The creation of an email list is an important element of online marketing. However, most entrepreneurs are struggling to comprehend whether an email list subscription is important or not. They instead spend more on social media, which helps them to easily track their number of supporters and input to consumers.
If you are still unsure about the most potential online marketing channel, a better understanding of the various advantages that a mailing list offers will motivate you to include an email list subscription in your marketing plan.
So how do you create an excellent list which will produce results for your company? Fortunately, we’ve made it simple for you with this guide. You will learn how to capture email addresses and obtain a number of tools to construct your company with a mass email list. Let’s jump in!
What is an email list?
An email list or electronic mailing list includes a collection of email addresses collected by a company for use of email advertising. It is much like a list of names and addresses that groups typically gather to send their clients and their Members publications or newsletters.
Businesses may expand their mailing list by requesting their product buyers or visitors to receive contact information. Emails are collected by content management systems through plugins or email campaign tools from third parties. This is discussed later in the email capture process. Email lists may be generated in many ways and may include people who have bought from you, signed up on your website, registered for your product, or given you a card during an event.
Why should you build an email list?
Starting your ecommerce journey emphasizes the crucial importance of constructing an email list, offering numerous advantages. For many ecommerce businesses, their email list stands out as their most prized asset. Here’s why:
-
Cost-effectiveness: While digital ad expenses soar and their efficacy declines, maintaining a regular email correspondence with your list proves far more economical.
-
Personalization: Unlike ads, emails allow for personalized communication. Moreover, automation enables tailored messaging based on customer actions, a capability absent in social media.
-
Precise Audience Targeting: Amidst declining targeting accuracy on platforms like Facebook, email empowers precise segmentation by demographics or behaviors, such as past purchases or email interactions.
-
Ownership: Unlike relying on external platforms, your email list remains your proprietary asset, boasting significant value.
-
Relationship Building: While digital ads adopt a broad-reaching, generic approach, emails facilitate personalized interactions that nurture customer relationships throughout their individual journeys, a feat unattainable through ads.
Best practices - the do’s and don’t of building an email list
Select a dependable email service provider (ESP)
Before diving in, it’s crucial to establish a business email address and select an email marketing provider that suits your needs for effective email list growth.
While we advocate for our own service, Omnisend, utilized by over 80,000 ecommerce brands with great satisfaction, there are numerous options available for list building.
Regardless of the provider you opt for, it should empower you to:
-
Effortlessly craft and personalize various signup forms and landing pages.
-
Track the performance of each signup form, analyzing metrics like clicks and signup rates.
-
Segment your subscribers based on diverse criteria and behaviors.
-
Deploy distinct automated email campaigns tailored to different audience segments.
-
Seamlessly integrate with other marketing tools, facilitating list expansion across multiple channels.
Attract more visitors to your website
To effectively attract additional website visitors, first consider search engine optimization. This enhances your site’s rankings. Additionally, focus on quality content that offers unique value. Share engaging blogs, videos, and more. Furthermore, leverage social media and email marketing. Create share
Advertising through Facebook can precisely target audiences, scaling efforts as businesses grow.
Content like viral videos or posts on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter draws visitors. Include clear calls-to-action and direct store links.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) slowly but effectively grows organic traffic over time, cost-free and platform-independent.
Maintain the vitality of your email list
Maintaining a healthy email list entails engaging only with individuals who are familiar with your brand, actively involved, and have voluntarily subscribed to your newsletter. These contacts are more likely to yield high conversion rates and drive successful e-commerce marketing outcomes.
To uphold the health of your list:
-
Utilize confirmation emails: Send confirmation emails to new subscribers to validate their email addresses and confirm their subscription, ensuring your list comprises authentic contacts.
-
Perform regular list clean-ups: Eliminate inactive subscribers, duplicates, and bounced email addresses to avoid allocating resources to disinterested individuals.
-
Employ tagging for contacts: Use tags to categorize subscribers based on their interests, behaviors, and preferences, enabling more targeted and relevant email communications.
-
Segment your audience: Divide your email list into smaller segments based on demographics, behavior, or preferences to create personalized and impactful email campaigns.
-
Remove inactive subscribers: Routinely purge subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails recently to maintain list engagement and prevent spam complaints.
Avoid purchasing email lists under any circumstances
The urge to rapidly build an email list is common among marketers. However, it’s crucial to emphasize that neither obtaining a free mailing list online nor purchasing one is a viable approach. While it may seem expedient, it’s not ethical.
This is a critical point that new ecommerce marketers often overlook. It’s essential to understand: this is not the proper method for building your email list.
Numerous dubious individuals online offer to sell email lists containing hundreds of thousands of supposedly “quality” contacts, which are often not truly valuable for your business.
And these are reason why:
-
Lack of originality: There’s a high probability that multiple people are buying the same email list, diminishing its uniqueness and effectiveness.
-
Spam traps: The email list may contain spam traps, leading to your sender’s email address and IP address being blacklisted for spamming if emails are sent to these contacts.
-
Poor quality leads: While not necessarily spam traps, the contacts may not be valuable leads for your business, resulting in them marking your emails as spam. This could damage your sender’s reputation significantly, especially if a large number of contacts mark your emails as spam.
-
Potential account termination: If your email service provider receives enough spam complaints due to the purchased list, they may terminate your account, halting your email marketing efforts altogether.
-
GDPR violations: Contacts residing in the EU may not have opted into your list, leading to potential violations of GDPR regulations and heavy penalties.
-
Wasteful expenditure: Acquiring and sending campaigns to contacts on a purchased list can incur significant costs. However, instead of generating sales, you may face the negative consequences mentioned above, rendering your investment futile.
Email list building tactics
When first building an email list, choose an email marketing platform. Platforms such as Gmail or Outlook work for simple campaigns and early contact management. However, as your list grows, a more advanced tool becomes necessary.
Investing in a solid email marketing platform is key to organize your list and run campaigns efficiently as it grows. This enables advanced features to engage readers and ensures you can scale up efforts over time. The right platform maximizes email marketing benefits from the start, saving time and unlocking full potential.
Offer incentives to encourage people to subscribe
Once you have chosen an email marketing platform, the next step is to implement a strategy for collecting emails on your website. Before you do that, though, it’s important to get people to sign up by giving them a strong reason to share their email address.
It’s natural for individuals not to give out their email addresses without receiving something in return. So a basic email sign-up form with a generic message like “sign up to our email list to receive our latest great content” is unlikely to generate high conversion rates
An effective way to capture an email address is to create a lead magnet that encourages subscribers. Examples of lead magnets include free e-books, reviews summarizing blog posts, PDF versions of blog posts or case studies, cheat sheets, coupons, webinar registrations, proposals or worksheets, courses or free email. There are chains and this offer gives visitors a reason to sign up with their email address.
You can customize the registration process by customizing lead magnets according to the needs of your target audience. Using a combination of theories usually gives the best results. Additionally, as your marketing strategy evolves, optimizing content—including bonus posts for specific blog posts—can further boost results.
While pop-ups are often associated with being annoying, they can actually be very effective in building your email list if thought out and used with a clear purpose
One important tip is to prioritize the user experience when designing your pop-up forms, and make sure they are relevant and appear at the right time.
There are different ways to take advantage of pop-ups. For example, you can use a “surprise” pop-up box that appears when the user spends some time on the page or engages by scrolling. This can lead to a discount on their first purchase, among other incentives.
As shown in the example from Flash Tattoos, your pop-up should be simple and straightforward, saving you time and effort in its creation.
Create compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) for your website or landing page
It’s vital to grasp that just a fraction of your readers will actively find ways to join your email list. Thus, it’s key to give various chances to do so over your content and pages.
To build an email list, a clear workflow is key. This means mapping user flow: from acquisition channel to lead magnet to welcome emails. Structuring the process this way allows testing strategies and benchmarking effectiveness.
Leveraging resources to grow email lists holds crucial potential. Overlooking this in content marketing strategies proves unwise. Imperative it remains to incorporate list growth in digital plans.
For example, if you’ve made a beginner’s guide about buyer personas and get lots of traffic, offering bonus content is very useful to get people to subscribe to your email newsletter. You could have a compelling CTA like “Get 4 EXTRA Buyer Persona samples and increase your sales now!”
Even if resources are limited for extensive material, delivering value to your audience can still incline them to appreciate and subscribe without feeling pressure.
Social media can strongly support email list growth. When integrated with email campaigns, these platforms prove vital. They enable meaningful engagement across channels.
Integrating a sign-up button on your Facebook page can significantly enhance lead generation. This simple addition yields major benefits for fledgling businesses. By incorporating an opt-in form, you take the first step toward building your subscriber base.
Consider launching a campaign on social media, encouraging your followers to subscribe. Despite business size, social media offers great potential to expand email lists. Their extensive reach provides visibility to grow subscriptions.
In addition, social media provides effective advertising opportunities. Campaigns with exclusive discounts for subscribers can incentivize sign-ups. For example, Facebook’s Lead Ads enable in-platform form submission, reducing friction for users. This mobile-friendly approach eliminates the need for separate landing pages.
Social media provides an important promotional avenue for contests and giveaways. As later tactics will explain, maximizing reach and engagement remains critical.
Organize a contest designed to go viral
A viral contest gives participants extra entries for widely sharing it. For example, 25 more entries for each referral signing up builds your email list while encouraging extensive sharing. This serves as an efficient technique.
Moreover, viral contests enable authentic, original user-generated content (UGC). This content nurtures trust and engagement. As a result, sign-ups and new customers may increase. Therefore, leveraging UGC provides dual benefits for marketing.
Reaching out to personal contacts can expand your email list. Some individuals likely want to subscribe. Outlining benefits in an email encourages signups. Prompt sharing with their contacts too.
Analyzing and interpreting information delves into reasons for subscribing. Balancing sentence structures keeps the tone moderate while encouraging signups.
If you have existing users yet lack an email list to promote content, consider contacting them. Inquire if they want emails about your latest updates and invite subscriptions. Similarly, establish lists if absent. Updates keep users engaged.
Establish a referral program to incentivize new sign-ups
Creating an email list benefits greatly from your customers endorsing your brand. When friends personally recommend your brand it carries weight and convinces others to join your list building trust and potentially leading to purchases.
It’s important to establish a program, for subscribers. Encouraging customers to share their experiences with friends is key.
Moreover offering rewards for referrals is crucial. Providing discounts special deals or redeemable points adds value and boosts participation.
The core of marketing is about providing value. By involving customers in the growth process you set the stage for an more engaged email list.Referral programs are recognized as tools, in eCommerce for nurturing an dedicated subscriber base.
Luckily there are user tools that simplify setting up referral programs without requiring advanced technical skills. Some examples include ReferralCandy, Tapfiliate and Partnerstack.
Partner with other businesses
By collaborating with complementary manufacturers inside your enterprise, you could get right of entry to their established target market and hook up with new capability clients who may additionally have an hobby on your services or products.
Collaborative advertising and marketing serves to decorate brand recognition and function your enterprise as a reputable authority for your area of interest. Here’s how it operates:
For example, if you perform a going for walks store and pick out 5,000 of your subscribers as triathletes, you might seek a partnership with a swimming save proprietor.
You may want to then release an e mail marketing campaign selling the companion swimming keep to your five,000 triathlete contacts, directing them to big gives on swimming gear.
Simultaneously, your companion should execute a comparable marketing campaign to their personal e-mail list, promoting your walking save and using traffic your manner, therefore expanding your electronic mail list with their subscribers.
Through the advent of precious content material and promotions tailor-made to your shared audience, you can harness every different’s attain and collectively grow your e mail lists.
Email list building
Congratulations! You now own a plethora of tactics to make bigger your e-mail listing and engage with potential customers. However, your adventure doesn’t quit here. To optimize your e mail advertising endeavors, ongoing mastering and refinement of strategies, coupled with the utilization of suitable equipment, are vital.
For example, Omnisend offers various unfastened tools to aid in e-mail list growth, including landing pages, popup paperwork strategically placed throughout your internet site, and gamification functions like the Wheel of Fortune, recognized for its advanced conversion charges compared to conventional signup paperwork.
By constantly enhancing your email marketing talents, you can foster more potent connections with your subscribers, force increased sales, and ultimately propel the increase of your business.
Final words
The creation of the email list must not be a difficult job. You are well prepared to expand the email list and your company if you learn the principles for engaging people through excellent content, use lead magnets, and use the right channels. The aim here is to have a clear approach and to be reliable with your customer growth and retention communications.
A long list of quality emails would encourage users to transfer their leads through the sales funnel further and turn them into regular customers from new subscribers. This is the principal aim of the whole method of list building.
