Email List Building

• Updated on: 2017-08-20
• Read original article here

As a marketer, you probably know that email is one of the most effective communication channels available to you today. However, the success of your email marketing efforts largely depends on the size and quality of your email list.
So how do you build a great list that gets results for your business?
This guide will make it easy for you. By reading it, you’ll learn the 2-step process for capturing email addresses and get a number of tools you can use to build a massive email list that grows your business.
Chapter 1
What is an email list and why should you focus on growing it?
Simply put, an email list is a list of individual email addresses that you have permission to send email campaigns to.
Email lists can be built a number of ways, and could include people who have:
Purchased something from you
Signed up for your product
Given you their business card at an event
Building your email list is one of the most important activities marketers like you can focus on, and here’s why:
Get your products and services seen by more people – Whether your emails contain updates on your latest products, discounts to drive sales, or an invitation to your next event, focusing on building your email list will ultimately result in more people seeing your products and services and clicking through to purchase.
Keep your list fresh and up-to-date – It’s an unfortunate fact of life that occasionally email addresses become invalid. People’s work email addresses change as they move between companies and others abandon old AOL and Compuserve email addresses in favor of modern platforms like Gmail. However, by focusing some of your time and energy on building your email list, you can fight list decay and ensure you have a growing list of people to receive and click-through on your email campaigns.
Chapter 2
Stationery company Paradise Pen Co. has seen considerable success with this strategy, collecting 80% of their customer emails in-store .
Paradise uses gift cards of small monetary amounts to incentivize people to subscribe to their list. They initially tried paper gift certificates, but when they switched to using plastic gift cards that could be redeemed online, gift card redemption rates jumped from 9.5% to 20%.
Not only did doing this build their email list but with such high redemption rates and most users spending more than the gift card amount, they were able to drive sales & revenue as well.
Place a subscribe form in-store
One of the easiest ways to get started capturing email addresses in person is to set up a basic signup form in-store.
You can do this the old-fashioned way by simply placing a pen & paper on the counter and presenting your chosen incentive.
If you want to get more advanced and save yourself some of the hassle of manually adding your customer’s email address to your email marketing software, you could use an app to turn your iPad into a beautiful email subscribe form .
Collect business cards
Manually writing down an email address is a pain, and can be a barrier to entry that prevents your customers from subscribing to your list.
Fortunately for you, many people have their email address on their business card and providing a method (such as a glass bowl) to drop their business card into is a great way to collect emails.
Step 2: Offer a valuable incentive
Now that you’ve made it simple for people to subscribe to your email list, then next step is to give them some incentive to do so.
There are an infinite number of ways in which you can provide an incentive for people to join your email list, and the right one depends on the type of organization you are marketing.
For instance, online fashion stores are likely going to have different incentives they can offer than a financial services firm, so the key is to pick out what makes sense for your business to offer based on what would resonate with your audience.
Some incentives you could use include:
Great content
If you have a blog or are using other content marketing techniques to attract visitors, then relevant, high-quality content is a great incentive to offer people to get them to join your email list.
This can take many forms, and we’ve seen many companies excel using a variety of methods.
For instance, the folks over at Buffer write some amazing content on social media marketing and productivity on their blog. The quality of the content they offer is a valuable enough incentive to entice 1000+ people each week to subscribe to their email list just to receive updates when new blog posts are published.
However, the team at ConversionLab take a slightly different approach. They offer an exclusive incentive (in this case, 7 conversion rate optimization tips delivered via email ) that isn’t available anywhere else on the web, encouraging people to hand over their email address to get the incentive and ultimately join their list.
Regardless of what approach you take, the key thing is to ensure your content is high quality and relevant to your audience, otherwise, it isn’t enough of an incentive for visitors to give over their email address.
Discounts and offers
If you sell something online, then offering discounts or presenting various other value-added offers can be a great incentive for people to join your email list.
For instance, online cosmetic store La Mer offer a fantastic first-order discount to new visitors to incentivize them to join their email list.
This is a particularly effective technique as not only is the potential to save money a great incentive to subscribe to their email list, but the actual discount itself is also a great motivator to make a purchase. So by offering first-order discounts to potential customers, La Mer is both building their email list and increasing sales at the same time.
Early access and exclusive promotions
If you have built up a reasonable level of brand love over the years, then offering early access and exclusives as an incentive to subscribe to your email list can be extremely cost-effective.
For instance, hair care company Oribe has thousands of loyal followers around the world and offers exclusive, early access to new products and promotions as an incentive to subscribe to their email list.
Chapter 3
Tools to help you build your email list
Now that you know the 2-part formula for building your email list, have thought about the kind of amazing incentives you could offer, and devised where to place your simple subscribe opportunities, it’s time to put it all into action.
To help you out, we’ve pulled together a list of tools that you can use to help you build a massive email list that grows your business.
Campaign Monitor Tools
If you’re a Campaign Monitor customer, there are a number of free tools available to you (accessible within the app) to help you build your email list. These include:
Subscribe Button
The Subscribe Button is a small and elegant button you can add to your website to allow people to subscribe to your email list. When clicked, a small popup appears where people can enter their email address.
These email addresses are then automatically added to your chosen email list in Campaign Monitor. To get started using the subscribe button, follow the instructions in this help article.
Subscribe Form
The Subscribe Form is a simple HTML form you can add anywhere on your website. You can set exactly what fields you want to capture (i.e., Name, Email, Location, Gender, etc) and it seamlessly integrates into the style of your website.
Any email address entered into the Subscribe Form are automatically added to your chosen email list in Campaign Monitor. To get started using the subscribe form, follow the instructions in this help article.
Subscribe Page
The Subscribe Page is a landing page dedicated solely to capturing subscribers. It’s customizable to suit your brand and you can set exactly what fields you want to capture (i.e., Name, Email, Location, Gender, etc).
All email addresses entered into the Subscribe Page are automatically added to your chosen email list in Campaign Monitor. To get started using the subscribe form, follow the instructions in this help article.
iPad Application
The iPad Application is a customizable application that enables you to capture email addresses on any Apple iPad. It can be placed on the counter of your retail store or used on the go at events and tradeshows. It is fully customizable to suit your brand and can capture whatever details you choose (name, email address, location, gender, etc).
To get started using the Facebook Application, follow the instructions in this help article.
Third Party Tools
For those looking to get a bit more advanced with their email subscribe forms, there are a number of third party tools available that integrate directly with Campaign Monitor to pass any email addresses captured into your chosen email lists.
These third party tools offer more advanced functionality than the default Campaign Monitor tools mentioned above, but can also cost an additional fee.
SumoMe
SumoMe is a suite of tools that help you offer simple subscribe opportunities. Using SumoMe, you can add more advanced types of subscribe opportunities like popups, slide-ins, and header bars.
Best of all, SumoMe’s suite of tools integrate directly with Campaign Monitor, so you can automatically send any emails you capture through the tool straight to your chosen list.
Optin Monster
Optin Monster is an advanced tool that allows you to add various types of subscribe opportunities to your website, including popups, slide-ins, header bars and more.
It features advanced customization and targeting options that allow you to show the subscribe opportunity on specific pages of your website or to specific visitors (like people coming from Facebook, or people who have never visited your site before).
Best of all, Optin Monster integrates directly with Campaign Monitor, so you can automatically send any emails you capture through the tool straight to your chosen list.
AddThis
AddThis offers a suite of website tools that help drive traffic, increase conversions, and grow your email subscribers. With AddThis list building tools, you can encourage your visitors to sign up for your email list using mobile-friendly popups, sliders, and banners.
AddThis also provides the ability to target different audiences with your subscribe message based on factors such as whether or not they’re a new or returning visitor, social source, referring URL or campaign name, and more.
Best of all, AddThis list building tools integrate with Campaign Monitor, which means when visitors sign up for your email communications using AddThis, their information is automatically added to your Campaign Monitor subscriber list.
Integrations
If you’re looking to build your email list using email addresses you already have (I.e. From your existing customers), then integrating your existing CRM, accounting package or eCommerce platform with your Campaign Monitor account can be a great way to automatically add new customer information to your email lists.
Here are a few of the different tools you can integrate with your email marketing software to help build your email list:
CRM system – You can integrate your CRM system with your email marketing software to automatically pull new leads, prospects, and customers into your email lists.
eCommerce Platform – You can integrate your eCommerce platform with your email marketing software to automatically pull all customers (along with granular customer data like purchase history) into your email lists.
Accounting Packages – If you keep a lot of your customer data in your accounting package, then you can integrate it with your email marketing software to automatically pulls your customers’ names and email addresses into your email lists.
If you’re a Campaign Monitor customer, you can benefit from deep integrations with CRM tools like Salesforce, as well eCommerce platforms like Magento and Shopify, that will automatically add new customer information (including name, email address, last purchase date, amount spent, etc) to your email lists.
Alternatively, 3rd party integration tools like Zapier allow you to automatically add new subscribers to your email list from over 500 other applications, including Google Sheets, Sugar CRM, Microsoft Dynamics, BigCommerce, WooCommerce , Quickbooks , Xero, Freshbooks, and more.
Chapter 4
Capture more than just the email address
By using the tools and following the 2-step process outlined above, you should be able to grow the number of subscribers on your email list quite considerably.
However, the size of your list isn’t all that matters.
It’s also important to have as much information on each of your subscribers as possible, as this allows you to send more targeted campaigns that get better results.
In order to do this, you need to capture this information in your email subscribe forms at the same time you capture their name and email address. So when creating your subscribe forms, considering adding some extra custom fields like:
Gender
Role
Number of employees
However, remember that making your subscribe forms longer can decrease the amount of people who subscribe, so ensure to only include custom fields that you’ll actually use to segment and target your campaigns.
Chapter 4
In conclusion
With Facebook making it harder for your messages to be seen and Twitter’s click-through rates declining, an effective email list is fast becoming a critical tool in every marketer’s arsenal.
However, if you think building and leveraging an email list is beyond your abilities, then think again.
By following the 2-step process presented in this guide and mixing easy to use subscribe options with a highly desirable incentive you will be well on your way to building a massive email list that can help grow your business.
So the only question left is what’s stopping you? Use the methods & ideas you’ve learned in this guide to start building your email list today.