Three Ways to Build Your Email List

Building an email list is a crucial part of many small business’s marketing plan for several reasons. Advertising agencies advocate email lists to their clients because they allow businesses to reach their clients directly and offer them products, services, and deals they know they will be interested in. In other words, if you have an email list, you can communicate with your target audience directly. And, if your marketing platforms like Facebook or your managed CRM program suddenly increase their prices, you will always have a list of customers who are interested in your products or services to work from if you have to radically change your marketing strategy. No matter what happens to your other advertising services and materials, you’ll always have a list of customers you can contact.

            But how do you build an email list? Before we dive into three methods you can start using to build your list immediately, it’s important to note that building a target audience and an email list takes time and constant effort. Customers have to be incentivized to get emails from your company. You have to break through the initial resistance that many customers put up to avoid having to empty out their spam folders every day with hundreds of emails they don’t want.

There is no quick, easy way to build an email list, but these four tips will help:

• Useful content marketing. The key to bringing in more people to your email list is to write useful, actionable content that your target customers will want to read. Entice your audience with useful content in your blog section. Then, if they want even more content, as they should, offer to send them more via email. Your email list will grow by leaps and bounds the more customers see how awesome your blog content is.
• Email signup boxes on your website. This seems obvious, but more important than throwing an email signup box on your website is making sure it is placed conspicuously in the top area of your home page (marketing agencies have found this is the best place to put them), keep the look and feel of your signup boxes consistent, clean, and professional, and include a few words explaining what’s in it for your customers if they sign up.
• Incorporate email signup options into all of your account registration and online eCommerce forms. That was a mouthful, but in short, if your clients create online accounts to get special deals from your online business, include an email list option for them. Site registration is a great marketing strategy anyway, but you can make it even more effective by again including a blurb on the positives of signing up for the email list and making it easy for your customers to do so whenever they’re using your website.

It should go without saying that your emails themselves have to be well-written and offer something to your clients. Include exclusive deals on products and services that only those on the email list get. Include tips and tricks for how to use your products and services better and how to improve their lives in some way. Customers are always looking for useful content, and if your company can provide it for them on your email lists, you’ll stay top-of-mind and foster positive feelings towards your company.

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