The Best Way to Grow Your Email List at Events
Growing your email list. One of the most effective ways to create a direct link between prospective customers and your business.
But while it’s easy to fixate on collecting more email signups solely from your website, you definitely don’t want overlook opportunities at events such as trade shows, sales presentations, and industry conferences.
When I was promoting my first book, I thought it was enough to just give people a handout about—you guessed it—my book. But what is the likelihood that someone would take that handout with them and then refer back to it to visit my website and then find my email signup form and share their information? Needless to say, you can’t assume handouts will automatically help you grow your website traffic or your email list. Handout or not, once people leave your event the chances of you capturing their email can drop like a lead balloon.
Paper signups can be effective, but they’re time consuming for everybody involved. If you have a strong turnout at a trade show, there’s a chance people could end up waiting in line to sign up—and that might not be a good thing. And once you get those paper signups, that means somebody is going to have to enter all of that information in—and that typically eats up time you just don’t have.
And then there’s the fishbowl. Beyond having to buy an actual fishbowl and get it to the event without breaking it, similar to paper signups—you’re still left with entering or scanning all of those business cards into a database, email marketing solution such as MailChimp, Constant Contact, or salesforce Marketing Cloud.
I think we can all agree that all of the above have their share of limitations.
Enter smartphones and text messaging. Most (if not all) of your current and prospective customers have them, use them, and can’t live without them. Instead of wasting time and missing opportunities to grow your email list by relying on handouts, paper signups, you can capture an email address from any phone in seconds.
Join By Text, an email sign up web app from Pittsburgh-based JA Interactive, has helped businesses and non-profits capture more than 50,000 emails via text messages in the first year of their rollout—eliminating the need for paper signups and saving organizations a substantial amount of time by completely automating the signup process.
If you’re already using an email marketing service such as MailChimp, Campaigner, or Hubspot to connect with your subscribers, that’s even better. Join By Text integrates with more than of the top 10 platforms which means you’re able to save even more time uploading your email signups.
Best of all, they have plans starting at as little as $19 per month—or what you would spend on 3 fishbowls.
As a consumer, I used Join By Text to signup for the Pittsburgh Tweetup email list and the process couldn't have been quicker or more seamless. Definitely something I'd recommend to businesses looking for a more effective and more efficient way to collect emails offline.
So, if you are looking for the best way to grow your email marketing list at events, be sure to check out Join By Text. You can also watch this quick video to see how it works...
Already a Join By Text customer or using a similar platform? Share your feedback in the comments below.
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