How to Build Your Email List (and Why It’s Such a Critical Marketing Tool)

The idea behind an email list is that you get to collect email addresses from your website visitors. You can then grow your subscriber database; empowering you to communicate effectively with potential and existing customers. In turn, that will enable you to sell more products or services.

In addition to collecting email addresses, you can potentially access other data about your prospective and existing customers, such as their names, genders, and locations.

So, it should already be clear just how effective building an email list is as a marketing tool. Armed with leads’ contact details, you can get in touch to tell existing and potential customers about your latest news and offers, and generate more sales.

But how should you go about building your email list? Here are some of the best methods you can utilize.

Use Eye-catching Signup Forms

First off, ensure that the signup form you use to gather email addresses is eye-catching and appealing. For instance, with AWeber signup forms, you can easily design your form to match your brand and include your own custom questions.

By having aesthetically pleasing signup forms, you will get more people subscribing to your email list, and armed with their personal information, you can better send customized emails to attract their attention and increase conversion rates.

Use Embedded Signup Forms

The most traditional type of signup form is a static embedded form that is placed on your high traffic pages in visible areas, such as on splash pages or in headers, footers, and sidebars.

When you use embedded signup forms, you make the forms less intrusive and encourage more people to join your email list.

Use Timed Pop-up Forms

Another great option is to use timed pop-up forms. These only pop up after visitors have been on your website for a predetermined amount of time.

That means you can attract people who are more seriously interested in your products or services and ignore those who bounce after a few seconds and are clearly not very interested. Therefore, you can get more quality leads by using timed pop-up forms on your website.

Implement a Gamification Element to Your Signup Form

One excellent way of getting more people to sign up is to introduce a gamification element to your signup form. You could include a test, quiz, or survey, for example, to encourage engagement with your lead capture form.

You should also consider giving away exclusive prizes and freebies to people who give you their email addresses and other details.

Gamification is a great tactic as it appeals to consumer psychology. People are more likely to give out their email addresses and other details freely when they get something back in return.

Include Opt-in Fields During the Checkout Process

In addition to using pop-up forms, you can collect customers’ email addresses and other details when they complete purchases.

Most online shoppers are happy to give out their email addresses when they buy a product so that they can get a confirmation email regarding their purchases and updates about the progress of their deliveries.

Shoppers are familiar with entering their information when completing purchases at the checkout, so including opt-in fields at the checkout to gather more information is a great and non-intrusive way of adding more people to your email list.

Invite Website Visitors to Sign Up for Notifications

You can also build your email list by offering notifications in return for prospective and existing customers giving you their email addresses.

Many people who visit your website will want to receive notifications about things like products being back in stock and new product collections. So, by inviting people to sign up for notifications, you can quickly expand your email list.

Create a Squeeze Page

If you are not aware, a squeeze page is a dedicated lead capture landing page. It is called so because it is designed to squeeze information out of your website’s visitors by restricting access to certain content.

To access the content, visitors need to fill out a form.

While squeeze pages are known for having high exit rates, they are still invaluable for collecting a good percentage of your website visitors’ email addresses.

Final Thoughts

When you have access to more email addresses from potential customers and existing customers, you can quickly build an email list. In turn, that enables you to communicate with those people and encourage them to make purchases.

You should choose the right kinds of forms for your specific brand. For instance, you could use embedded forms or pop-up forms.

Alternatively, or in addition, you could implement a gamification element to your form, include opt-in fields at checkout, invite visitors to sign up for notifications, or utilize squeeze pages.

Building an email list is a critical marketing tool that you need to have, so make sure you use the right strategies to get quality email addresses and other data from your prospective and existing customers.

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