop up
Now let’s actually talk about strategies that work:
Talk about your newsletter
Encourage discovery of your newsletter program by making it front and center! Both Instagram accounts below, do a great job of calling immediate attention of their newsletter program.
This same strategy can work for a variety of different industries. Even if you have a product you want to encourage immediate purchase of, it could be a better tactic to encourage newsletter signup first and foremost.
Beyond just mentioning your newsletter in your link in bio, you can gain traction by linking your newsletter out from your stories.
I consistently use links in stories such as this example. Where in this story I am promoting my new email course, there is equal opportunity to drive awareness of my newsletter — Slow Emails.
Auto-reply to DM’s with a link to your newsletter signup landing page
Linktr.ee just launched the ability to auto-DM based on an emoji comment on a post. What does this mean? As an email example, you can ask your subscribers to reply with 📧 on a post, and you will automatically DM them a link to subscribe to your newsletter signup landing page.
It’s a genius way to eliminate the number of hoops you require your subscribers to jump through. The same goes for early access discounts or waitlist signups. Another idea could be to promote “Reply with ⏰ and we’ll DM you a link to get first grabs on the product before it drops to everyone else”—in which you can send a link and encourage them to opt into your newsletter program to get first intel when you have a launch.
I normally don’t like to tout tools without trying them myself, so I created a free trial last night, and tested out linking to this very blog post from my Instagram profile. I’m IMPRESSED! Not only did I get a fair few comments (in which I auto-DM’d based off of), I feel like this can totally to a variety of different strategies.
Follow me, if you aren't already!
Measuring success
If you are keen to dive in, work with your social media marketer or internal stakeholders to bring some of this strategy to life! If you want to get granular, you could create a per-social platform landing page or signup form, to track traffic #’s, and subsequent conversion to completing the signup form. Remember, email marketing list growth is not an overnight task — it will take days, months, years to potentially see impact, but it’s worth it!