How To Build An Email List

How To Build An Email List For Free
How To Build An Email List In Gmail

And today I’m going to show you the exact list building strategies that I used to get these results. Click a section below to be taken right to one of the strategies. Use Content Upgrade Popups; 2. Hack Qualaroo To Build Your Email List Fast; 3. Optimize This Often-Ignored Page and Increase Your List By Up To 25%; 4. Limit The Number of Options; 5. One strategy we use to build our email list is to offer a lead magnet. A lead magnet is basically a freebie you offer your website visitors in exchange for their email addresses.

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ROI for email marketing remains the highest among all marketing channels – $40 for each $1 spent. No other channels come even close to these heights.
So it’s obvious why a long email list is so desirable by eCommerce businesses nowadays.

Deciding to build an email list is one thing, but actually seeing success can be quite hard for retailers. This is especially true since there are often so many other aspects of running an eCommerce store.

The two main conditions for successful email list building are the following:

Decent traffic to your website
Decent sign-up forms on your website

Although this article won’t help you with improving your customer acquisition, it will definitely help with learning about the most effective signup forms.

Even better, the 9 methods that we discuss below are very easy to implement and results can be seen within a few short hours or days.

But first, let’s cover some basics.

What Is an Email List?

An email list is a collection of email addresses: anyone who has subscribed to your newsletter, blog or website, or emails that you gathered from people in person.

However, when it comes to marketing and sales, it’s much more than that. The popular marketing quote says:

“The money’s in the list.”

That means that your income depends on how long and healthy an email list you have. Engaged customers can bring you a fortune. And vice versa – your efforts to approach customers will be useless if the contacts you have aren’t relevant, email addresses are inactive, or you don’t have them at all.

The main purpose of growing your database of email addresses is to increase the number of your potential leads. So later you could convert them into loyal shoppers.

Best Practices – DOs and DON’Ts About Email List

1. Get an email service provider

Honestly, before we even start, it’s very important that you get an email marketing provider that you’re comfortable with and which works well with your particular business model.

Of course, at this point we’d recommend our own service, Omnisend to fulfil that need, but for the purposes of list building, there are many options to choose from.

What is important is that your email marketing provider has the following capabilities:

a variety of signup forms
the ability to send those signups to different lists
the ability to monitor the effectiveness of each signup form
the ability to segment your subscribers based on various behaviors
the ability to send automated messages based on these lists and segments

With that, you’ll have everything in place to start building your email list from scratch.

2. Keep your list healthy

Healthy email list means that you approach those people who are aware of you, engaged with your brand and have signed up for your newsletter. Only this kind of contacts results in high conversion and generate accurate ecommerce marketing results.

Plus, 30% of subscribers change email addresses every year. So no matter how long and hard you have been collecting your emails, you should delete inactive email addresses on a regular basis. At least once per year.

Focus on the quality, not quantity.

3. NEVER buy an email list

This one is such an important point to make, and one that many new eCommerce marketers are falling for.

There are many shady people on the internet who will sell you email lists with hundreds of thousands of “quality” (read: not quality) contacts that are perfect for your business.

But you know they’re not. You’re just hoping that at least some of them are (maybe 2% wouldn’t be bad, right?).

But that’s bad thinking.

Here’s why:

If you’re buying an email list, there’s a huge chance that other people are buying the same email list.
That email list may be a pure spam trap, or have spam traps, meaning if you send emails to those contacts, your sender’s email address and IP address will be blacklisted as spam.
Those people may not be spam traps, but they’re unfortunately not quality leads for your business and they mark you as spam. Think about it: 100,000 contacts marking you as spam. Your sender’s reputation is as good as dead.
With enough spam complaints, your email service provider will terminate your account.
You are violating the GDPR, as those contacts (who reside in the EU) did not opt into your list. You can face heavy penalties.
You will spend a decent amount of money on acquiring that list, and for sending your campaign to the contacts on that list. But instead of sales, you will get all the consequences mentioned above.

If you want to kill your email marketing career before you’ve even started, go ahead and buy an email list.

However, if you want to be a smart marketer, follow these 9 proven tactics on how to build your (clean) email list from scratch.

Email list building tactics

1. Underestimated standard opt-in form

One of the first, and default ways, for you to build an email list is by having a standard opt-in form on your site.

Pretty much every Shopify site will have this opt-in form enabled, normally at the bottom or in the middle of the screen.

As a store owner, you can disable this, but you really should only do that if you have another signup form available.

For other eCommerce platforms (like Woocommerce), it’s important to include this in your website design. Instead of having a specific opt-in form, you can place a sticky sign up form on the bottom or side of the screen.

Here’s an example of one of Omnisend’s forms:

It’s important not to underestimate the importance of opt-in forms for eCommerce stores. I go over some of the most important uses and best practices in this article about signup forms.

You also can find valuable this guide to persuasive email opt-in forms.

2. A surprise popup

While the opt-in form is important, it is nonetheless still quite passive. You are hoping that your visitors will sign up for your newsletters by their own will.

Furthermore, you can’t really gauge whether they’re already interested in your brand. Instead, you should be using a popup form.

Popup forms are dynamic in nature. You can set them to pop up at certain times or for certain events and they are a great way to deliver lead magnets for lead generation.

For example, in our signup forms, there are options to show the popup after a certain amount of seconds, after the user visits a certain amount of pages, after a certain percentage scrolled, or when the user is getting ready to leave (exit-intent).

You can play around with these options and when you get it right, the signup rate will increase significantly.

3. A power of incentive

If you want visitors to sign up, you need to give them something in exchange. Something that they would find relevant.

The most common incentive is to offer a discount, sale or free shipping for a limited time.

But don’t offer “free updates”. No one really cares about free updates, it might even seem spammy.

A nice example of the signup form is below.

You can also simply offer visitors access to your newsletter, like Shop Hereford below:

They are straightforward in their attempts to build an email list, and their visitors know exactly what to expect in their inboxes.

4. Gamification

In order to build an email list, you need to attract and engage your visitors. Sometimes, however, discounts and sales are not enough.

In those cases, it’s a great idea to think outside of the box. There are now many interactive signup forms that are fun for visitors and effective for eCommerce store owners.

One of these is the Wheel of Fortune, a fun wheel that the visitor “spins” to get a prize. In order to spin the wheel, the visitor first has to sign up.

You can determine the prize as you wish, either as a specific amount or percentage discount.

Either way, it’s a win-win. The visitor gets savings on their purchase, and you get to build your email list.

5. A targeted landing page

You can also build an email list outside of your home page.

When you are running your marketing and advertising campaigns, you should be focusing on specific funnels to get your sales or subscribers.

For example, you can offer a limited time, major sale or a free plus shipping offer.

Instead of sending them to your homepage (where they can get lost), you should send them to a landing page.

This landing page will have far fewer elements than your store pages, as it is intended for high conversions by focusing on one product only.

In order for your visitors to get that product or offer, they’ll need to sign up.

With adequate testing, you’ll be able to improve your landing page’s conversion rates, build your email list and boost your sales.

6. Powerful lead magnets

People are generally skeptical of new stores and normally quite reluctant to purchase anything the first time.

That’s why the average conversion rate for many eCommerce stores is around 3%, which means that a full 97% of visitors will leave your store and most will never come back.

In order to avoid that, you can convert your visitors into subscribers—at no cost to them—with a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is a valuable resource—like a PDF guide, ebook, gift guide, stock images, etc.—that your visitors really want and one of the best ways to build an email list.

In order to get that resource, they will need to sign up for your newsletter and email campaigns.

Here’s a popup from AdEspresso offering a lead magnet in exchange for the visitor’s email address:

You can also host your lead magnet on a separate page, as we did with our Ecommerce Case Studies lead magnet landing page:

One note: the lead magnet should be directly related to your niche.

If you sell fidget spinners, the lead magnet shouldn’t be a collection of 500+ cute cats.

Although your audience may enjoy both cat pictures and fidget spinners, the cats won’t prime them for the sales pitch.

7. Giveaways that work

How To Build An Email List For Free

Another great tactic that all eCommerce stores should be considering is to utilize the powerful giveaway, especially on your audience’s’ favorite social media channels.

This will most likely be Facebook or Instagram, both because they’re popular, but also because the advertising costs are very reasonable.

And, with an intriguing (even viral) offer, you can get cost-per-clicks as low as 1 cent.

Just remember, similar to what I mentioned above about the lead magnet: make sure the prize that you’ll be giving away is directly aimed at your target audience.

If you want dog lovers, give away something that only dog lovers would highly value. Don’t give away an iPad or Bose headphones.

Make it specific, so that your entrants are also your qualified leads—which is the entire point of the giveaway.

Here, the jewelry candle company JewelScent is giving away one of their (very specific) products with a simple entry form:

To increase their chances of getting natural shares and gaining reach, they added bonus entry points:

You can host your giveaway landing page on your site, but it’s usually easiest to use a landing page or some other service. The free online tool also can be a good giveaway. For example, at Omnisend we created free email subject line tester.

8. Referral programs

Related to growing your email list by using giveaways (especially how JewelScent improved their social reach in the image above), we want to use what we have (current subscribers) to get more of what we want to have (more subscribers).

An amazing way to do that is to use referral programs. It’s a tactic that helped excel Uber, PayPal, Dropbox, and Hotmail to become industry leaders in their fields.

With referral programs, you’re basically bribing (in a loose definition of the word) your subscribers to share your offers with their friends, family, and colleagues.

There are free ways to get referrals, where you don’t have to bribe your contacts with anything. These include:

adding the option to forward or share your newsletters or welcome email with others
adding the same option add the end of your lead magnets (videos, PDFs, cheat sheets, etc.)

They’re fine, but they may not be enticing enough.

Instead, try to give away something valuable in exchange for a referral.

This can be free shipping, a $50 coupon or discount, a 25% discount, or even a free gift.

This works wonders and helps you get new contacts, and even new customers, which—as I’ve mentioned—is the point of all of this.

9. Offline list building

As you can see, the continuous list building process should be organized online – on your website, landing pages, social media, etc.

However, always take advantage of and use “old-school” offline ways to collect emails when you can.

For example:

Print your business cards and exchange with people when you meet them and talk about your business. Add received contacts into your list.
Take participation in the faires. Always have a registration list with email column at your booth.
Ask customers for emails if you sell your products somewhere offline.
Consider organizing meetups and gather like-minded people for discussions. Use a registration form for this.

All means of list building are proper if only they are legal.
_____________

At the end of the day, the important thing here it is to have a specific strategy and to be consistent in your communications for both customer acquisition and customer retention.

A long email list of good quality will allow you to move your leads further through the sales funnel and to convert them from new subscribers into loyal customers. And that’s the main purpose of the entire list building process.
Remember, “the money’s in the list”.

list building

Building an email list is arguably the most important element to building a following and getting your message heard. It is the most direct and cost effective way to communicate and engage with your fans and subscribers on a personal level. The bigger your list, the bigger your online marketing asset–and the more interested publishers are.

A large Twitter following, significant traffic to your site, or an active Facebook community is great, but an email list is better. Here’s why:

You own your list. If Facebook deletes your fan page or Twitter kicks you off, you are effectively kicked out of the conversation. You don’t own the content, and what’s worse, if you don’t have an email list, there is no way to contact your followers to let them know what happened.

Blogs, websites and RSS readers can disappear. Once you have an email list, you can always stay connected with your audience and keep them informed of what you are doing.

Here are a few more benefits to building and maintaining your email list:

The conversation via email is personal, direct and private. It provides an excellent medium for staying in touch with your readers.

It’s cheap, cost effective and everyone online has an email address.

You will always have a way to communicate with your audience. Pat Flynn of the Smart Passive Income Blog and Jeff Goins at GoinsWriter both had issues with their sites recently. They were able to communicate to their readers via email and mitigate what might have been significant and expensive consequences.

Use your email list to broadcast every time you have a new blog post and send a surge of traffic to your site.

Inform your readers and fans of a book launch, new product or freelance service and provide a link to your sales page.

Here’s a tip: Subscribe to successful authors, marketing gurus, popular self-publishing blogs and so on to get a free marketing lesson in each email you receive.

Look at the subject line for their email. Did it catch your attention or intrigue you? Did you open the email? Why?

Analyze the copy used in the body of the email. What was the tone they used? Was it conversational or salesy? Was there a ‘call to action’? (Were you asked to do something, like click on a link? Did you?) How did they get you to take that action?

So, If the Money is in The List, Should I Use My List to Sell?

Use your email list like you use social media–as a way to connect further with your readers and fans. Interact and inform your readers; don’t constantly promote and sell.

Use your own experiences as an email recipient to define what is great content. Spammy, hard selling is out. Remember, as with everything involved in building your writer platform, you are trying to build trust in you and your brand. It only takes one click to unsubscribe, so make it worthwhile for your reader to stay.

If your subscribers trust that your newsletters or updates provide awesome and unique content (and are not just filled with shameless self promotion), your open rate will increase and your subscribers will be happy to spread the word about you–and what you have to offer.

Provide a call to action or link that directs your reader back to your site where you are promoting your book launch, speaking engagements, new post or other events and services. Keep it conversational, engaging and have a single purpose or action.

Think quality, not necessarily quantity, and consider managing your readers expectations by letting them know when and how often to expect emails from you. By attracting relevant pre-engaged visitors (for example, through guest posting, social media and great on-site content) and providing the most useful information you can, you should see a steady rise to your email subscriber list.

If you haven’t yet, I’d love it if you signed up for YWP’s free updates and the Quick Start Guide! Why not try out the process first hand? 🙂

Getting Started

One of the biggest oversights many writers make in their book marketing efforts is not starting an email list right from the start. In fact many successful online entrepreneurs have stated that waiting before developing their email lists was a big mistake they made early in their careers–and a costly one.

Don’t wait for perfect. It’s tempting to put off list building until your site is tweaked to perfection, you have a killer “ethical bribe” (more on this below), or you finally have a book to market. It also might seem easier to just work on your social media strategy and leave list building for a later project.

The problem is, that building your email list is just too important to ignore.

Online marketing strategist, Derek Halpern of Social Triggers urges those of us marketing online to stop promoting our social media profiles at the expense of our email list. He notes that “email marketing crushes social media marketing”, and he uses some statistics from his own extensive platform to prove his point.

With this in mind, move building your subscriber list to the forefront of your book marketing efforts and ensure it has a prominent position when developing your author blog or website.

Please note: Some affiliate links are included below. I will earn a small commission if you buy from one of my links, at no extra cost to you. This helps Your Writer Platform continue to provide loads of free, quality content. I appreciate your support!

Step 1: Make an Unforgettable First Impression

Keeping in mind that “perfect” is an unreachable goal, try to present your brand and author blog in the best possible light. Site design, aesthetics and your branding should be unified and cohesive. Your website should be free of errors (even top bloggers, writers and marketers have the occasional spelling mistake, but do your best to fix any problems with your blog).

Get a good email service like Aweber which allows you to send email newsletters. I use Aweber and it is by far the best option in my opinion. I am most impressed with the ease of use and level of customer service. Plus you also have the ability to manage several lists from different websites under the same account, if you choose.

Create a hook or “ethical bribe”. An ethical bribe is a freebie, something (of value) you give away in exchange for your reader’s email address.

Some marketers and bloggers refrain from the free giveaway model because they don’t want people to join their email list just to receive the freebie. They prefer that readers join because the blog resonates with them and leaves them wanting more.

How To Build An Email List In Gmail

The quality of your subscribers is far more important than the number of subscribers. The more people on your list who are genuinely engaged with what you have to offer, the better. Consider both options and choose what best fits your brand strategy and your views.

Step 2: Create an Awesome Sign Up Form

Create a sign up form in Aweber. Include the benefits the reader will receive from opting in, like free updates, exclusive tips or promotions, or your free giveaway.

Ensure your form fits with your overall design, and doesn’t just blend in. Make it pop! It should be very clear to your reader that signing up is an action you wish for them to take.

Place your form at any point on your site where a visitor is likely to be engaged in your content: minimally, at the top of your sidebar, at the bottom of all your articles, and on your about page.

Set up a page on your blog that contains a link or allows the reader to download your free gift.

Step 3: Have a Dedicated Page for Your Free Gift (optional) and Sign Up

Create a page that is dedicated to nothing more than obtaining email sign ups. Consider giving your reader a list of reasons why they should sign up. For ideas, you can check out YWP’s Updates page.

Ideas and Tips for Growing Your Email List

Although there are many ways to begin growing an active and engaged following through your email list, here’s a few clever ways that are easy to implement right away:

Add a sign up prompt at the end of your book. The perfect time to ask a reader to sign up for more is after they have turned the last page of your book, and they are looking for more!

Include calls-to-action on almost every page of your site. Remember to include email sign up boxes or forms on your homepage, your About page, and after each post.

Create remarkable email content. Not only will this help keep your subscribers, but it will also increase the likelihood that they will share your emails with their friends, family and colleagues.

Add a sign up link to your everyday email signature. You can even include a reason to subscribe.

Include a link in your bio when guest posting. If a reader is engaged enough in your content to read your bio at the end of your article and link back to your site, make sure they are linking directly to your email sign up page!

Add a sign up tab to your Facebook author page. This way, you can encourage people to sign up right from your Facebook page by adding a custom icon to your mailing list tab.

Collect emails at offline events. Conferences, meet ups, speaking engagements and other promotional events could provide great opportunities to gather email addresses.

Have a simple call-to-action at the end of your newsletter. Word-of-mouth is a valuable tool for growing your email list, so try adding “Did you enjoy this email? Maybe your friends would too!” at the end of your email or newsletter.

Building your email subscriber list is a key component in creating and maintaining a ‘captive’ audience. By following some of the tips above, you will grow an accessible, thriving fan base that will be the cornerstone of your successful writing career.

For an even deeper dive into email list building techniques, check out Part 1 of the five part Email List Building Series: The Power of an Email List (And Why It’s a Must).

Did I miss anything? Any more tips for writers trying to build their email subscriber list? Please share in the comments below.

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