Did you know that email marketing could give you as much as a 42x return on investment? This is much higher than what you can get from other marketing tactics.
Moreover, 81% of small and medium businesses rely on it to generate leads. This clearly indicates the importance of email marketing for businesses and marketers.
However, your email marketing initiatives are only good if you have email lists that you can use to send emails to your prospects. It is not easy to build email lists. It takes time and effort and is not something that you can do overnight. That is why it is important to have processes in place to gather email addresses of potential leads from different sources. In this post, we will discuss ten of the best ways to do so and build your email lists.
10 Ways to Grow Your Email Marketing Lists:
- 1. Use Lead Magnets or Gated Content
- 2. Run an Online Contest
- 3. Ask For Feedback
- 4. Add CTAs and Forms Throughout Your Website
- 5. Get Subscribers For Your Blog
- 6. Host Webinars and Podcasts
- 7. Collect Emails When a User Makes a Purchase
- 8. Start a Rewards and Referrals Program
- 9. Use Quizzes and Polls
- 10. Provide Discounts and Offers
1. Use Lead Magnets or Gated Content
Lead magnets are basically incentives that you provide people to give you their contact information. The most effective lead magnet is a valuable piece of content that is useful to your audience. Create something that your audience wants enough to give you their email information.
This type of content that people can get only if they provide their details is called gated content. This could be a cheat sheet, guide, case study, ebook, templates, toolkit, etc. This type of content provides actionable insights to your audience and is extremely useful.
Always remember that your gated content or lead magnet should provide a solution to a pertinent consumer problem. It should be something that is not easily available and is, therefore, extremely valuable.
Here’s an example of gated content on our website. We created a useful ebook on “How To Measure Influencer Marketing ROI” that users can download for free by providing their contact details. We have a lot of similar useful resources on influencer marketing that act as gated content.
Image Source: IMH
2. Run an Online Contest
Running a contest or giveaway is a simple and effective way of growing your email list. All you have to do is make it compulsory for people to give their email information to participate. It’s as simple as that.
Of course, your reward should be something that people will want. That is the whole motivation behind participating in a contest. But, other than that, it is pretty much as simple as incentivising people to participate and get their contact information.
Also, you can promote such contests and giveaways on social media to reach more people and get them to participate. You can also use influencers to further amplify your reach and get higher participation.
3. Ask For Feedback
People love talking about their experience and often resort to expressing their opinions on social media and other online platforms. However, if you provide an outlet for them to do so, which also helps you, then it is a win-win situation for both.
Every time a consumer has had some interaction with your brand, you can ask them for feedback. It could be after someone has made a purchase and you could ask how their online shopping experience was.
You can also train your chatbot to ask for feedback after every conversation. The only catch is that before they submit their feedback, people have to enter their email address.
Most people will gladly do so if the form is not lengthy and just asks for their email address. Even if a share of people leaves without submitting, you will still get a lot of email addresses using this strategy.
4. Add CTAs and Forms Throughout Your Website
The most common way that most businesses collect email addresses is via forms on their website. A well-designed website should have strategically placed calls-to-action (CTAs) and forms that encourage website visitors to sign up and provide their contact details.
You can simply place CTA buttons on all of your landing pages or use pop-ups that ask for contact details. Always keep the forms short, so that it is quick and easy for people to give their details.
5. Get Subscribers For Your Blog
The best way to attract people to your website is by creating useful and relevant content on topics from your niche. That is why you should start a blog if you don’t yet have one.
Once you have hooked people with your content, you can ask them to subscribe to your blog to get notifications on all latest posts. Anyone who finds your content valuable will want to stay updated on the latest additions to your blog. This way, you can not only build your email list but also foster customer loyalty.
You can also create and start sending weekly or monthly newsletters to keep your loyal audience updated. Anyone who subscribes to your newsletter will get an email with personalised content recommendations. This will also help drive traffic to your website in the long run.
For example, check out this CTA that we add at the end of our blog posts to encourage people to sign-up for our newsletter.
Image Source: IMH
6. Host Webinars and Podcasts
A lot of marketers are realising the value of webinars and are hosting them on the latest industry topics. These are very good way to engage your audience and establish yourself as an industry expert. And, as webinars require participants to register with their contact details, it is also a great way of building your email list.
The trick to getting more people to register for your webinars and podcasts is to invite influential people from your industry. You also need to select relevant topics that your target audience would be interested in. If you get the guest and topic right, you will get the desired views.
7. Collect Emails When a User Makes a Purchase
This is a more traditional way of collecting email addresses, and it is still relevant. A lot of businesses ask their customers to provide their email information when filling out the delivery address for shipping. E-commerce businesses can use this tactic very easily by simply adding a box for an email address on their check out page.
Several offline retailers also ask for customers’ contact details while they make a purchase. They feed that information in their customer records and can use it to build their email lists.
8. Start a Rewards and Referrals Program
One of the most effective ways of building email lists is by starting a loyalty program. These programs are designed to reward your loyal customers for various actions. These actions could be making a purchase, referring a friend to your business, or simply following you on social media.
Whenever a user signs up for your program, they need to provide their name and contact details. You can use these to fuel your email lists.
9. Use Quizzes and Polls
Quizzes and polls are popular social media tactics that marketers use to get more views and engagement. However, these can be used for lead generation as well. All you need to do is to ask the participants to provide their email address to find out the results.
People are curious and that is a major reason why they participate in quizzes and polls. They want to find out how well they did or whether their opinion matches the public sentiment or not.
Anyone who has spent time in filling out a quiz will definitely want to know the result as well. And, if you say that they can get the results via email, there is a good chance that they will provide that information.
It is not necessary that you run these on social media. You can also have a quiz on your website and ask your website visitors to participate.
BuzzFeed is a website that uses this tactic extensively. They have a whole section of their website dedicated to just quizzes. From “which Disney character are you?” to “Which show should you watch?” they have quizzes on numerous topics.
Here’s a look of the quiz section of their website.
Image Source: BuzzFeed
10. Provide Discounts and Offers
This is a tactic that you can use on people who visited your website but are about to leave. You can entice them to stay by using exit pop-ups that provide some discount coupon or offer.
This tactic is usually used to get more sales conversions but can also be modified to gather email information.
All you need to do is put a condition that the discount code or offer will be revealed only if they fill out their details. This way, you provide them with enough incentive to give their contact details.
This is a great strategy that not just helps you build your email lists but also improve your sales.
Ready to Build Your Email List?
These are tried-and-tested tactics to gather email information from your customers and prospects. Use these powerful methods to build your email lists and succeed in your email marketing initiatives.
Don’t waste any time and try these out right now.
