As an online store owner, you need clear marketing strategies that can guarantee you ROI. You must think about who your target market are and ways to get them to use your product or service, and one powerful strategy proven to bring you the much needed traffic, conversions and repeat buys is email marketing.

The influence of email on ROI has been studied by the Direct Marketing Association with impressive stats to show:
• Email has an average ROI of £38 for each £1 pound spent.
• 72% of people prefer to receive promotional messages through email than social media.
• 9 out of 10 marketing professionals agree email is either important or very important to their business.

However, a major challenge with ecommerce businesses is how to get visitors to fill the sign up forms on their site. If you are in this situation, here are three sure ways to get your first 1000 email subscribers.

Engage in awesome content marketing

The era of “content is king” hasn’t phased out yet. Writing engaging content is key because you will need to drive traffic to your site before you even think of building an email list. Writing relevant content comes with hard work, and you need to do your legwork first to produce the type of content that shines.

A few things to consider include investigating who your target market is, such as their age, interests and lifestyle as you don’t want to attract the wrong audience to your site. Then, find out who your competitors are and the type of content they are creating.

Once you have these information, create content that is 10x more valuable than those of your competitors. Again, offer a content upgrade. This is some sort of freebie like “Increase your email subscriber list 1000x” you offer your audience. Include a call to action (CTA) button that either asks them to subscribe or download the material.

You can also set up a welcome mat and carry out A/B testing with different copy, templates and images to identify the mat that has the highest conversion rate.

Get featured in industry niche newsletters

You have an awesome content that organically gets picked by search engines, drive traffic to your site, and then email subscriptions. But that’s not enough. Another effective strategy for getting your first 1000 email subscribers is to reach out to curators of newsletter directories.

To find the most relevant directory, you can search for keywords related to your niche in Google. Something like “business insurance newsletters” if you’re an insurance company will work. Once you’ve found the specific directory for your content, shoot the curator a friendly email.

For conversions, ensure the content you submit to the editor has content upgrades.

Follow your target market to their hangout

Online communities such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are great places to share your content, because they’re where your audience hang out. Each community requires a specific kind of content, Ad type and the time of the day when you can get the most views on your post.

So, you need to draw up a social media marketing plan that will guide you. You don’t want your posts to look spammy, counterproductive or simply irrelevant to you audience.

You can repurpose aepic content in the community with intention of leading traffic to your site where you have the content page fully optimized with content upgrade and email opt-in offers.

Try these three strategies and watch as your email list grows to your first 1000 subscribers.