Building an Email List: 8 Tactics for Collecting Email Addresses

It might seem like an old school tactic, but email marketing proves to be an effective way to reach your target market.

Mind you, 91% of customers read emails every day, and 66% buy a product based on your email. This explains the importance of email marketing for making your business grow.

But here is the thing: How can you send an email blast if you do not have an email marketing list?

Luckily, there are a lot of things that you can do to collect emails from potential customers. Here are eight ways you can do it:

1. Make it Part of the Checkout Process

As mentioned earlier, email can compel a reader to buy your products. Hence, it is vital to incorporate email marketing into your e-commerce marketing mix.

And one way to collect your customers’ email is to include it in the checkout process.

It does not matter whether your customer would want to checkout as a guest. After all, you will need to ask for his full name, shipping address, and payment details. So, it would help to ask your customer’s email address as well.

But you should not forget to ask for the customer’s permission if he/she is okay to receive marketing messages from you.

2. Encourage Email Forwarding

This is an old school tactic. Nonetheless, encouraging subscribers to forward or share your email is another way to grow your email list.

It can be as simple as adding social sharing or “Email to a Friend” buttons on your email. But, of course, you need to create an email that is so good, your reader cannot help but share it with his family and friends.

Simply put, one of the keys to growing your email list is to:

1. Write something valuable and that resonates with subscribers
2. Make it easy to share your email

3. Give Something Away

This is the most common tactic in building your email list.

To do this, you must have something valuable to give away. This can be an e-book or white paper or a free course. And your audience must subscribe to your email list to access your free content.

But make sure that what you are giving is valuable for your audience.

If you are a life coach, it would be ideal to provide in-depth content about self-care or something similar. Your audience would be willing to give their email in exchange for exclusive content.

4. Reinvigorate an Old List

This might not be your first time to give email marketing a spin. Thus, it would help if you consider reinvigorating a stale list of email subscribers.

What you can do is create an opt-in page with engaging content and send it to your old email list. Your opt-in page should encourage your old subscribers to join again.

As for those who did not respond, remove them from your list. Doing so gives you more room for new email subscribers who are more likely to make a transaction with you.

5. Run a Contest or Giveaway

Aside from offering exclusive content, you can also collect emails with contests and giveaways. Because who would not want to win something, right?

Using our previous example, you can run a contest wherein a lucky winner can earn a week’s worth of free one-on-one coaching with you.

To entice participants to leave their email, you need to keep these two things in mind:

1. Make your opt-in page simple
2. Let participants know that you will contact them via email

PRO TIP: Only ask what is necessary, like your participant’s complete name and email address. Asking for their credit card might turn them off, as it will not make sense why you would want that sensitive data in choosing a winner.

6. Create a Handy Tool

Another way to collect emails is to build a useful tool. It is like giving away exclusive content in exchange for an email; only you are giving away access for a tool.

This tactic is ideal if you run a Software as a Service (SaaS) business.

Encourage potential users to register via email to access the free trial. Doing so enables you to collect emails and nurture them to become paying users.

You can also use this tactic when working on an app or browser-based tool. Once your app is in the beta testing phase, you can open this to the public in exchange for their email.

That way, you are collecting both email and user feedback, which you can use to improve your product.

7. Promote via Social Media

If you are unsure how you can fill in this month’s social media calendar, consider promoting your newsletter.

It is as simple as letting your social media followers know that you send a newsletter once a week. And then share a link to an opt-in page.

You can also opt to change your Facebook page’s call-to-action to a “Subscribe” button. This will then redirect a follower to your opt-in page.

8. Join Offline Events

This might be one of the “less traditional” ways to collect an email.

But if you are lucky to be part of an expo or convention, you can ask people to come to your booth to leave their emails. Once the event is over, you can plug-in these emails to your email marketing platform.

You can encourage event participants to leave their email if they bought something from you or run a contest in your booth. For the latter, you can ask them to drop their business card in a bowl and make a raffle before the day ends.

What’s Next?

As a marketing professional or business owner, it is your job to collect email addresses. That’s because your subscribers can serve as another revenue stream.

But here’s the thing: Collecting an email does not give you the right to bombard your subscribers with unnecessary messages. But it enables you to forge a meaningful relationship with them.

To recap, here’s how you can collect email addresses to kickstart your email marketing campaign:

1. Make it part of the checkout process
2. Encourage email forwarding
3. Give something away
4. Reinvigorate an old list
5. Run a contest or giveaway
6. Create a handy tool
7. Promote via social media
8. Join offline events

This relationship can help you achieve a return on investment and turn your audience into loyal customers.

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