First question I have is how engaged is your email list? What are their open rates, their click through rates, etc? What is their product? What have they offered them in the past? How many times have they bought? Do they continue to buy? What is their greatest need? Do they align with your target customer?
If they are engaged and opening emails then it becomes a matter of rediscovering what is relevant in their world of needs. Run a survey and get a great feel for what's important to them. Write content they want to share. As someone else mentioned use "share-gating". Those are all great ideas.
An important part here is what you're using for your email marketing. I would definitely recommend using a service where you can do behavior driven marketing, such as Infusionsoft or ActiveCampaign (depending on your budget).
Behavior driven marketing will trigger marketing actions based on engagement, such as visiting a page, watching a video, opening an email, etc. This is so important. So let's say you have a group of people who you send an email to with a button that says "check out this video and tell your friends", then all those people who click on the link you can tag those people and trigger a new campaign that will further target them.
Basically you can get granular on who really is engaged and nudge the others who are not.
I also would definitely focus on increasing more revenue first by getting my existing 800 customers to buy more times more often. I would focus on creating targeted valuable content in the form of webinars, videos and content or offers pertaining to their needs.
Then I would go into lead generation by developing out funnels that will build a list wherein the marketing pays for itself. Then I would optimize the funnel till I got it to the place where for every $1 I spend I would make $2 back.
The challenge I've seen with most businesses is they get caught up looking at marketing in terms of what it's going to cost instead of what it's going to make them.
The first and most important part of scaling your customer list is getting your new lead gen traffic to break even with some form of an offer. Getting emails in a landing page is great, but if you're not liquidating your traffic and making the cost break even on the front end then you're going to go broke really fast. The key here is to create what's called a Self Liquidating Offer or SLO. If you knew that for every $1 you spent you made $2 back, how many $1 would you spend?
The first area to begin looking at is what your sales process and your sales funnel will look like. Both on the front end and on the back end. The first step is to get them to enter in their information with an incentive of great reward (video, pdf, free ebook, etc). Realize most people will give their fake email on the first submit. So the next page is really important. This is where you want to take them either A) into a sales video with small "dip your toe in the water" offer that's around $7 to $25 or B) provide them with another valuable content but then have a form on the page where they enter their real information. After they have completed steps 1 and 2 then you take them into your real offer, the big buy.
Now on the subject of using retargeting, I would take all your unsubscribe emails and create custom audiences to drive them back into your funnels. For your existing customers I would create a custom audience in facebook ads with content or incentives to share with their friends or straight out target their friends. Again using behavior driven marketing and automation you can trigger campaigns to further target engaged people.
So there's a lot you can do here.
