How To Collect Emails For Email Marketing?

Email marketing reigns supreme with 91% of consumers rating it as the top marketing communication channel. It not only helps marketers build long-term relationships with their customers but it is a proven way to nurture leads and convert them into long-lasting customers.

Regardless of the business you operate, your email list is the most important element of a successful email marketing strategy, as well as, the most valuable business asset. If you are starting from scratch, or just want to grow your email list, how do you plan on collecting emails?

“Focus on growing your list all of the time as newer subscribers are more engaged adding to healthier open rates and ROI.” – Karl Murray

Your mind-blowing email campaign is ready to be unleashed. However, if there’s no one to send it to, what good is it? If you are wondering how to collect emails or simply add quality subscribers to your email list, you need to ensure two things: 1) you have a method in place to reach people and 2) you have a process in place to collect emails.

In this article, we’ll cover the following topics:

An email list – definition and stats
Collecting emails for email marketing the right way
How to collect emails: 15 tried-and-tested email list building techniques
How to create a sign up form with EmailOut?

Ready to dive in?

By knowing your target audience’s needs and understanding their interests, you can create highly-personalised, compelling offers and content that will entice more people to join your mailing list and convert them into customers. You may lack the time or know-how to create – or expand – a quality email list. There are plenty of challenges to overcome to develop and maintain a healthy email list. However, fortunately for all email marketers, there are lots of tried-and-tested easy methods to collect emails for email marketing.

What is an email list?

Before you start running, you first need to learn to walk. Therefore, let’s start with the simple basic – what is an email list?

An email list is a collection of email addresses (from customers, leads and subscribers) gathered through online (i.e. newsletter sign-ups, websites, lead-generating campaigns, etc.) or in-person (i.e. live events, leveraging business cards, etc.) for the sole purpose of distributing marketing emails to multiple recipients. An email list can shrink as people opt-out (unsubscribe) or due to natural decay or grow depending on the methods used to solicit a person’s contact details.

Take a look at these statistics –

email lists naturally decay by about 22.5% every year
roughly one in three US email list subscribers purchase a product/service from a brand they’ve received a marketing email from
42.3% of Americans subscribe to email lists to receive savings and/or discounts
59% of subscribers opt-out from an email list because they receive too many emails
43% of people unsubscribe from an email list because the information they receive is no longer relevant
60% of consumers prefer to sign up for a brand’s email list to receive promotional offers compared to 20% who follow brands on social media for deals
78% of marketers state email list segmentation is THE marketing automation feature they cannot do without
57% of email subscribers spend between 10 to 60 minutes browsing marketing emails during the week

Now, are you ready to start collecting emails for email marketing? I have compiled a list of 15 list building techniques that will help you collect emails the right way.

How To Collect Emails The Right Way? 15 Proven Email List Building Tactics

Email list building can often be quite annoying to the potential subscribers. The tactics email marketers implement to request emails can often affect the users’ experience. If the experience is irritating or, overall, bad – users will just abandon the signup process and leave your website.

Pop-ups, for example, are considered to be one of the most popular email list building methods. Yet, if you don’t time the pop-up correctly and provide a clear reason for it showing up on your page as well as offering value for the users’ data, you risk not only a drop in website (page) traffic but also an overall poor experience. Therefore, it’s important to familiarise yourself with all possible tactics on how to collect emails the right way.

Take a look at these 15 email list building techniques –

Make sure you have your sign up form hosted on your website – or on a dedicated landing page.
Create a signup call to action button on your business’s Facebook page.
Create captivating and interesting visuals to encourage people to opt-in for your mailing list and publish them across your social media channels.
(post-COVID) Due to the pandemic, trade shows and networking events have been moved to the digital world and can be attended online. Thus, make sure you participate in online networking events and distribute a sign-up link to your email list to the attendees. Remember, make it clear what they are signing up to and how it’ll benefit them and their business.
Set up and host your own online event (i.e. webinars, online training, etc.) and ask the attendees to join your email list to receive more useful information, beneficial content, etc.
Make your email signature work for you by including a link to your sign up form.
Turn your employees into lead-gen machines. Offer an incentive (i.e. financial reward, two additional holiday days, etc.) to each employee that adds new subscribers to your mailing list.
Giveaways with a twist. Offer people a free how-to guide, video tutorial, infographic, whitepaper, ebook, etc. and ask them to sign up to your email list to qualify for whatever you are offering.
Get referrals. Ask your customers and existing subscribers to encourage friends and/or colleagues to sign up to your email list. In exchange, give them a discount.
Use Pinterest! You can use Pinterest for more than just holiday decoration ideas, keto-recipes and fashion tips. You can turn it into your very own lead-gen machine. How? Quite simple. Build an offer, pin it and link it to your awesomely designed sign up/opt-in landing page (check out EmailOut’s newsletter sign up page). Bonus tip: Add a disclaimer on your sign up form ensuring people know their personal information is safe and won’t be used for nefarious purposes.
Take advantage of YouTube. Make and upload tutorials, how-to training videos, product/service reviews videos, vlog series, etc. At the end of each video material include a link to your sign up form and offer viewers the opportunity to join your troops and receive even more valuable, highly useful and relevant content.
Use LinkedIn! Social media is a very powerful tool. Especially if you invest in it. LinkedIn ad formats can help you cater to the growth of your email list. Post your sign up form and sponsor it. Alternatively, just create a sign up call-to-action button on your business’s LinkedIn company page.
Use a lightbox or pop-up overlay. There are different pop-up forms marketers can choose – exit, floating bar, full screen, inline, sidebar, gamification. Each one serves a purpose and requires the marketer’s careful consideration. For example, an exit pop-up (when a person attempts to leave a webpage) can serve as a sign up form encouraging the user to opt-in to your newsletter. An extremely useful tool for adding pop-ups to your website would be OptinMonster.
Each email campaign can work wonders for growing your email list. By including a forward-to-a-friend link, you will not only make sure your subscribers can share your highly-relevant campaigns but also act as lead-gens and help you gain more subscribers. Just make sure each campaign has a call-to-action leading people to your sign up page.
Your blog is a powerful tool. Make sure each one of your blog posts has a clear call-to-action including a link to your sign up form at the end.

With these tried-and-tested email list building methods, you will no longer wonder how to collect emails and where to start. You utilise all of them then make a cup of tea, relax and monitor how each one performs. Once you have a clear idea of the results, you can pinpoint which method (or methods) deliver the best conversion rates and stick to it.

How To Create A Free Signup Form with EmailOut?

When you have a professional email marketing platform on your side, creating a sign up page is a breeze and requires just a few clicks.

https://preview.redd.it/3115d6vqeb961.png?width=1894&format=png&auto=webp&s=99c6b00fd0ff08379a3d692cb634172053081b52

Why don’t you give it a try? >>>

Final Thoughts

There is more than one way to build – and grow – a healthy, high-quality email list. However, before you even start testing any email list building techniques, there are three very important things you need to have in place first.

1) Knowing your audience. Who are the people you are targeting? What’s their name, job, age, interest? You need to create a buyer persona. Once you do that, crafting the perfect email campaign will be easy.

2) Nail your landing page. Even if you don’t have a website with all the bells and whistles (which, honestly, you should), all you need for building and growing your email list is a landing page which hosts your sign up form. Actually, according to stats, only 63% of small businesses have a website leaving a whopping 37% of small businesses without a significant online presence!

3) Maintain a healthy email list. Regardless of starting from scratch or just growing your emails list, you need to make sure you do regular clean-ups of any inactive subscribers. For example, stats point out 30% of subscribers change their email address every year. So, it’s recommended that you clean your email list(s) every 6 months – at minimum.

Remember, buying or renting email lists no matter how easy it might be, is a huge no-no for email marketing. Why? Permissions.