Oh, what's in a name? Today we are asking: Oh, what's in an email address? Every successful email marketing campaign begins with an effective email list. There’s no point building advanced email campaigns with sophisticated design, engaging copy, and special offers if your email list isn’t properly segmented and targeted.
This guide will explore and explain 10 effective tactics that you can leverage to build your email list from scratch quickly. And best of all, by following just one list building tactic, you’ll not just acquire new email contacts but email list subscribers who are loyal.
Let's go over how to build (with the best list building strategies) an email list for all your 2023 email marketing campaigns.
Table of Contents
- Choose Great Email Software for Email List Building
- What You Need in Email Marketing Software
- How to Start List Building: Top Strategies in 2023
- Add a pop-up offer
- Put an opt-in form in your site's navigation or footer
- Collect an email address at your store or in-person event
- Add a signup button to social media
- Build personalized marketing landing pages
- Include a newsletter sign up option at check out
- Outside-the-Box Ideas to Building a Great Email List
- Best Software to Build an Email List
- After You Gather Email Addresses
- Want to Learn More About Your Email List?
Choose Great Email Software for Email List Building
Email list building should be one of the top tasks in your marketing strategy. Building anything - a landing page, chatbot, or ad campaign - involves creating a catchy design with content that matches your brand, message, and desired outcome.
But what shouldn't stress you out is learning how to build email or organizing your users into a list. Then decide how to reach those people with an offer after your audience members sign up to get your marketing campaigns in their email. This also shouldn't be complicated.
How do you choose marketing software? Decide if getting a good email list is worth the price you pay. If you don't want to download any program to build emails, there are tons of software options that allow you to work directly online. We'll go over more about how you can get email addresses through some of the top marketing software out there today.
What You Need in Email Marketing Software
What is important for list building? To build a great email list that generates sales, your three priorities are:
- Quality. Get real, complete information from real people—and never buy email lists. Bots, spam accounts, and abandoned email addresses don’t make purchases.
- Relevance. It’s hard enough to convert prospects who already want what you’re selling. When building an email list, only target people who are genuinely interested in your products or services. Otherwise, you’ll see leads unsubscribe as quickly as they joined.
- Quantity. Once you’ve checked off the first two priorities, you can start focusing on growing your email list and expanding your reach to include new or wider audiences.
How to Start List Building: Top Strategies in 2023
So, how to gain an email address? There is no step-by-step guide since you can do any of the following to get an email list. Create great content and you're sure to grab the attention of your target audience.
Subscribers are the life-blood of your marketing. Let's start learning all the ways you can create enticing signups.
1) Add a pop-up offer
While you shouldn’t train shoppers to wait for or expect discounts, promotional offers can be a powerful tool for converting first-time website visitors before they hit the back button. With homepage pop-up forms, you can add to your email list and save a potential sale in the process.
If the term “pop up” gives you pause, consider that the average conversion rate for pop-up forms is just over 3%, with the best pop-ups converting at around 10%. Depending on your overall website traffic, numbers like these can dramatically increase your email signup rate.
To begin using pop-up forms to capture emails on your ecommerce site, start with an exit intent pop-up. These will only show if a visitor moves their mouse off the page, which typically means they intend to navigate somewhere else.
Using the targeting options in your marketing platform of choice, you can disable these pop-ups for previous customers and visitors who are already on your list. This lets you focus your copy around new customers only.
2) Put an opt-in form in your site’s navigation or footer
One key to capturing new subscribers for your email list is giving visitors ample chances. That’s why in addition to a homepage or product page pop-up form, you should also consider adding an email sign up form across every page on your website.
Most website platforms enable you to place opt-in forms in locations where shoppers look for additional information about your business, including the margins, navigation bar, and footer. Because these forms are often subtle and located below the fold, your conversion rate will likely be low overall. However, the contribution they make to building your list can add up over time. Get it?
To boost your conversion rate, make sure you’re adding a strong CTA button about the value of a sign up, whether it’s a coupon, exclusive content, or regular news and updates.
3) Collect an email address at your store or in-person event
Face-to-face connections are still the most effective tool for converting leads into customers... even if a transaction doesn’t happen in person. Whether you have a brick-and-mortar store, or you’re promoting your business at an event or pop-up shop, your in-person interactions can help you build your email list, leading to more digital sales.
Remember, forms often associated with email marketing and lead generation can easily make the transition from URL to IRL. For instance, you can bring a clipboard and ask people to write down their name and email address or, to better sync with your email marketing tool of choice, you can provide an iPad where people can submit their address directly. You can even include a CTA on your business cards to incentivize email sign ups.
As with your online forms, make sure you use a strong CTA to incentivize in-person sign ups. For example, “Sign up for our mailing list for a chance win a $25 gift card,” or “Subscribe to our newsletter for 25% off your first online purchase.” It’s also a good idea to segment these lists by location or event, so that you can send emails tailored to each audience’s needs.
4) Add a signup button to social media
People follow brands on social media for many reasons, but the biggest reason given in most surveys is to stay up to date on new products. By adding an option on your Facebook, Instagram, and other social media accounts to sign up for email updates, you can give followers another way to stay in the know while pulling them into more personalized email nurturing campaigns.
Most social media platforms support buttons or forms, enabling you to add a simple email signup option to your page. For instance, you can include a call-to-action button on your Facebook business page to encourage your followers to sign up for your email list.
5) Build personalized marketing landing pages
When it comes to convincing visitors or followers to provide their emails, there’s no one-size-fits-all offer. Depending on where they discovered your online business and where they are in their buyer journey, different prospects will respond to different email signup CTAs. With that in mind, you should plan on creating multiple landing pages with opt-in forms and messaging tailored to a particular segment of your audience.
To begin using personalized landing pages, consider your ecommerce website’s traffic sources. What are Facebook users looking for? What about Amazon users? Whether you’re crafting a landing page for an evergreen audience, or capitalizing on an event or holiday, Be sure that your on-page message and CTA are clear and consistent with the offer that inspired prospects to click over to your site in the first place.
TruVISIBILITY has all the templates to help get you started with making a personalized landing page.
6) Include a newsletter sign up option at checkout
It’s unsurprising that many online business owners neglect their checkout page as a marketing tool—after all, they’ve already secured a customer. Yet the buyer’s journey doesn’t end with a single transaction. Indeed, many customers opt to complete their purchase without creating an account, limiting your future interactions to messages about their transaction. By encouraging users to sign up for your email list at checkout, you can turn a single transaction into a lifelong fan and repeat customer.
Adding a checkout newsletter sign up option can be as simple as including a checkbox under the field customers are using to provide an email for their order confirmation. Be specific about the value buyers will receive, whether it’s email-exclusive discounts, how-to content, or updates about new products. This will not only outline their incentive to opt in, but also ensure you’re in compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations.
Apart from a checkbox or text field, you can also take your checkout CTA to the next level with a popup or banner on your purchase confirmation screen.
Outside-the-Box Ideas to Building a Great Email List
Let's think outside of the box now for other ways you can build your email list. Collecting emails can become a tedious job, but it can also be a fun and creative process. Here are the more advanced ways you can get emails in your contact list.
1) Use a chatbot to engage with prospects
While it’s still realizing its full potential, chatbot technology already offers a number of effective tools to help you automate your messaging with website visitors. This can help you not only save you valuable time and effort in customer support, but also create unique offers generate email list sign ups.
2) Drive email sign ups with ad campaigns
Since landing pages are usually built with a single outcome or conversion point in mind, they’re often very useful for building your email list. By isolating landing pages to specific campaigns, you can not only craft a clear offer on a distraction-free page, but also measure your results more accurately. Because of this, landing pages are also a great place to send traffic from digital ad campaigns.
Whether you’re looking at social media, search, or some other advertising channel, there are countless options for driving email list sign ups with online ads. For instance, you can place banner ads on YouTube videos related to your industry, or run targeted Facebook ads to drive visitors to a downloadable guide that’s related to your product (e.g., a recipe book to pair with your kitchen gadgets.)
With the powerful audience targeting tools in Google AdWords and Facebook Ads Manager, you can build an offer with an audience already in mind, then tweak attributes like location, age, gender, profession, interests, and more to reach the right people.
3) Entice visitors with valuable content
When building your email list, it’s important to remember that your physical product or subscription is not your only value proposition. You started your online business to solve a problem or address a need, which means you have some valuable ideas and solutions. By sharing those ideas in the form of blogging or downloadable content, you can create a lead magnet that adds value for your target audience and builds trust in your brand, generating more email sign ups and, eventually, more customers.
Content marketing is a big, complex topic, and there are lots of content options that will inspire prospects to give an email address, including podcasts, webinars, and videos.
A free ebook or guide, usually in the form of how-to content, case studies, or additional tips and tricks in your product category, is the perfect example. After the cost of your time (and yes, your time is very valuable!) or the associated writing and design fees, you can offer a strong incentive to join your email newsletter and you won’t have any recurring costs, aside from hosting the guide itself. People want to get free stuff and love it when they do - it's the ultimate enticing action to get email addresses.
4) Run contests or giveaways on social media
Contests and giveaways can help accelerate list growth by turning the act of subscribing into a shareable and winnable event. The added momentum of a contest can be especially valuable in the early days, when your list of subscribers is small and you don’t have existing traffic to leverage.
One way to amplify this strategy is by partnering with other ecommerce brands who sell to similar customers. With the right partner, your products will complement each other, making the offer more compelling than if you ran the contest alone.
Whatever you post, whether it is intended to get signups or not, you should still have the option for potential leads to sign up for newsletters or other marketing communication. If nothing else, they can be lead to your website where they can sign up for a special offer or newsletter information.
Best Software to Build an Email List
Let us share the top 4 marketing software that features email marketing. What's awesome about this list is that they also feature landing page building options, adding cookies to any page, and list email marketing as a main focus throughout their software.
TruVISIBILITY
You can start free and continue to use this software for free... for life. You only pay a percentage of emails sent as your communications and email lists grow. Email marketing software shouldn't be expensive, so TruVISIBILITY made the fairest price tools on the market.
What can you do with TruVISIBILITY's Messaging app?
- Monitor campaign data, such as bounce rate and open rate
- Integrate with a website you already built (or build one in their Sites app)
- Integrate social media with your landing pages, chatbots, etc. - having it all connected to the email marketing app
- Choose from a number of email templates for every occasion or offer - all with your subscribers in mind.
- Simply drag and drop widgets so you don't need tech-savvy knowledge to create a campaign
- Fully customize from scratch or from templates
Larger software companies also do not offer the personalized attention needed like TruVISIBILITY gives.
Omnisend
Omnisend works much like Mailchimp when it comes to tools you can use to collect email addresses, such as creating emails and landing pages. There's also a list of features you can use to automate emails and create forms for your landing pages.
Omnisend is different than other software because they pride themselves on making marketing easy for ecommerce businesses, specifically. This means their emails and pages you can build are targeted more toward just this type of industry.
Omnisend is not the cheapest or most expensive option, but is good middle ground. You can reach up to 250 contacts by email for free each month, but if your business grows, so does the pricing. You can choose from two other pricing points, either $16 per month or, if you want to send unlimited emails, it will cost you almost $60 per month.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor has great template options for emails as well as a thorough tool for building signup forms, which can be placed on pop-ups, landing pages, etc.
It is a software company that has been around the block, giving people list building help, almost when marketing software started to explode. It is still found among the top marketing software for a reason.
Their new innovations keep loyal clients, wanting to give people content upgrade where they can, such as tools that lead people to add more fields to their signup forms. This may help with sign ups and collecting emails, but too many fields can be overwhelming. Especially if you simply want to collect sign ups for your newsletter from your blog page or homepage.
As much as you may want to sign up for their service, there are pricing plans to consider with Campaign Monitor, too. There is no offer where you can sign up to get a free trial. Instead, plans start at $29 per month.
If you want to send unlimited emails, it will cost you $59 per month. Or you can get premier support for $149 per month.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is often one of the programs people choose to subscribe to because Mailchimp can partner with different website hosts. If you have a large number of subscribers each month (like hundreds of thousands), this may be the one with which to create your campaigns.
Mailchimp has a similar offer as other email marketing tools, however, such as monitoring data, ability to put an email address into one or many groups, etc.
But is the price worth it? You can start with a minimal email address list for free, but support only lasts 30 days. Then pricing plans rise from $13 to $20 to $350 per month.
They do help you with the building process of email marketing with tons of template options and fairly easy-to-build platform.
After You Gather Email Addresses
Let's say you've finally got an email list with new subscribers. What's your next plan of action? Here are the first things to consider when you know you can make well-designed email campaigns and have a good audience to send content to.
Divide into Groups
Do you have a long email list? marketing to all of these contacts can be pointless if your campaign doesn't exactly target the entire group.
This is why you should divide your email lists into different groups. If you have a skateboard on sale, will you tend to advertise this to your older demographic? Perhaps you want to group your lists by age, selling certain products to teenagers and young adults.
Even if your entire brand is intended just for new moms, you can still break up your groups into new subscribers and loyal customers, for example. And perhaps within that email list, you have contacts who signed up only for podcast information and not event information. It all depends on what you sell, whether you have an ecommerce business, and how diverse your audience is.
Automate Emails
Once you've divided your contacts into groups, you should follow our next policy: Always send a welcome email. This should be one of many automated emails sent to your contacts.
You may be building mail campaigns for your many different email addresses, but there are a few that can be automated. This makes it much easier for you to send email marketing for things like:
- Welcome emails
- Store-wide sale
- Special offer for all people of a certain group (new contacts, April birthdays, etc.)
- Holiday discounts for subscribers who have signed up with your business for over a particular number of months or a year
- Announcements with updates or changes in your business
Sending this type of content automatically can save time and even grow your customer base as these leads click through these email campaigns to your website, for example.
Want to Learn More About Your Email List?
Building an email list from scratch cannot happen overnight. However, by following these simple and effective tactics mentioned above, you’re increasing your chances of building your new email list in half the time!
Some methods will work better than others. But at the end of the day, what’s important is to combine them and get the best possible result for your business.
As you familiarize yourself with techniques on how to build an email list, you’ll want to move on to more advanced ones like webinars and podcasts.
Remember! What matters is not how fast you can build your list but how effectively you acquire new leads to be able to retain them.
Need to improve your email list building? Perhaps you want to build landing pages and emails that capture and retain leads and customers. Be our guest and check out TruVISIBILITY's Messaging and Sites apps for free to start building everything you need to collect email addresses. Your profile will be saved no matter what pricing plan you go with, even the free for life plan.
Related articles
Want to receive more articles?
Sign-up for our weekly newsletter to receive info that will help your business grow