What Is an Email Capture App?

Building a contact list is vital for any marketer or marketing team. This is why email capture strategies can do your business some good. If you are reading this article, take is as a sign that your email list could be bigger and better! We can go over how to capitalize and use email capture for various reasons aside from a way to collect leads, such as a social media tool to grow you brand as well. What is great about an email capture app is that you can partially work on it offline.

Table of Contents

• What Is Email Capture?
• Why Your Business Needs an App to Capture Email
• What Are Marketing Strategies Around Captured Emails?
  • Popups and Slide-Ins
• What Tools or Forms do You Need from an Email Capture App?
• A List of Great Email Capture and Email Messaging Apps
• What's Next?

What Is Email Capture?

Email marketing shouldn't be confusing. So what does it mean to capture email? Email capture is a marketing technique used to grow subscriber lists by asking people who visit business pages for their email address in exchange for a value. Your email collection can grow more than your business, you can grow hope when you get a collection of emails. What's great about email capture is that is can be part of anything, like a landing page or social page. 

Why Your Business Needs an App to Capture Email

Why do you need to capture any email? Email capture is an important part of any digital marketing strategy. That's because email marketing is still consistently the best way for you to develop relationships with prospective clients while nurturing relationships with existing ones.

Essentially, keep in mind that you predominantly want to get a new email every few minutes or days, depending on the size of your company and what you predict you can get. But to capture an email is not just for new leads. It can be for old leads who may have lost a password or for past customers who forgot they have bought something from you. Ultimately, you want to have a solid list of emails so that you don't have addresses or marketing messages that bounce, hurting your email messages and sending abilities in the future. And a strong list of contacts means faster, more consistent, and better sales you can make.

What Are Marketing Strategies Around Captured Emails?

Some strategies when trying to capture emails revolve around the design of a form or message of 'how' you go about making a form. But what are some other things you need to do to successfully get emails in a list?

• Verify emails. Always send an email so the new subscriber can verify or opt-in to receive marketing emails from you. This will help you save money when sending emails and drive more sales.
• Wait until a person goes to the second page view to have a pop-up window with an email capture form appear.
• Use a slide-in.
• Load a floating bar on scroll on a page of a website.
• Use lightbox popups.
• Show an interest-based offer.
• Use simple Yes or No buttons.
• Add a feature box. A feature box, as shown in an example below, showcases what you are selling within a page while also allowing the visitor to see the webpage.

Popups and Slide-Ins

Popups & slide-ins are separate boxes that either pop up or slide in somewhere on your website to collect people’s email addresses. 

The key is balancing the results you’ll get from popups with the negative effect they have on the user experience on your site. While we have our own opinions on this balance, it’s really up to each and every business to work out how far they are willing to go here. Below is an example of a popup.

What Tools or Forms do You Need from an Email Capture App?

As it says, forms are one of the top tools you need for email capture. Where will people type their email addresses to get to you? Think of other vital information you'll need from someone other than an email. You will want an email app to have a sign in feature if, in fact, you have a lead who comes to your page who actually remembers they have an account with you. You will also want to give this person the ability to recover their password or make a new one so they can sign in again.  Always make sure people visiting your website can do this on any device, including android phones or apple tablets. 

What do you want in forms? It all depends on what type of business you have, but here are some ideas:

• Email address
• Name (first, last, or just first name)
• Mailing address information (if necessary for sending fliers or physical in-store coupons)
• Personal information for data collection if your business pertains to this, such as gender, race, economic standing (generally for government or financial institutions)
• Tools or things the lead is interested in. Can be a drop-down menu of items they like, whether it is things they do for a hobby or what they like to buy (i.e. clothing choices, like jeans, dresses, jewelry)
• Career path of the lead (can be put in a drop-down menu with categories like education, retail, entertainment, military, etc.)

Remember that some of these subjects you'll want in your forms may require the forms to give you a tool for leads to free type an answer if needed.

A List of Great Email Capture and Email Messaging Apps

The best email messaging apps have the best forms and a great automation system in place. You can imagine that Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign are among the top apps we love for these, but TruVISIBILITY has modeled a similar email automation system to make sure every email your website visitors put into a form are almost immediately notified with a welcome email or other email that provides the new lead with the coupon code, discount, or whatever was promised to them. 

TruVISIBILITY

Among the cheaper options, TruVISIBILITY's Messaging app is unlike other apps because of the power and many abilities the user can enjoy for free. TruVISIBILITY has the drag and drop capabilities to help create an email campaign in minutes. It can even take you longer because the free membership still lets you use the Messaging app templates. And yes, email capture is the strategy TruVISIBILITY's templates had in mind for you. Their email messages can also be connected to TruVISIBILITY's Pages app.

The Pages app lets users create a landing page from scratch or use a template to draw up the perfect page for email capture. This means the landing page app includes the best forms for website visitors to input as much personal information as you'd like to ask. Another plus is that users can work with the tools of the app with their mobile devices, whether you have an android phone or tablets, making it easy to build a landing page from anywhere as long as you can text the copy you want easily with the mobile devices' keyboards.

The best thing about TruVISIBLITY is that there is no need for a free trial since they have a free subscription. They also have a pro account that offers unlimited emails you can collect, custom chatbot design (if you choose to use the all-in-one suite), and endless help to build your brand. This is based on our experienced support to help grow your business through getting you leads, displaying surveys for customers for your business, and - most importantly - email automation and strong email marketing.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp doesn't have a free trial but a free account. However, your marketing will be limited unless you pay to use all the tools and view all the data your email messages are producing. Their forms for landing pages are solid, but Mailchimp is mostly known for their email app, and therefore email capture abilities. 

Mailchimp toutes putting your ideas into your marketing campaigns with their various tools, such as image input or HTML embedding (which is a great feature of theirs). However, when it comes to growing a lengthy list, Mailchimp will cost more. And you will want their 150+ integration tools, such as the great email automation they offer, in order to collect those emails. Unfortunately, we found their templates are lacking in inspiration for both the email marketing app and the landing page app. In order to successfully use Mailchimp, you will have to get ideas of truly great landing pages for email capture elsewhere, such as a simple Google search. 

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign has been growing in popularity possibly because it does have a free trial and a better monthly payment plan at $9, versus Mailchimp's $11, $17, or $299 per month plans. Their marketing app works similarly to Mailchimp's, but the option to give clients or leads a survey in their apps in lacking in originality and ability to make it custom to your brand. That is one of the few tools that has an issue. And again, if you get one of ActiveCampaign's paid , you'll find the template you choose also works similarly to Mailchimp's. Lacking inspiration. 

You can get more information from ActiveCampaign's help or support hotline, of course, but there is one other thing to mention about ActiveCampaign. Choosing a monthly plan varies in price and lets you pay based on how many contacts you will have. Since it is based on how many emails you've collected, it is hard to predict how much you will actually pay. How are you supposed to know how many contacts you will have? That is the point of email capture - to grow your collection of emails and not be punished for sending marketing campaigns to more addresses. 

A few honorable mention email capture apps that work specifically for growing an email list, include:

• OnSpot Social (great for automation)
• Jotform
• Copper
• SignUpAnywhere
• Brew Survey (great for making a survey)

These apps are specifically designed to help you capture any email from anywhere and should be able to be integrated with whatever landing page app you have, but the process of integrating them may be tricky as some website software may not accept or recognize these capture apps.

What's Next?

We hope this article helped you understand email capture a little better, helping your marketing strategies and email list collection surpass your business expectations. Of all the apps, we also hope you've discovered which is best for your website based on the templatesoffered. Inspiration is key when thinking about email capture because enticing people with more than just a great value proposition can make or break lead generation. The design of your forms on your website or landing page, making sure the messaging on your pages and emails works, and a survey with helpful, custom questions for feedback, can get you where you want to be with email capture.

Remember that email capture can be part of your chatbots with forms embedded in your bot conversations as well, so check out our all-in-one suite to easily integrate all of these tools towards making a solid email list or two.