In this instructional video, Polly Barnfield explains how businesses can leverage Instagram to grow their email list, using the Scandinavian Pantry Shop as a concrete example. She walks through a real Instagram post that announces a special newsletter discount, showing how the post simultaneously nudges existing customers to open the email and entices new visitors to sign up for the discount. She highlights practical steps such as placing sign‑up links in the Instagram bio and on Facebook, using a personal, friendly tone in the caption, and adding a clear call‑to‑action. Barnfield then expands the strategy by demonstrating how to use Instagram’s engagement tab to like, comment on, and share posts from other local businesses in the same geographic area, thereby surfacing the brand to a wider, locally‑relevant audience and fostering networking. The video concludes with an invitation to click a help button for further assistance. The overall message is that a single, well‑crafted social‑media post, combined with targeted local engagement, can significantly boost both email open rates and new subscriber acquisition.
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Today we're looking at how you can use social media to grow your email list. The Scandinavian Pantry Shop is an online store selling beautiful homewares and gifts. Now they also use Instagram to drive discounts for site and to drive people to take their discounts for signing up to newsletters, which is a really great way of growing your other communication channels. So let's take a look. So here they're saying, happy Thursday. Things are moving quite quickly. They're talking about a new premises and then they're saying they sent a brand new newsletter to their subscribers this morning offering a very special discount. You can still sign up by visiting the website. Now what this is doing is if I am an existing customer and I haven't opened the newsletter yet, it's making me think, oh, do you know what, I was going to buy something from there if I can get a discount. Brilliant. And so it makes me want to go in and open up the email. So that is going to only improve their open rate. Now this also is making me think, if I have never come across them before and I happen just to be looking through and I'm scrolling through and I think, oh, wow, what a beautiful feed. It makes me then want to go onto their website and sign up to their newsletter to get the special discount. Now, she could have gone one step further by adding in, you know, the sign up via our website and maybe link in the bio, for example, and on Facebook, obviously you can physically put the link. But also what I really, really like is that she' been super personal. So she's done best wishes, Ursula and she's done a little kiss as well. So I think all in all, if I was just coming across this and someone was offering me, you know, a really lovely discount and I loved the look of some of their products, all I had to do was sign up, then I would do it. And then as an existing customer, it reminds me, oh, I haven't opened that newsletter yet. I'd love to use their discount. So it's kind of, you know, two sort of positive things out of one post, I guess. So any business can do this. You know, if you got your email list and you do little discounts and things like that, then just remind people by popping on here because as you can see, people really do respond to it. And all of these people now have either been reminded to go and use their discount or might have gone and signed up to get a new one. Now if I was a Scandinavian pantry, what I might want to do is, you know, I might Even if they're online, they might have a location. In fact, they did, didn't they? Because they were moving locations. So I would want to look at other businesses within that new location that I could engage with. So what I would do is I would go into the engagement tab. Engage and then I would pick. So say it was pool. Let's look at pool. So I would want to do this and make sure you click on local because these are all of the most engaged businesses in pool. That means that people from pool are engaging within these businesses, social media posts. So what I would want to do is I'd be liking, I would be sharing, I would be engaging. Because what that does is it means that the people who don't even know that I exist because maybe I'm coming to a brand new place or even if I've been there for a little while, I still want to be coming up in their feeds because these are people. So say lovepo. These are people who are already engaged. They've got five comments. I would want to be the sixth person to go in and comment to say, oh, love the photo. Something simple like that. And what that means is the Scandinavian pantry is suddenly coming up to all the people who've engaged within that post. And that's an extra, you know, 478 engagements that, you know, they might not have seen before. That might be 400 people that maybe haven't ever, you know, recognize that the Scandinavian pantry is there. And it's also a great way of businesses networking and showing, you know, that you're supporting businesses in your location. Now, if you've got any questions whatsoever, click on the little blue button. We love to help.
