How to Build Email Lists for Marketing?

Introduction

Email marketing is a very powerful growth strategy only if implemented correctly. Sending emails to good verified email addresses is the key to success with this strategy. There are many different ways in which you can collect email addresses from your website visitors and create different types of lists. You can use these lists in your marketing automation sequences or run periodic email campaigns with them. This helps nurture relationships with customers and prospects and also increases the trust in your brand. 

Why Not Just Buy Email Lists?

Your domain reputation is everything. Domain reputation is determined by the bounce rate and spam rate that originates from your email sending practices. If you send out a 100 emails from an emailaddress@yourdomain and you get 10 bounces and 5 spams, your bounce rate is 10% and your spam rate is 5%. The acceptable numbers for these rates are usually a lot lower in the real world scenarios and the calculations are also a little more complex than this. But the bottom line is that you need to maintain these at healthy levels to have a good domain reputation. A good domain reputation ensures that your emails will land in the recipients' inbox, while a bad reputation is sure to put them in their spam box.

By now you must have some idea why it is not a good idea to buy email lists. There is no way to know how many bad email addresses are present in the email list you buy. By the time you find out, you would have already ruined your chances of succeeding with email marketing strategies. Email lists bought from third party providers have already been abused so many times that the chances of getting a good clean list of verified emails is almost zero. Email lists for sale also contain many email addresses that are spam traps. You won't even need your bounce rate to go up if your emails are caught by spam traps. These traps will automatically blacklist you as a sender.

How to Get a Good Email List?

The most effective way to build a list of good email addresses is to have the recipients provide their email addresses themselves and also verify them for you. Now you must be wondering why anyone would do that. You are right! Nobody is going to provide you with their email address just so you can market your products and services to them. However if you are smart about this, you can have them provide their email addresses in exchange for some kind of offer that benefits them and you can also verify their email addresses by delivering your offers through a verifiable link in their emails. Continue reading if you are starting to get an idea of where I am going with this.

Signup Forms

Use free sign up forms embedded within the website to encourage users to sign up on the website. User sign ups usually follow a verification process before allowing the user to login to the program. These sign up forms can be of various types depending on the type of website you are promoting. You can have people sign up for an event or a seminar. You can also offer a free trial for a service on your website. You can offer discounts and gifts they would receive upon successful sign up. These offers can also be attached to the checkout process on an e-commerce website to encourage creating an account versus checking out as a guest.

Welcome Popups

Welcome popups can be used to greet the first time website visitors after they have spent 10-15 second on your homepage. The welcome message can be combined with offers designed for first time visitors. These offers must be well crafted and well designed so the visitors are compelled to enter their email address to receive them. These popups do not always have to be on the homepage and the timing is also very important. A website visitor may only spend a few seconds on the homepage of an e-commerce website and may navigate to the product listing page immediately. In this case it makes more sense to show the welcome popup on the homepage right away but show it on the product listing page after 15 seconds where the user is going to spend more time browsing the products.

Free Educational Offers

Depending on the industry you are in you can offer plenty of value in terms of training and education. You can create e-books on various topics and offer them as free downloads via email. You can also create training videos/articles, how to videos/articles and prompt the user to provide their email address to subscribe to your material. You could also used timed popups to interrupt your viewer in the middle of a video or an article to signup for your newsletters to continue watching or reading. This however will only work on some of your very high quality content. 

Discount Coupons & Other Offers

Display popups and banners on various pages of your website with high quality images featuring discounts, free shipping and other offers. Have the website visitor enter their email address to receive a coupon code in their email. When they enter the email address then deliver the coupon code via a verifiable link in their email. This link could be an image or PDF of the coupon. That is how you verify the authenticity of the email address. 

Birthday & Anniversary Gift Offers

This strategy works well when people have their birthdays and anniversaries coming up soon and are looking for great deals online. You can offer free gifts tied to other purchases or even offer greater than usual discounts in exchange of their email addresses and dates of birthdays and anniversaries. Collecting data on birthdays, anniversaries and other important life events can be an email campaign on its own and could work really well with your existing customer base. These offers can also be tied to the checkout page or presented as post checkout offers.

Contests, Giveaways & Sweepstakes

Contests and giveaways are another great way of collecting a large number of email addresses very very quickly. It obviously is going to cost you some money to award the winners but would still cost a lot less then what you would pay contact directory for individual contacts. If you can partner with other brands to increase the value of awards then this could be lot more effective.

Refer a Friend

Offering discounts coupons in exchange for referrals can be a great strategy with your existing customer base. Have your existing customers refer one or more friends by entering their email addresses to receive 20% off on their next purchase. These email address will have to be verified, of course! The chances of verifying referrals are also pretty high because you can include their friends name in the subject line of the email so they know its from a trusted source. Have them click a link to accept the offer in the email so you can verify the authenticity of the referral.

Exit Intent Popups

According to the industry experts, 10-15% of potentially lost visitors can be brought back with intelligently designed exit intent popups. When a website visitor abandons a cart or closes a web page without taking the desired action, the exit monitoring scripts can trigger offers designed to bring them back to where they left. These offers can be served in form of a popup where you either give them an option to leave their email address to receive an offer for their future visit or offer them a discount to complete their purchase. This can be implemented in many different ways depending on the type of website.

Conclusion

If all this seems like a lot of work to collect email addresses then you are on the right website. Cart2Order provides an easy to use promotions module that will do all the work for you. All you have to do is create an offer or an e-book and create a new promotion with the options you need. You can select the pages and time these promotions in a few simple clicks and voila! you are all set.