Using our soon to be released Market Intelligence tool, our Strategic Services team discovered that over the holiday period, online retailers were sending approximately four tweets to every one email, often staggering an 'offer tweet' in between 3-4 'engagement tweets'.  Twitter is a great channel for interacting with current and prospective followers and it can also be utilized to spread the word on special promotions and grow your email list.  There are three simple steps to follow to make this happen:

1. Setup a (or use an existing) sign up form
2. Tweet your message
3. Track growth and interest

Step 1 - Setup a Sign Up Form
While you may already have an email sign up form in place to use, you will want to review it for a few key aspects:

• Make it easy to sign up.  Preferences can be further collected at a later time, if you add too many fields to the process; your customer may decide it's too cumbersome to complete.
• Have an automated message setup upon submission of the form to welcome your new subscriber or to provide them with any information you wish to promote in your Tweet.
• Use a trackable URL to the sign up form so you can assess response.  A service like bit.ly can provide you with both a shortened URL and analytics on the number of clicks.
• Make sure the form is optimized for a mobile device.  Many of your followers may be accessing Twitter via their phone so check that the sign up process is as easy to use as if they were on a desktop.
  
  

Step 2 - Tweet your Message
There are multiple ways you can motivate your followers to opt-in to your email list.

• Highlight Benefits: Highlight some of the advantages to signing up for emails, as Dreamfields Pasta does in their tweet below.  Dreamfields also utilizes hashtags to potentially extend their reach outside of their direct follower audience.
  
  
  
• Special Offers/Coupons: Indicate that signing up for email is the only way to get access to special offers, as BierCraft Restaurant highlights in their post below.  In the second example, Kid to Kid Buford not only calls out that opting in is how you get a special coupon, but also ties in a specific timeframe for the customer to take action.
  
  
  
• Contest/Sweeps: Run a contest or sweepstakes where the rules and information are available for customers that sign up to receive emails, as in the Jacksonville Landing tweeted in the example below.
  
  
  
• First to Know: Another way to highlight that email recipients get access to exclusive information is to call out that signing up for email is the best way to be the 'first to know' about news, product updates, sales, and other types of promotions.
  

Step 3 - Track growth and interest
After you have sent out your Tweet (you may wish to repeat the Tweet using slightly different wording over a few days, but with the same sign up link), track how many link clicks you have received (using a service like the aforementioned bit.ly) and how many subscribers have signed up. You can also track these sign ups as a special segment to experiment with specific offers and content to see how email subscribers that also follow you respond to different messages.  

Adding your email sign up to your Twitter communications is a quick and easy way to further engage your audience.  Just remember to keep your Twitter 'voice' the same when you tweet your information and highlight the value of signing up for emails to see your list start to grow. 

What ways in social media are you utilizing to build your email list?