While it can sound counter-intuitive at first, to really grow your email list you need to focus on your immediate goals and not your long-term strategy. What does that mean? Your long-term aim is obviously to acquire customers and get conversions. But the short-term is to grow your email list. Then you can use that database of warm leads to really kick your sales strategy into high gear.
Some may wonder why you would neglect your long-term goals in favor of short-term successes. And while it’s tempting to make your media dollars do double duty, what usually happens is that you underserve both objectives. Certain media types are better for certain goals, and a search ad may not be the best way to gather emails, while a co-registration unit won’t help with immediate sales. You need to focus the specific goal of each media type and really create a plan tailored to what you need, and each media type’s own strength.
Focusing the goal of your media will improve your KPI, whatever it may be. So a highly targeted and strategic ad that is solely focused on generating leads to grow your email list will perform better and provide a lower cost per lead than a mishmash ad that is trying to sell at the same time it attempts to collect email addresses.
This typically means that you will have multiple campaigns running at once, each with its own singular focus and specific goals. If you’re just starting out, the immediate goal of media is to grow your email list. Once you have that campaign generating emails for you, those new leads can continue along the funnel as you nurture them to sales with email drip campaigns, social posts and retargeting ad campaigns that shift to your long-term strategy for media: sales.
But lead generation doesn’t stop there! You always need to keep that funnel full, so develop a media plan specifically for lead generation and continue to finetune it as you see which leads are most likely to convert to customers. And always keep in mind that efficient media is highly focused on a specific objective that ladders up to your long-term strategy.