4 reasons why email lists are essential for growing your membership program

Hier geht’s zu einer deutschen Version des Artikels.

Email lists are the not-so-secret ingredient for growing a successful membership program.

Publishers get up to 70% of their traffic from newsletters, and newsletters consistently deliver the most engaged, highest-revenue site visitors. So get your email list in order in the lead-up to your membership launch and you’ll have a much easier time signing up paying members.

Here are four ways a solid email list will help you build a successful membership program for your publication:

Build personal rapport

Getting someone’s name and email address is the modern-day equivalent of scoring someone’s home phone number back in high school: it grants you coveted access to their personal space. As a publisher, this is an invaluable opportunity and not to be taken lightly.

Gaining an email contact involves a higher barrier to entry than a simple Facebook follow, but if you can collect that contact, and treat them well, you’re giving yourself the best chance of converting them into a paying member.

In fact, Steady offers a tool specifically for this purpose. Publishers can collect email addresses with our floating button even before they’re ready to start their membership program. This is a great way to ensure you have plenty of email addresses stored up once you’re ready to launch.

Maintain control of your reach — for free

Along with creating a cozier setting for communicating with your fans, email addresses have another major benefit over social media: you have a much greater ability to control your reach.

Marketers spend millions of advertising dollars on Facebook each year hoping that Facebook pulls through for them — but that means putting both their money and their faith in media ad giants. Turns out, trusting your own skills is often a better bet.

When you send your subscribers an email you can virtually guarantee that it will land in their inbox, unlike a social media post that may or may not appear in their feed.

Get good at writing emails and your subscribers will be happy to keep opening them — even better, it won’t cost you anything at all!

Enjoy regular visibility

If a fan hands over their email address then they are giving you permission to talk to them. So don’t be shy to pop up in their inbox when you have something to say.

Emails are the most affordable, reliable and effective way to engage regularly with your audience and ensure you stay on their minds. If you’re hoping to build deeper connections with your community through a membership program, start by developing those relationships via email and you’ll be raring to go come membership time.

Cultivate a dedicated audience

In our experience, publishers have a much easier time converting fans into paying members when they already have a happy list of email subscribers.

Ideally, by launch day, your email newsletter recipients will be keenly interested in news from your publication, with loyalty landing somewhere between blossoming and solid.

When you offer warm contacts like these the chance to become paying members, they already feel comfortable enough with you and what you have to offer to sign up without any further hesitation. And that can make a tangible difference when it comes time to recruit members.

Read more

How to talk to your community about Steady

How to collect email addresses from potential paying members

Marketing tools to use before and after launching your membership program