The Best Way to Grow Your Email List With Instagram
While Instagram is one of, if not the most important tools a business can have online, at the end of the day it’s their platform and anything can happen to your account at any time. You need to have something that you control entirely and the best option for marketing is an email list! Just like with your finances, always diversify! We’ve added nearly 20,000 emails to our list using the methods we’re going to talk about today.
Now if you’d prefer to watch rather than read, check out the video below:
1. Add an email opt-in link to your link in bio
One of the easiest ways to grow your email list is to make it as easy as possible for people to sign up, so make sure you add it to the link in your bio. Instagram now offers up to 5 links in the bio, so make sure you use one of those links for the email list. You could even add a CTA in your bio with an ⬇️ saying “Sign up to our email list!”. If you use services like linktr.ee, make sure you add it to the list of links so it’s in as many places as possible.
2. Create an email opt-in lead form via an action button
If you have a Business profile, you get access to action buttons, and you can create what’s known as a lead form as one of the buttons. You set it up via the Edit Profile button on your profile page, and it lets you add up to 3 custom questions alongside general customer info (name, phone number, email, address etc). Some types of accounts might not have access to this option, so just check and see if it’s available for you.
3. Create a lead magnet (also known as a freebie)
One of the best ways to grow your email list is to create a lead magnet. Around 86% of our email list came from lead magnets alone, so they’re very effective when done right. A lead magnet is a free download that you create and offer in exchange for an email address. It can be anything that provides value to your potential customer or client. For example, we currently have four lead magnets in the form of a PDF - Instagram Checklist, Instagram Reels Checklist, Ads Checklist and a Social Media Strategy Guide. The idea is to give away enough information for free to make it legitimately valuable and worthwhile for someone to download, but not too much information that it’s giving away something you could potentially charge for.
How can you create a lead magnet? The best option is Canva. If you head over to Canva.com (you can sign up here if you haven’t already), you can search for “lead magnet templates” and over 7000 come up immediately. Scroll through and select which one suits your brand’s vibe, but remember it can be customized using your brand colours, fonts and imagery. When you click on a template, it shows you the available layouts - usually they have multiple pages with different layouts that you can customize, so take a look at any that catch your eye and select the one you like best. Prepare all of your content beforehand in a document, separating it page by page so you know the exact layout - this will make creating the lead magnet a lot easier.
A lead magnet could also be a video tutorial you send as well (like “My Top 4 At-Home Exercises Anyone Can Do” or “How To Set Up Quickbooks The Easy Way”), a well-detailed email thread, or a free product.
When it comes to content, you should know what your audience needs, especially if you’ve put together a well-thought-out strategy like we broke down in full in this video — but overall, think about it as extending tips you would have shared in an educational Social Media post.
4. Set up your lead magnet in Flodesk
Once you’ve created your lead magnet, it needs to be hosted somewhere to collect and store email addresses. We use Flodesk, a tool we’ve used for years and we love it. It’s extremely simple to use with drag-and-drop features similar to Squarespace (one of our other fave tools), and all of the templates are attractive, clean and professional. You can create a Flodesk account by clicking here, which will give you 50% off your first year of Flodesk - trust us, you’re going to love it.
Just upload your free source to Flodesk as a PDF, or as a link, and create a segment for that freebie so you can set up a sales sequence. Hit Forms up the top, select a template and follow the instructions. You can upload your PDF here along with creating a blurb about what it’s all about, and name the customized segment where the email addresses will be stored. This will allow you to separate all of the leads that come in from this particular lead magnet so you can continue to market to them based on actions already taken. You can also create email flows that will follow up with them at designated times - for example, a follow-up email in 7 days, another email in 14 days with more helpful information, and so on. This is also known as a drip campaign - it’s outside of the scope of this post but if you’d like us to do a video or post on this sort of thing!
5. Use strategic CTAs in your posts
Once you’ve designed your lead magnet in Canva and set up your lead magnet in Flodesk, now it’s time to push it! By using strategic calls to action in your captions and on your assets (directly on video or graphics), you’re telling your audience to sign up specifically and directly, and of course, you’d explain the value and benefit of doing so. You could have a CTA like “To learn more about how you can do X easily, hit the link in our bio to sign up to our mailing list”.
However, that technically could be too much friction for some people, so to make it even smoother, you can use a tool like Manychat to do the heavy lifting for you. Manychat is an Instagram automation tool, so it allows you to set up workflows that are triggered by a comment. For example, you could say in your post and/or caption “To get your free PDF on how to do X, comment “freebie” below!” Manychat can be set up to automatically respond with a unique comment (you can set up as many as you’d like so they’re not too repetitive), which will then trigger an automated direct message to the user. The DM can be something like “Tap the button below to download your free PDF!” or even have a stream of multiple-choice questions if you want to have some more fun with it.
This is by far the most efficient and effective way of driving traffic to your lead magnets, and you can try their Pro plan for a month for free via this link, and use the code HIGHSEASON at checkout to get that free month. Also, watch this video for a walk-through on how you can set up Manychat organically.
6. Run ads on high-performing posts
A guaranteed way to build your email list is to use Instagram ads. There are a few ways you can do this - you can run engagement ads on new or high-performing organic content with CTAs to get the freebie; you can run traffic ads directly to the landing page or to messenger which would be most effective — we broke down how to do that in this video which will share how to use direct to Messenger ads to get people into your DMs where you could send them the direct link.
That’s it! Having an email list is one of the smartest moves you can make in business today. That and your website are the only two things you truly control online, so diversifying your online presence is key in this somewhat unpredictable world that we live in. If you’d like us to do more videos and posts on email lists and lead magnets, let us know in the comments.
Resource Roundup
Free downloads: Instagram Checklist, Instagram Reels Checklist, Ads Checklist and Social Media Strategy Guide
Canva: The easiest way to make custom graphics and videos online
Flodesk: The best email and freebie host. Get 50% off your first year with our link
Manychat: Automate your Instagram DMs. Get 30 days of their Pro plan free with code HIGHSEASON at checkout
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