5 Tips To Turn Your Instagram Followers Into Email Subscribers

A robust email subscriber list helps you, as a content entrepreneur, achieve direct, personal contact with your audience. Email is a reliable channel for distributing your best content and promoting (your own or affiliate) products and services. Most importantly, you own access to your audience.

On the other hand, Instagram, with its extensive reach and impressive user engagement, Instagram is a perfect platform to tap into a broader audience demographic and funnel those followers toward your email list.

How can you use the rented land of Instagram to move your audience to the owned land of your email list? Do these five things.

1. Optimize Your Instagram Bio for Email Sign-ups

To harness the potential of Instagram in building your email list, an obvious (but significant) first step is to optimize your bio for email sign-ups. Essentially, this involves tweaking your Instagram profile in a way that makes it easier for interested followers to sign up for your newsletter.

Your Instagram bio is the perfect spot to place a call to action (CTA) that encourages visitors to subscribe to your email list. However, that might not be the only link you have, and adding too many links to your Instagram bio can confuse your audience and give it an unprofessional appearance. 

This is where a link-in-bio tool like Linktree becomes incredibly valuable. It enables you to create a personalized and easily customizable landing page for your bio link, housing multiple hyperlinks relevant to your brand.

In this example, The Rock includes links to his podcast, a playlist, and his retail products, including training shoes, tequila, and energy drinks.

Using Linktree, you can provide a direct sign-up link to your email newsletter right in your Instagram bio. This gives your audience a straightforward path to joining your email list, simplifying the process and potentially increasing sign-ups.

Additionally, Linktree allows you to connect other vital resources like your website, podcast, online store, and more, ensuring your followers have immediate access to your complete digital ecosystem.

By effectively managing your Instagram bio with tools like Linktree, you are creating an optimized pathway for transforming Instagram followers into newsletter subscribers.

2. Use Instagram Stories and Highlights

Instagram Stories are short, 24-hour photos/video updates that provide a unique opportunity to connect with your audience in real time. On the other hand, Instagram Highlights are collections of Stories, creating a permanent feature on your profile.

This means even after 24 hours, your Stories can remain visible via Highlights, offering an ongoing source of interaction and engagement.

Instagram Stories make it possible for content entrepreneurs like you to insert clickable links and CTAs that direct your engaged viewers to your newsletter sign-up form.

You could provide sneak peeks of your upcoming content, share behind-the-scenes glimpses of your creative process, or create mini-tutorials geared toward your brand and your audience’s interests to motivate your followers to click on the link and subscribe to your newsletter.

Now, if you’re new to video editing, you might find it tricky to produce visually engaging and professional-looking videos for your Stories and Highlights. But with user-friendly video editing tools such as Videoleap, it becomes a breeze. 

Apart from basic functionalities like adding audio overlays and layering filters and effects, Videoleap also offers features that take your video content to the next level. For instance, Videoleap recently rolled out a feature that enables users to leverage the power of AI to completely change the settings of their visuals with one tap:

3. Host contests or giveaways

By offering a chance to win an exciting prize in exchange for their email, you can spark your audience to engage with your brand and gain potential leads for your business. With this tactic, though, expect a higher percentage of opt-out subscribers because some people will enter the contest who don’t want to receive your content.

However, managing such giveaway campaigns, from creating the rules to choosing the winners, isn’t as straightforward as it seems. 

Fortunately, digital marketing tools like Woorise simplifies this process. Woorise allows you to create engaging, branded contests and giveaways, providing you with a wide array of pre-built social actions (like participating in a poll) or the flexibility to create your own customized actions for any social platform or website.

When it comes to selecting winners, Woorise’s user-friendly platform makes it a seamless process: Pick winners randomly from all entrants, filter for specific actions, or even manually select winners after exporting all entries.

For content entrepreneurs targeting specific audiences, Woorise’s geo-targeting feature comes in handy, enabling campaigns to be available only to users in certain geographic locations. This ensures that your efforts are directed toward the right audience, increasing the efficiency of your email list-building process.

As with any activity, you must follow the applicable rules and regulations of the platform and related government jurisdictions.

4. Invest in Instagram ads

Organic reach on Instagram can be limited and unpredictable, largely due to ever-changing algorithms and continuously growing competition. Enter Meta’s Instagram lead-generation ads, a game-changer for content entrepreneurs aiming to expand their email lists.

Instagram ads allow you to collect information from your followers within the platform who opt-in. When a user clicks on a lead generation ad, they’re presented with a form pre-filled with their Instagram profile information, making it easier for them to share their details and, in turn, facilitating a faster growth of your email list.

However, setting up Instagram ads that actually convert can pose a challenge for newbie advertisers. Understanding the platform’s ever-evolving algorithms, creating eye-catching visuals, and writing compelling ad copy are no small tasks. If done ineffectively, it can result in wasted ad spend and missed opportunities.

Keep the following best practices in mind to create captivating ad copies that convert:

• Evoke emotions: Use visuals and ad copy that not only describe your offer but also evoke emotions that align with your brand message. For instance, if your content revolves around personal growth, you might aim to inspire and motivate your audience through your ad copy.

• Use AI-powered tools: They can generate creative captions, suggest the best hashtags, and even optimize your posting schedule based on data-driven insights much more quickly.

5. Monitor metrics and recalibrate

After your Instagram-to-email strategy has been going for a month, review the impact. Look at your Instagram analytics to see how (or if) your audience behavior has changed. Are you getting more clicks? More impressions? Do your ads deliver good click-through rates and cost per conversion? Is Instagram driving traffic to your link-in-bio page or website? Most importantly, is your email subscriber list growing?

If not, adjust your visuals, tweak your text, or update your ad buy to find a formula that works best for your creator brand. Keep checking your analytics regularly because you never know when Instagram will change its algorithm or your audience will behave differently.

Execute the Instagram-to-email strategy

An effective email list not only gives you direct access to engage your audience but also fosters an environment of trust, helping you to cultivate long-lasting relationships with your followers.

Starting with optimizing your Instagram bio for email sign-ups, you can create an easy pathway for your followers to access your newsletter or other content offerings. Posting Instagram Stories and Highlights offers another avenue to engage with your audience and encourage sign-ups.

Hosting contests or giveaways can serve as a powerful driver for audience engagement and email subscriptions.

Lastly, effectively employing Instagram ads for lead generation by invoking emotions, using AI-powered content generators, and continually monitoring and recalibrating your strategy can significantly boost your email list growth.