Five Simple Ways to Start Growing Your Email List Today

• Updated on: 2017-06-24
• Read original article here

Just about everyone on the planet depends on email. Roughly 92% of adults who are online use email, and when it comes to customer acquisition, it's close to 40% more effective than social media.

So why not use this nearly ubiquitous platform to attract and keep new customers? Much of your email marketing can be automated with Zapier, which means you can get back to crafting the messages and caring for your customers.

"Zapier is the extra team member at our agency, Zest Digital, linking our systems together and managing the push and pull of data."

Whenever you create a new entry inside your CRM, Zapier can add that person's name, email address, and other details to your email marketing platform. Moreover, depending on the app you use, you could add that person to a specific list, group or drip campaign.

"Zapier is the extra team member at our agency, Zest Digital, linking our systems together and managing the push and pull of data," says Alex Minchin, Managing Partner at Zest. "One simple example is how we manage new contacts in Highrise. We've set up Zapier to push these contacts to Campaign Monitor."

By linking Highrise and Campaign Monitor with Zapier, Minchin can automatically move customers through the sales pipeline by subscribing them to new email lists.

"The tags we apply to the contact record within Highrise determine how they are segmented within Campaign Monitor, and which list that contact ends up in," Minchin says. "This saves a huge chunk of administrative time, and allows us to keep connected and engaged with all the new contacts that we meet on our travels."

"When a prospect wants to receive our email newsletter, download a case study, or contact us, our Zaps make it all possible."

Forms can be placed anywhere—like on a website, in a tweet, or in your app itself—and connecting those forms to your email marketing platform is about the easiest way to quickly grow your email list.

"One of the last things we did before launching our new marketing agency website was to think about how we would integrate our email service provider Emma and Gravity Forms to capture users email addresses," says Marc Apple, Chief Strategist at Forward Push. "Within a short amount of time, we had set up a Zapier account and created our first Zap to give it a try. It literally was as simple as that. When a prospect wants to receive our email newsletter, download a case study, or contact us, our Zaps make it all possible."

"Zapier is the glue that automates everything and keeps our leads list up to date."

You may have different email lists for different campaigns, and sometimes you need to move people into or out of lists when they meet a certain criteria. By applying filters to a Zap, you can create an automated system that will take care of that tedious list management for you.

"We use it as a bridge to synchronize our customer experience across different sites," says Ryan Goodman of Centigon Solutions. "We subscribe and unsubscribe users from lists as they move through our customer engagement funnel. From our website, to Salesforce, and WordPress site, Zapier is the glue that automates everything and keeps our leads list up to date with MailChimp."

"[Customers] receive an immediate confirmation and also know a bit about what's coming next in terms of updates and future materials."

When you're selling products or services, you may want to move those new buyers seamlessly over to your email marketing campaigns, which you can do with a simple Zap.

Author Chris Guillebeau uses Gumroad and Mad Mimi to manage his ecommerce and email marketing needs, respectively. "I like my customers to be added to a Mad Mimi list as soon as they purchase—that way, they receive an immediate confirmation and also know a bit about what's coming next in terms of updates and future materials. Zapier makes this process super simple!"

"Our key events have Zaps to ActiveCampaign which helps us produce sold-out events by leveraging our email marketing efforts."

Running an event comes with a lot of tedious work. But with a few Zapier integrations, you can automate some of the mind-numbing stuff—like adding event attendees to your email marketing list.

"We run more than 45 events each year; from weekly book clubs of 20 or less, to monthly teas of 25 to 35 attendees, and three large events of 100 to 250," says Sara Reyes of FreshFiction.com. "Choosing Eventbrite over Meetup or other ticket product made sense because of their reporting and widget embeds. The only shortfall was the email housed in ActiveCampaign, which allowed us to set up automatic and invaluable auto-responses. But we solved that with Zapier. Now our key events have Zaps to ActiveCampaign, which helps us produce sold-out events by leveraging our email marketing efforts."

Email is one of the most important channels for marketing, because it's the one platform that nearly everyone uses. There are many different email marketing apps out there to help, and if you're just getting started, or even looking for a more robust tool, it can be a bit intimidating. With that in mind, we put together an exhaustive list of apps and tips to help with any stage of your email marketing efforts.

Download our new ebook, "The Ultimate Guide to Email Marketing Apps," to get access to these in-depth chapters.

In April we welcomed six new apps to Zapier, including an email marketing service, a sales tracking tool, and electronic signature software. We also made three large enhancements to the apps that you already use with Zapier.

If you find yourself sending email in bulk, like for billing or welcome emails by the thousands, then you will want to look at a transactional email service. Sendwithus allows you to not only send large amounts of emails, but to A/B test them, and even set up drip campaigns. And now when you connect that email system to Zapier, it opens up a world of possibilities with other apps you use like Stripe and Eventbrite.

Chris Griffith and his team at Wizehive needed a way to streamline their email process, and chose Sendwithus because they made it simple to send an email series.

"We offer an email 'crash course' to help educate people about best practices when it comes to running online application processes—things like collecting and reviewing applications for grants, scholarships, and awards. It's a service we've been helping people with for over 7 years," says Griffith. "We wanted a great way to offer that crash course via email in a drip based sequence —enter Sendwithus."

A thriving community for designers, Dribbble allows people to show off designs that they're working on and get feedback. Add Zapier to the mix, and you have an easy way to share and store your designs on other apps within your workflow.

"With Zapier and Dribbble, I can easily post a new shot to Twitter, and share my work with my friends and coworkers," says Zapier product designer Stephanie Briones. "I don't post to Dribbble very frequently, so when I do, I think it's fun that my followers will get a sneak peek of what I'm up to."

Spotio aims to make tracking and cataloging your sales easy. Now that Spotio is connected to Zapier, any sale you log can be sent to hundreds of different apps—like your CRM or email marketing platform.

"I use Spotio to track my team of door-to-door marketers," Zapier user Jabez Zinabu says. "I can see which streets they went on, what houses were leads, which were not home, and which were not interested. This way we can go back to the neighborhoods several times in a row, and not worry about knocking on the wrong doors. It also sends me data weekly on how we compare to the other Spotio users in my company, which has been helpful."

Now that Spotio works with Zapier, Zinabu can automate the repetitive parts of the process.

"The only thing that took extra effort was taking the data from Spotio and inputting it into my calendar, or manually copying the leads from Spotio into a spreadsheet," he says. "Once I began using Zapier, it automated the process! It not only saved my time, but keeps me from constantly reminding my employees to update the Google Doc with the leads they got for the day—they may be bigger fans of Zapier than I am."

Need help growing your email list and attracting new viewers to your site? SumoMe has a suite of marketing tools to help you do just that. And when you connect SumoMe to Zapier, you can easily add email addresses that you collect using SumoMe to your email marketing app of choice.

Dealing with documents can be a hassle, especially when it comes time to obtain signatures. CudaSign can help you manage those documents and get signatures at the same time. Use CudaSign with Zapier to keep everything in one place, and cut down on time needed to deal with any document.

Hotel management is a lot of work, and when it comes to guests and reservations, there are many moving parts. The ibelsa.rooms team has created an app to assist with much of that management process, and when you connect it to Zapier, you can spend more time with your guests and less time moving data between apps.

When Google created a separate way to connect both Google Sheets and Google Docs to Zapier, we wanted to make that corresponding update for you as well. Now, instead of bundling Docs and Sheets together under the Google Docs name, you can pick a trigger or action app that's more distinct.

Parsing information from emails and sending it to other apps is one of the best ways you can work with Zapier. Mailparser gives you lots of flexibility there, and they just added enhanced mailing address parsing. Need to get physical mailing addresses out of emails to send to your CRM? Give Mailparser a spin.

If you use Highrise to manage the deals that you've won and lost, this updated trigger will simplify your workflow: Now, you can trigger a Zap when a deal has changed status—perhaps after you've won the deal and marked it as such. If you're looking to communicate each win with your team, or even to add a person to a particular email marketing list, give this improved trigger a try.

Every week we team up with folks from Zapier-connected apps for a free online training session, where you can learn the ins and outs of automation. This month we're co-hosting sessions with the teams at Help Scout, Contactually, Eventbrite, and Clio. Can't make a session? We also have an archive. where you can watch recordings anytime.

The Zapier family is growing rapidly, and we added five new faces to the team this month.

Since Zapier is a fully distributed team, onboarding can be a more complicated process than if we were all in an office together. As our team has evolved, our documentation process has, too—namely, we rely on Hackpad to track the ins-and-outs of how we work at Zapier.

Jess Byrne, a customer champion here at Zapier, is leading the internal charge when it comes to documenting our onboarding process. "Hackpad acts as a wiki and is collaborated on by the entire Zapier team. Having our tools and processes outlined and fully accessible allows for new hires to get up to speed with little hand-holding," she says.

"Employees are able to self-start their own onboarding and have all of the resources they need right at their fingertips. This allows us to make the most of everyone’s time, as hours aren’t wasted teaching basic level information and fosters self-learning, which is an important skill for any remote worker."

That's one way that we help our new teammates dominate their first few weeks at Zapier. Do you have a tried-and-true onboarding process at your company? We'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Go back in time! Read our March edition of the Zapier Monthly: "How to Achieve Inbox Zero with Smart Email Automation".

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Notes image via Stefania Servidio on The Noun Project