Building an email list is a regular and forever process of gathering email addresses from visitors or clients of a site. This is done to build a database and engage potential and existing customers in the future with updates, new products, branding purposes, etc.
Email list building is a fundamental technique for marketers as reports have indicated that 59% of the customers agreed that receiving textual information through email has either emphatically or contrarily impacted their buying choices. A robust email list is a business’s best resource since it is essential for effectuating various types of promotions. Email marketing campaigns are immune to algorithm manipulations and also enable brands to promote their products and/or services effectively.
However, email list building is a fairly perplexing and time-taking task. You can’t hope to create a great number of subscribers in a short term. Building a powerful email list requires patience and effective strategies.
Through this article, we will share all the important information about email lists and also discuss different ways to build an email list. So, let’s get started.
What is an Email List?
It is a collection of email addresses collected from individuals who have interacted with newsletters, blogs, websites, products, landing pages, etc. Your email subscribers are essentially the individuals with whom you want to interact in the future for promoting your products and/or services and building strong customer relationships.
By having a proper email list, it becomes possible to develop email marketing strategies for driving more sales. This implies that the success of your email campaigns very much depends on how good your email list is. If your email subscribers list is large and respondent, you’ll be more likely to have recurring clients.
Reasons to Build an Email List
1. Get Returning Visitors
It often happens that you have visitors who have interacted and purchased your products but never returned. Since they’ve made a purchase already, they are surely the potential ones and can be further pitched for making a purchase again. To do so, reaching out to them via email is the best option through which you can also hook them by offering some discounts.
2. Increase conversion rate
Every visitor who has ever interacted with your website is definitely a potential lead because they are likely to be interested in your offerings. Therefore, your email subscribers are substantially more easy to get converted for your offerings.
3. Email Builds Trust
Sending quality and useful emails subtly builds trust among your customer base. This is because they read your messages from the end-to-end privacy of their inbox instead of a message placed on any billboard or online media. It’s considered to be a more personal approach.
In addition, personalized emails make customers feel special and they further agree for discussions. Organizations can also resolve their queries that will eventually help in building the reliability of any business.
4. Easily deliver messages to customers
Statistics show that there are over 4 billion email users globally and around 95% of the uses open their email inbox at least once per day. These numbers are enough to prove how much an email list holds the potential for making an organization successful.
Furthermore, sending emails enables organizations to convey their words directly to somebody’s inbox, which is a much better way online media because here clients are more likely to miss the updates on their feeds.
8 Best Ways to Build an Email List
Before starting out, ensure to make a proper decision regarding the email marketing service provider. For creating your email list and carving out fruitful results through the same, make sure to choose an email service provider that allows you to send bulk emails. Every email service providers come with the following features:
- Various sign-up forms to collect emails directly from websites.
- Allows individuals to monitor the impact and impressions on every sign-up form and sent emails.
1. Deploy pop-ups and overlays
It is widely observed that if displayed at the right time, pop-ups can drive huge conversions by allowing users to share their email addresses or other details. While these details are heavenly all alone, you should be cautious while using pop-ups and consider Google’s interstitial advertisement rules.
On the off chance that you don’t, you may be liable for penalties. Following are some points worth considering for creating pop-ups that resonate with Google’s guidelines:
- Your pop-up shouldn’t cover the main contents of the webpage.
- Never use a standalone interstitial that blocks the complete screen and an individual has to first close it in order to access the content.
- Avoid using the page layout in which the sections available above the fold appear the same as a standalone interstitial.
Have a look at some of the most common and best practices for including pop-ups on your website.
- Welcome pop-ups
Welcome pop-ups are utilized to welcome guests to the site and they display around the initial 15 seconds after a visitor landed on the webpage. A solid call to action is mandatory with this pop-up so it doesn’t get excused as problematic. Best practices incorporate offering discounts, new updates, telling about the USPs, or some other type of significant information worth sharing at that time.
- Exit-intent pop-ups
It is studied that around 10-15% of possibly lost visitors can be saved with an exit-intent popup. These pop-ups appear when a user is about to exit. They regularly monitor the user’s behavior on the web page and quickly detect when somebody is about to exit.
Exit-intent pop-ups decrease the chance of an exit by catching the visitor’s consciousness and offering them substantial justification to stay on the page and share their email to get the latest updates about the company’s products and/or services.
- Promotional pop-ups
These pop-ups can be displayed at any time when a visitor stays on the website. In contrast to welcome pop-ups that are displayed when a visitor first lands on the site, or exit-intent pop-ups that appear before the visitor exit, promotional pop-ups show up when the user is surfing through the website.
For making a web page that converts, the addition of promotional pop-ups is really helpful. Start by understanding what stage of the customer’s journey your visitor is, and then push the promotional pop-up. All things considered, these pop-ups regularly based on behaviors and targets people who are more likely to share emails in exchange for some real benefits through emails.
2. Add CTA in the About Us page
The About Us page is perhaps the most strong page when it comes to conversions. Ideally, the About Us page is majorly visited by the individuals who are interested in the offerings of your business, yet it probably won’t be sufficient to persuade them to buy without a CTA through which you can collect emails.
3. Offer lead magnets
Lead magnets are basically extremely informative and unique content pieces that online businesses offer in exchange for a user’s email addresses. These content upgrades can be guides, catalogs, statistics, etc.
Customers who are not interested in purchasing the product or service in the first place can be offered valuable content in exchange for their email addresses. And right after getting the emails, create structured email marketing campaigns dedicated to these less-interested customers for making them the loyal ones.
4. Deploying gamification
Attracting and engaging visitors for capturing their emails is one of the most effective and widely-used strategies in the marketing world. Using the sign-up forms that are interactive and have small games like Wheel-of-fortune are powerful ways of deploying gamification onto your website and capture emails.
Wheel of fortune asks users to click and spin the wheel for winning various prizes. To turn the wheel, visitors initially need to sign-up by providing email. You can decide the prize as you wish, either as a particular sum or rate markdown. In any case, it’s a shared benefit. The guest gets savings on their purchase when they join, and you will get their emails in return.
5. Loyalty and referral programs
Perfectly planned loyalty and referral programs can organizations in developing their email list from scratch. Loyalty programs are an incredible method to create email lists that can be targeted for future promotions. Also, it is observed that individuals are more disposed to shop with stores that offer loyalty programs. To bring higher benefits from your loyalty programs, utilize it as a successful email list-building strategy. Ensure to make a simple to enroll process and offer some critical advantages like deals, gifts, products, etc.
6. Landing pages
One of the best ways for online websites to create an email list is to create more landing pages dedicated to a different set of audiences respectively. The reason is crystal clear, personalized landing pages help in getting higher conversions because it precisely displays information to a wider demographic. Since every visitor expects something different, more landing pages created for answering different audience sets will eventually increase the number of sign-ups.
7. Organizing webinars
One of the most interactive, efficient, and modern ways of engaging and informing users and getting customer’s email in return is organizing webinars. These webinars can be saved for using them in future as the lead magnet as well.
Also, webinars attract more potential users because they only stream for a limited time period only. Unlike videos, they aren’t available all the time for users and can be viewed in a restricted time slot only. This helps in creating a FOMO in viewers and also created a micro-commitment along with them. Since attending the webinars requires users to register with the email address, any business would be able to create a massive list of email subscribers.
Conclusion
Building an email list has a variety of benefits. In fact, it is one of the major sources of getting recurring customers and enjoy more sales. Carving out email marketing strategies using these lists increases the conversion rate along with building trust among the customers.
The blog contains all of the essential information regarding emails list building along with the best eight ways of creating an effective email list. However, always keep in mind that building an email list is not an overnight process and requires a lot of patience and determination.