By
Sarah Harris
Building and curating an email marketing list might sound like an antiquated idea, but we assure you, email marketing is alive and well. It’s not only effective, but it has an incredible ROI compared to other types of marketing, bringing in $40 to $45 for every $1 invested.
Today, we’re going to examine the best methods for creating an email list that delivers real results. Follow these tips on how to build an email list to get an edge over your competition!
What Is An Email List?
An email marketing list is a list of email addresses you can send marketing campaigns to. In other words, you have permission to seek sales through these addresses.
Why Is It Important to Use Email Marketing?
People check their email a lot. It’s often one of the first activities people do in the morning. Since your email list will be built from people who already have some kind of contact with your company, they aren’t cold leads, which means that an email from you won’t seem like it’s coming out of the blue.
Do Email Lists Still Work?
In the days before email marketing became such a powerful force, email lists had to be compiled by hand. Learning how to build an email list was easy because the strategies for using them were limited.
These days, automation does most of the grunt work, like email list cleaning, eliminating duplicates, purging inactive addresses, and more.
Best of all, messages can be more easily personalized with this automation, making the connections with potential customers stronger.
The addresses in your email marketing list can be collected from:
- Customers
- People who have subscribed on your website
- A meeting where you exchanged business cards
- People who attended an event
These addresses are valuable because they are a way for you to reach people who may be interested in your products and services. Your website, social media, physical interactions, previous sales, and any other methods by which someone gave you their email address can become an opportunity to create a long-lasting client.
16 Tips on How to Build an Email List
Email lists don’t happen by accident – they must be crafted!
1. Collect the Right Data
You have to know your business before you can know your customers. What are your goals? Who are the customers you have and what kinds of customers do you want?
Perhaps you’re a car manufacturer and your primary clientele is in retirement age but you wanted to start grabbing the attention of millennials — you’ll need to know what’s important to this new marketing demographic before you can modify your product and your marketing accordingly.
2. Create a Subscribe Page on Your Website
First, you have to have something worth subscribing to. Your newsletter and offers must be up-to-date or people will quickly become unsubscribers. The subscribe page should tell people what to do and what they get. The easier you make it to navigate, the more subscribers you’ll receive.
3. Let Your Ideal Customers Opt In
If they’re going to opt-in to receive content, it has to be worthwhile. Give them coupons, access to product reveals, and other information before the general public. Give exclusive access to contests and behind-the-scenes content.
You can also offer your knowledge through eBooks and guides or educational videos. Remember, your email list serves your customers as much as it serves you!
4. Optimize Your Website for Subscriptions
Make subscribing simple. No one wants to hunt for the subscription box. Make subscribing as easy as a checkbox during checkout. Put subscription buttons and email fields on your blog, video channel, or social media platforms. You can also have pop-up windows on your site that encourage subscriptions and a banner for subscriptions should your site visitors close it before they have a chance to see what it says.
5. Offer Live Content and Webinars
Whether you have exclusive live events or webinars as a reward for your subscribers, the point is that it’s a reward for your subscribers. To gain access, they have to subscribe! These events could be purely for entertainment, such as a concert, or you could host training or education seminars.
6. Do a Giveaway
People like free stuff! Give away a cool prize package that requires an email address for entry. Don’t forget to encourage them to get friends and family to enter, too.
Make sure to post about it on your website, social media, and marketing campaigns to drive as many people to your giveaway as possible!
7. Offer Content in Multiple Formats
People also love content. Blogs that give helpful advice or news, videos and podcasts that offer interesting projects, and emails that contain exclusive offers or messages. This builds trust and loyalty with your customers.
8. Create a Quiz
People really like to feel smart. Perhaps you have a record shop and your website has a daily quiz of music trivia where people get discounts or product offers at the end if they give you their email. You’ve engaged your customers by indulging their passion — and you’ve just built up your email list!
9. Ask Your Social Media Followers to Subscribe
If you’ve built up a large social media following, don’t be embarrassed to ask them to subscribe on your website, too. Entice them with offers and content they won’t see on your social media platform!
10. Encourage Your Followers to Share
Referral programs give your subscribers an incentive to find other subscribers for you. Online banks and savings programs often give cash incentives, such as an extra $50 in your account and $50 to your friend or family member if they open an account, too.
You can also have a sharing option in your newsletters in case your subscribers know someone else who would be interested in your content.
11. Offer a Free Trial
Since your email list serves your customers and your business, you can reward them with a free trial of your product or service if they subscribe. This also gives them a taste of how your product or service works!
12. Invest in Advertising
For just a few hundred dollars per month, a well-executed email marketing campaign can net you a lot of email addresses.
Email marketing services know how to make effective campaigns and do an excellent job of sifting through email addresses to find ones that have the most potential to respond.
And while you’ll have to approve the campaign, the marketing service is the one who will run it. They also take care of all of the design work and copywriting.
By the way, do not purchase an email list. Email marketing services won’t take them, the addresses don’t always work, and the lists are compiled from people who may or may not have ever heard of you. Don’t do it!
13. Pay to Promote High-Value Content
The higher the value of your content, the more eyes should see it. Paid social media ads can ensure that your content does get in front of more eyes. Paid videos on YouTube and posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have a direct connection to potential customers.
14. Become a Sponsor
You’re probably used to seeing sponsors at events, from fairs to conventions to concerts to car shows to sporting events. These are excellent places to get your name in front of potential customers.
But did you know that you can also sponsor blogs and articles to go in-depth on a product? You can sponsor influencers and YouTube personalities to demonstrate products and services. You can even pay celebrities to market your brand!
15. Offer Monetary Incentives
Remember how we said your email list serves customers? This is one of the more obvious ways to do it. You can give people a 15% off or 20% off coupon in exchange for signing up for your email list.
16. Keep Your Email List Up to Date
Email list cleaning needs to be done regularly to avoid some irritating problems. Any email addresses that bounce back should be removed. Clients who don’t want engagement should not be on your list or you risk alienating them.
Email list cleaning will also help identify customers who have stopped engaging, giving you an opportunity to reach back out to them.
You Send the Emails, Print Bind Ship Will Send the Packages
Email marketing works. People read emails constantly, they engage with businesses through email, and they overwhelmingly respond to email marketing campaigns.
Your email list is gold, and it needs to be treated like it’s valuable. Whether you want to give some physical rewards to your subscribers, transform some Etsy printables into something tangible, or supplement your email marketing by sending printed content through your mailing list, Print Bind Ship makes it easy!
We take care of all of the storage, printing, and shipping so that you don’t have to. Want to know more? Reach out to Print Bind Ship to learn more about how to engage people and attract more customers today!
FAQ
Yes, thanks to the fact that people still check their email often. Email lists offer an easy way to stay in contact with customers using the methods that they prefer.
Your mailing list is a collection of all of the email addresses you can use to contact current and potential customers. There’s no other single list you can use that’s as effective or efficient at reaching them at once.
While getting to at least 1,000 subscribers gives you a decent sample size of potential customers, it’s the quality of those email addresses that matters. There are strategies that work for every list size, but keep in mind that you’ll need to work on converting your list to sales or it won’t matter whether you have 8,000 subscribers, 80,000 subscribers, or 800,000 subscribers!