4 Insanely Actionable List Building Strategies Instapage Used to Increase Subscribers

 The following is a guest blog post written by Fahad Muhammad, the Content Manager at Instapage, a landing page software company that believes “every promotion needs a page.” He writes about marketing trends, conversion optimization, copywriting and user behavior on the Instapage blog.  

What do a SaaS company and a bookstore have in common?


It’s the fact that both businesses aim to build and nurture better relationships with their customers.

How do you start to build a relationship with your customers? Start with their email address.

According to McKinsey & Company, “Email conversion rates are three times higher than social media, with a 17% higher value in the conversion.”  Once you have their email address, you have a legitimate way of contacting them. Emails typically enjoy a longer lifespan than, say, an occasional tweet or Facebook post.

Email marketing opens up many opportunities for your business. That’s a fact every marketer will agree on. The tricky part, the part most marketers and bloggers struggle with, is building a substantial email list.

How do you get visitors to opt into your email list providing personal information? How do you convince prospects that you’re trustworthy? Simple. Give them something in return.  

How Instapage Grew Its Email Subscriber List

At Instapage, we understand the importance of a customer’s email address, which is why we spend countless hours trying to come up with strategies that help us capture as many email addresses as possible.

We truly believe that the way to our customers’ hearts is through their email addresses. This is why we have multiple email list-building campaigns running simultaneously.

The great thing about these strategies for you is you can duplicate each one to build your list.

List Building Strategy #1: Our Gated Webinar Landing Page

Every Wednesday, Instapage’s Marketing Educator, Ander Frischer, hosts a webinar: “Master Instapage in 30 Minutes.” The purpose of this webinar is to:

  • Familiarize new Instapage users with our landing page builder
  • Attract potential customers showing them how easy it is to create landing pages with Instapage

We use a simple landing page design for our webinar page:

simple landing page design

If you notice, there’s no form on the page. We did that on purpose because we didn’t want to scare away prospects by asking too much, too fast. Instead we preview the webinar using the bullet points on the page, telling them what they’ll learn from the webinar. Those that are interested then click the CTA button, and this is what they see:

sign up form call to action

Bang. This short form helps us collect emails (and generate leads).

Two-step opt-in forms are a great way to build email lists because they don’t go for the “ask” right away. They warm up the prospect, and then go for the sale.

We’ve been able to generate over 6,700 signups (and counting) in a span of 3 months from our short opt-in form on our gated webinar page.

List Building Strategy # 2: The Blog Pop-Up Box

The Instapage blog has a substantial visitor count every month, so we decided to leverage our blog’s traffic and use it as a strategy to increase our email lists.

So we created an exit pop-up:
blog pop up box

The exit pop-up is pretty simple and straightforward. As soon as a blog visitor attempts to leave the page, the pop-up appears, encouraging them to “Get Fresh Content From the Instapage Blog.” Implementing this didn’t take very long and it’s been very effective at growing our email list. The pop-up has been active for three months and has collected more than 2,500 email addresses. Exit pop-up for the win!

List Building Strategy # 3: Strategically Placed Sign-up Forms

How do you collect more eggs than everybody else on Easter? You get more baskets.

We didn’t want just a pop-up to collect as many email addresses as possible from our blog’s traffic. We also placed lead magnets at the beginning and end of every blog post. Each blog category has its own lead magnet which gives visitors the chance to download an information packed PDF and gives us the opportunity to collect an email address.

This how the lead magnets appear on a blog post, a blue horizontal banner underneath the featured image:

lead magnet landing page

Featured below is the screenshot of the landing page visitors see when they click on the ‘35 Best Landing Page Tips’ lead magnet:

increase landing page conversions

There’s a two-step opt-in form on the page, that asks visitors for their name and email address:

lead magnet form

Instapage has a total of 10 lead magnets to date and since their publishing have been able to collect approximately 13,466 leads.

List Building Strategy # 4: Our PPC Landing Page

We love to create landing pages because they continue to be an excellent way for us to collect email addresses and generate leads.

To date, the largest number of email addresses collected is from our PPC landing page:

landing page creator

The page has three calls to action, benefit-oriented copy, and images that convey our software’s ease of use, ultimately persuading them to convert on the CTAs. You’ll notice we chose the two-step opt-in on this page as well because it proved to be very successful on the webinar registration page.

The result? Approximately 6,200 signups in three short months! 

increase conversions

As you can see above, the second step in the process shows visitors why it’s a good reason to sign up for Instapage with social proof. By entering their email address, prospects will become a member of a community of 300,000 marketers.

Wrapping Up

Email list building is not that difficult if you implement the right techniques. It’s just a matter of testing and determining what works best with your brand’s audience.

Proven strategies that help you build your email list include:

  • Making the opt-in form very obvious to see and convert
  • Not going directly for the “ask”
  • Being subtle with your forms
  • Giving prospects something valuable first
  • Telling prospects “what’s in it for them”

Corresponding with your email subscribers on a regular basis is extremely important. Engage with your subscribers regularly even if it’s just to ask what they’re up to.  Send them an automatic thank you email as soon as they sign up to show true appreciation and begin building a relationship. Email your subscribers new offers and special trials first when they become available so there’s less of a chance they unsubscribe from your list.

Want to collect more emails from your forms? Try these strategies and analyze the results until you’re satisfied – and then keep refining to achieve even better results!

Have any additional techniques that built your list we didn’t cover? Please share it with us in the comments!

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