Using a Sense of Community to Grow Your List

• Last updated September 2, 2019
• lead generation

Most marketers look to grow their list by continually seeking new subscribers. However, it’s just as important to focus on keeping those subscribers once they arrive.

One key way to do this is by fostering a sense of community with them. It helps people feel a sense of belonging, being part of something, and often means they get more value too because the members of that community will help each other out.

The good news is that once you start doing this, it helps to grow your list too:

• Subscribers are attracted to you through word of mouth referrals.
• Your growing community provides social proof, authority and credibility
• This in turn helps to develop partnerships with other businesses, who can rapidly send you potentially thousands of leads (for example, through webinars)
• A vibrant, growing community is attractive to potential subscribers, and can act as a lead magnet on its own, providing for some powerful lead generation
• People hate to feel excluded or be on the ‘outside’ of something. It’s a bit like the party going on next door that you’re not invited to. They relieve that ‘pain’ by signing up.

How Do You Create a Community?

There are various ways to create a community around your business, some more subtle than others.

Social Media Groups

One of the more obvious and most powerful ways is to create a group on Facebook or LinkedIn that’s relevant to your market.

For example, this can offer personal support from and contact with you, as well as help and support from other members of the group.

As your group grows, other individuals and businesses can help share the load of managing and administering the group. By doing so, they gain credibility and visibility themselves.

One such example, is the award-winning data protection lawyer, Suzanne Dibble, who created a Facebook Group focused on GDPR in the run up the legislation becoming law in May, 2018.

Partly thanks to the confusion businesses around the world were facing in terms of how to comply, as well as her marketing activities in publicising the group, she rapidly attracted over 35,000 members. A good percentage of these members will have also subscribed to her email list, thanks to the helpful resources she provides in return.

Forums

Although the rise of social media groups have made creating a successful forum away from social media, such as on your own website, more challenging, it’s certainly still possible. New forums spring up every day on a wide variety of diverse topics.

One advantage you have is that you own all the data. You can ensure that everyone joining your forum does so by also subscribing to your email list.

There’s a wide variety of software to choose from if creating a forum on your own website. Some of the most popular ones include phpBB, vBulletin, myBB and XenForo.

If taking this route, be prepared for it to potentially take more effort, and likely more time, for the forum to gain traction and become successful.

After all, people are on Facebook and/or LinkedIn, often on a daily basis, out of habit, with easy on-the-move access via their mobile phones too. To participate in your forum takes more effort, requiring them to remember the URL, login and then spend time on there.

So it needs to provide sufficient value for them to want to prioritise doing so. And if numbers and contributions are low, there’s less incentive for them to do so.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible to do.

If you’re in a popular niche and are able to provide unique value to a group of people who have a strong need or desire for the type of content your forum will provide, you have a greater chance of success.

The good news is that as your list grows, it’s easier to keep your forum active—and therefore more appealing to others—with regular emails that encourage repeat visits.

Your Blog

A blog offers many different advantages, including a rising amount of traffic from search as your blog content grows in volume, and lots of material to share across social media to attract your audience to you.

As your blog becomes more popular and gains an increasing audience, it can also help foster a sense of community via the comments that can be left on posts.

By responding personally to comments that are left, you develop a sense of connection and relationship with your audience. And contributors themselves will often respond to comments as well, creating a general discussion around the topic of your post.

Podcast

Podcasts can be very powerful for generating a sense of community. They can often feel a bit off-the-beaten-track, a bit like you have to be ‘in the know’ to be listening in the first place.

And of course you’re talking directly to your listeners, building that sense of community with them. You also have a lot of power to promote other platforms through which your community is growing, such as your social media profiles, groups and your blog.

Language

The language you use in your emails (as well as potentially content on your blog) helps people to feel a sense of connection with you, and that they belong to something.

For example, you could call people on your list by a particular nickname so they know they belong.

For example, popular blogger, Harsh Agrawal of ShoutMeLoud calls his community of fellow bloggers "Shouters" with just this aim in mind.

Interaction

You can also invite direct interaction with your audience, for example by asking a question in an email and inviting them to email you directly with their response.

(You can try something similar on social media of course).

In essence, you're treating your emails as a two-way communication channel, rather than just a one-way broadcast that makes it difficult for people to communicate back with you.

Avoid using a ‘no reply’ type email address that make you seem unapproachable or unnecessarily corporate.

Instead, write to them personally, from a personally-named email address, and thereby appear much more welcoming to those on your list so they feel they can communicate back with you.

This doesn’t mean that you need to answer every email yourself. For many businesses that is of course impractical. It’s more about setting the tone of communication with your list.

Combination of multiple approaches

Often the most powerful way to build a sense of community will be a mixture of many of these approaches, thereby communicating with your audience through many different touchpoints.

For example, a podcast can also provide content for a blog, both of which can then refer to your groups on social media where people can interact and further get a sense of ‘belonging’ to your community.

steve shaw

Steve Shaw is the CEO of optinopoli™, next-generation lead capture and sales conversion technology—click here for more info.