15 Email List Building Strategies for Your Startup

Email marketing is the link that builds a relationship between you and your customers. It hardly matters what business you are operating; an email list acts as the most crucial part of an unbeaten market strategy. Using an email list, it becomes easy for you to share your business story, showcase your business products and boost your business, all the while turning your subscribers into your paying customers.

What do you mean by the term Email List?

Email list is a list that compiles the email address of the subscribers collected via your website or blogs, which can be used by you for marketing for your business and its products.

How To Build Email List Strategically For Your Startup?

Note that successful business campaigns always start with a healthy email list. Hence, you need to carefully build a targeted and segmented email list to get benefitted from it. Make sure you properly organize your email list; otherwise it would be useless even if you build beautiful email lists with classy design, special offers and engaging copy.

Below are stated three vital priorities that you should consider while building a valuable and a healthy email list:

• Quality – Acquire actual information from individuals and try not to purchase email lists.
• Relevance - Target those people who you find are actually interested in the products you deal with.
• Quantity – Once the above two priorities are checked off you can now focus on volume of your list and implement strategies to grow it.

Luckily, there are innumerable effective and simple ways through which an email list can be built, including traditional offline and online tactics and emerging strategies like paid search, special offers, events and direct mail. The challenges that come along with maximizing the email list growth are:

• Using the above-mentioned tactics responsibly
• Abiding by all the legal requirements
• Respecting the preferences of the subscribers

Email marketing will stay here forever and thus, you need to follow below mentioned strategies for attracting new subscribers and building a successful email list for your startup.

1. Hang a sign-up sheet

Signup sheet is the easiest way to collect the details of the customers in person. Whether you are in your storefront, any trade show or a community event, hang a sign-up sheet at the entrance so that you can encourage your visitors to jot down their names and email address on that sheet. This way you can build your email list with ease.

2. Make use of business cards

Whenever you meet up with people personally, you can leverage their business card and offer yours too. You can place a bowl or a small basket at your office’s reception desk or on your store’s counter so that the visitors can leave their business cards inside it. You can encourage the visitors to do so by offering them some incentive like a gift card, a free service or product, etc. For drumming-up emails, you can also in return give them your business cards with an offer or discount mentioned at the back so that people get encouraged and signup for receiving your emails.

3. Organize an event

Organize an event such as lunch gathering, book club, topic talk or any other event that works to attract people towards your store. Hang a notice at your store entrance, advertise about the event via local media and send invitations to nearby businesses and ask people to submit their email address if they desire to attend the event.

4. Organize giveaways

Using your email list or snail mail, you can send people an online postcard requesting for their email information and in return offering them a giveaway for providing the email information.

5. Run a contest

To build an email list, you need to offer incentives. Running contests are the most straightforward and the easiest way to incentivize people for sharing their email ids. Who will not love to win a prize merely by sharing his email address? The contest can be of any type, like photo contest, video contest, short story or poem writing contest, etc.

6. Provide lead magnets

Lead magnets means offers that you will give to your potential customers on sharing their email addresses. Through lead magnets, you can raise awareness and get connected with your prospective customers to whom your brand is completely new. Lead magnets can be checklists, cheat sheets, discount coupons, product samples, eBooks, podcasts, free trials, premium content, templates etc.

7. Make use of pop-up forms

Pop-up forms are very important for your website as they grab instant attention of the visitors and allure them to tap on the link. Pop-up forms are having a very high rate of conversion and also help in collecting the email addresses of the visitors.

Source: How to Add a Contact Form Popup in WordPress
Published on WPBeginner

Generally, pop-up forms don’t have a good reputation as it is considered to be intrusive. Use automated timers and lightbox modals so as to make them less intrusive. By these forms, you can ask the visitors to provide their email address so as to get regular updates from your business.

8. Try a few telemarketing

All through the day, probably you as well as your employees interact with so many prospects and customers over the phone call. Prior to hanging up the call, you can offer them if they are interested in joining your business email list.

Tell them about the benefits they can get on enrolling, like discounts and exclusive offers available only to the email subscribers.

9. Use Your Blogs

With the help of your blog, you can establish a strong relationship with your prospects and customers and collect their email ids. You can post a few appealing and informative lines of your blog and ask the reader to provide their email address to continue reading. Definitely, the interested reader would submit his email address to read the entire blog.

10. Build using customer requests for downloads

When the visitor of your website request for online catalogues, price quotes, pamphlets, research papers or company information ask for their email ids. This practice of building email lists is generally useful for financial organizations, cataloguers, business-to-business marketers and various other businesses having no ecommerce websites. While downloading and saving any documentation ask that individual to enter his name and email id so that he can access it.

11. Don’t let the website visitor exit

If your website visitor exits your website without participating, grab him one more time before he leaves your website. Place a lightbox on your website. This lightbox would pop-up and ask the visitor for his email address before he exists from your blog or website.

12. Involve your employees

Reward the employees for gathering testable and valid email addresses. Make sure that your employees have acquired the consent of the persons whose email addresses they have gathered before giving those email addresses to you for building your email list.

13. Word of mouth

You can ask your current clients to mention some new subscribers and email addresses to build an email list. By offering them rewards or discounts for consent backed, valid and confirmed email addresses, you can make the deal even more exciting.

14. Use credit/debit card receipts

You can customize the receipts of credit/debit card with a line or field where your customers can list their email ids while they are signing it. Or you can just ask them to write down their email ids on receipt’s back side, which you can add to your email list and database for sending them a welcoming mail.

15. Leverage Social Media Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc, are some of the social media platforms that you can use for building an email list. Every social media channel has advertisement capabilities using which you can target a particular group of people and push them to give you their email ids.

Every social media channel has unique characteristics, hence choose the channel as per your needs. For example, Instagram can be used for promoting consumer products as well as Google ads, LinkedIn is useful for business to business advertising and with Snapchat and Facebook teenagers can be targeted.

Summing Up:

Now, when you have known about the tactics that you need to implement for building an email list for your start-up, you can get started. Building an email list is not at all a daunting task, only you have to learn basic fundamentals to attract people so that they provide you with their email addresses.

About the author: Ankit Patel is a Marketing/Project Manager at XongoLab Technologies LLP and PeppyOcean, A leading mobile app development companies. During his free time, he loves to write about new & upcoming technologies, web & mobile, programming, business and marketing.