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5 Proven Ways To Grow Your Email List Using YouTube

Want to grow your email list on YouTube? As the world’s second-largest search engine, YouTube offers a huge opportunity for business owners to generate more leads. In this guide, we’ll share how to build an email list for your YouTube channel.

Did you know that YouTube is the third most visited site after Google and Facebook? There are 3.25 billion hours of video watched each month. If you aren’t getting a piece of that pie, you are missing out on a lot of email subscribers.

Unfortunately, most YouTube channels aren’t optimized properly for email subscribers.

Why capture your YouTube subscriber’s email address?

Email is still one of the best ways to keep in touch with the audience you’ve already earned. Why? Because it allows you to connect with them in a place they check every day: their inbox. Your emails aren’t limited by an algorithm — every person gets every email every time.

When you have your own email list, you’re able to communicate exclusively with an audience of engaged viewers who enjoy watching your videos.

Plus with email, you can let viewers know when a new video is released, or share other content they might find valuable, such as a blog post or ebook. Emails also allow you to build trust with your subscribers.

Getting your subscribers on your email list can also help you increase your revenue through courses, subscriptions, and merch.

Why do YouTubers need to build an email list?

The four major reasons you should care about an email subscriber over a YouTube subscriber, and build a list are as follows.

1. You own your email subscribers

If you run a YouTube channel, it’s not unfamiliar to hear about algorithm changes and regular experiments on the platform. Your video views and subscriber count can drop unexpectedly. Worse, your channel might not align with the network’s policies and get shut down overnight.

Compare that with your email list. It’s solely your audience, and you have direct access to their inboxes. You can broadcast emails, or even build one-to-one relationships by personalizing your message.

2. Email marketing suites offer you powerful personalization features

Here’s the first email that Pat Flynn (affiliate marketer and blogger) uses to learn about his new subscribers. Based on the answer you click, he then shares targeted and relevant resources that suit your stage.

It’s impossible to segment your YouTube subscribers and serve them with personalized content in this manner.

5 Proven Ways To Grow Your Email List Using YouTube

The best part about growing your email list with YouTube is that you can repurpose the tools and resources you’re already using to create and publish videos. So adding these strategies should take very little effort.

1. Add a call-to-action (CTA) to your video content

One of the easiest ways to encourage people to join your email list is to – you got it — ask them. The ask is commonly known as a call to action or CTA. This can be as simple as adding a text overlay or verbal instruction in your video asking viewers to subscribe to your email list for updates, exclusive content, or special offers.

Make sure your CTA is clear and compelling, and consider offering an incentive like a free e-book or discount code to entice people to sign up.

2. Add Cards

Annotations are a great way to add call-to-action links to your videos for desktop viewers, but unfortunately, they don’t work on mobile devices.

More than half of YouTube views come from mobile devices. On average, there are 1,000,000,000 mobile video views per day!

To make sure your mobile viewers can see your call-to-action overlays, use YouTube Cards.

Cards add a white box to the upper right-hand corner of your video with a brief description.

To add cards to your videos, follow these steps:

Go to your Video Manager.
Find the video you want to add cards to and select “Edit”.
In the tab bar at the top, select “Cards”.
Select “Add card” and choose “Link cards”.
Then select “Create”.
If you haven’t done so previously, for some link types select “Enable” first to accept the Terms & Conditions.
Enter the URL where you have your option form.
Upload an image or select one of the suggestions.
Edit the title, call to action, and any other text. Then adjust the start time

You have valuable real estate in your video description, use it to provide opportunities for viewers to join your email list, sign up for your services, or to check out your social media accounts.

One of the options can be to sign up to receive valuable content through email. This works especially well if you’re creating tutorials or how-to videos that offer value to your audience.

In your video description, include a link to your email sign-up page along with a brief description of the benefits of signing up. You can also use tools like Leadformly or Typeform to embed a sign-up form directly into your video description.

4. Syndicate your videos on Wistia. Then, use Turnstile…

Content syndication is an efficient way to scale your audience, without creating new content. If you’re creating videos, then you could also push them to Wistia. It’s a terrific platform for getting detailed video analytics.

Once you have uploaded your videos on Wistia, it enables you to gate them with landing pages. Here’s a detailed guide on capturing leads using Turnstile.

You could also publish your YouTube videos natively on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram (where your audience hangs out) as video updates have a higher reach than links. Then, in the description of the social media update (or in the first comment), you can invite users to subscribe to your list.

How To Add a Business Email To YouTube

5. Ask in your video

Asking your viewers to sign up for your email list directly in your videos.

To make this approach work, you need to lay the foundation for the ask throughout the video by mentioning how your viewers can find more information by signing up for your email list.

This can be done casually and naturally within the content of your video. Then, at the end of your video, you can encourage viewers to sign up for your email list. Remember to highlight the benefits of joining your email list. Also, make sure the signup process is as simple and straightforward as possible.