Email marketing is the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them, and turning them into customers. As a business, your database is one of your most valuable assets, allowing you to engage with customers, build relationships, and, most importantly, generate new business.

Here are our top 5 tips for building your email database:

Create website pop-ups
Pop-up forms provide visitors with a simple and convenient way to share contact information while they are browsing your site, making them a powerful tool for growing your database. Although pop-ups may seem annoying at first, if used correctly, they are easy to add to your website and are proven to work.

Craft landing page call-to-actions
The people who visit your blog or web page are looking for something specific, so create call-to-actions that meet their needs. For example: if your website is receiving traffic from your “how to paint a room” article, entice people to subscribe to your email database by providing catchy content on a relevant topic such as “Download the coolest toolkit for selecting the best colour.”

Promote email sharing and forwarding
Word of mouth promotion is powerful. If you are sending valuable and engaging content, ask your subscribers to forward your email to someone they think could use it. Always include social sharing buttons and an “Email to a Friend” button in your marketing emails.

Provide great content
Develop a free eBook or whitepaper and publish it on various web pages that ask visitors to provide their email address to download it.

Collect email addresses at events
Offline events such as trade shows or seminars are highly anticipated growth opportunities and still one of the most effective methods to collect email addresses. Make sure to save these email addresses in your marketing database.

Defining success in social media marketing begins with understanding your business objectives, aligning your social strategy to those goals, and consistently measuring your efforts.

We have listed the top 4 goals that many businesses use and a technique for successfully tracking these goals.

Note: It is important to set SMART goals for your campaigns.

Goal 1: Increase brand awareness
Brand awareness assists your target audience to recognise, remember, and relate to your business. The more that people know about your brand, the more of your product or service you will sell. 

Measuring brand awareness:
Check your potential reach and impressions. These metrics can be checked weekly, monthly, or per campaign.

Goal 2: Boost brand engagement
Indicates how effectively your business is creating interactions with its audience in the social space. Use engagement rates to determine audience health (how responsive your audience is and how many are “real” followers), and the types of content that your audience finds interesting.

Measuring brand engagement:
Analyse the number of people that like, share, mention, and comment on your posts.

Goal 3: Drive traffic to your website
Consistent engagement with your audience can boost traffic to your website. Make sure to include links to your website in your social media posts.

Measuring website traffic:
Google Analytics is the easiest tool for tracking website traffic from your social channels. To check this metric, log into your Analytics account -> go to Acquisition -> All Traffic -> Social.

Goal 4: Generate new leads
Generating leads on social media has become an essential part of marketing for businesses today. Social media is where businesses promote their campaigns and can be a gold mine for generating leads.

Measuring new leads:
Leads may reach you in various forms such as someone commenting on a post, responding to an event, or sending a private message on your channel. If you are promoting your adverts, Facebook and LinkedIn use a built-in customisable form to capture your lead details and store that information on a downloadable spreadsheet. In addition to this, you can set up conversion tracking on Google Analytics.