How to Build Your Email Marketing List

Email marketing is a powerful method of building relationships with your customers. When a customer opts in to receive emails from you, it’s often a signal that they want to hear from your brand.

Approximately half of the world’s population has an email address, that’s about 4.26 billion people worldwide. Many online activities require an email address, such as signing up for social media platforms or creating accounts with businesses. As a result, email marketing is a powerful way for brands to reach their people. 

Why is it important to build your email marketing list?

Unlike your social media following, you own your email list. That means that continuously building your list with relevant contacts can give your brand security. Social media algorithms and advertising costs can also change, which means you need to adapt your strategy to keep reaching your audience.

However, since you own your email list, you can rely on it to communicate with your audience continuously. You can use it to share the latest new arrivals or exclusive deals straight into people’s inboxes or leverage the owned data to target people on other platforms.

Since people have opted in to hear from you, email marketing can also deliver a strong ROI. You also don’t necessarily need to produce new content to communicate via email. It’s a great avenue for you to repurpose and share your existing content.

So, let’s dive into how you can start building your email list. Remember that this will be an ongoing part of your digital marketing strategy. People change email addresses with time and most brands want their email list to keep growing.

How to build your email marketing list:

Start visualising the journey a customer will typically take to find your brand and purchase from you. Define your end goal (most likely a purchase) and plan the steps that your ideal customer will take to get there.

Set up your website for success.

Your website is one of the most powerful tools for list building. It’s often the place where you send your audience to make a purchase or take an action. You should have pop-up forms for sign-ups implemented strategically throughout your website, timed to appear when visitors are most likely to engage with them. 

You can also embed your sign-up form in the check-out process. This quickly converts paying customers into long-term subscribers and can generate a lot of additional revenue.

Keep your forms concise and visually appealing. Communicate the benefits of subscribing, while also ensuring that your terms and conditions and privacy policy are visible. You should be gathering informed consent with every sign-up to avoid breaches of privacy and spam laws.

Incentivise people to subscribe.

Give people an incentive to subscribe to your brand or create an account. These rewards might be exclusive discounts, early access to sales, personalised recommendations based on purchase history, and ease of future purchases. 

Some businesses also offer free guides, access to exclusive content, or the chance to join a community to acquire email addresses. 

Make sure that your incentives are exciting and encourage website visitors to want to share their contact information. A visually appealing and well-functioning website will also help to build trust.

Run lead-generation advertising campaigns.

Paid advertising can help you build your email marketing list quickly. Once your website is set up to capture email sign-ups, you can start driving traffic to it with paid search or social ads. Include calls to action that encourage your audience to subscribe. 

If you’re using Google Ads, then target keywords that are relevant to your brand and direct people to landing pages that are optimised for sign-ups. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram also offer highly targeted advertising, so that you can reach clearly defined audiences that you want to have on your email list. 

Lead-generation ads can also enable you to gather email addresses within the advertising platform. Your audience doesn’t have to click through to your website to sign up and can fill out your form in their feed or on the search engine results page.

Reward your subscribers.

Make sure you follow through on your promises. If you win your subscribers over with exclusive access to promotions, then that’s what you need to give them. 

If your emails don’t align with the expectations you set, you might have low engagement rates or lose subscribers.

Make sure that your emails are well-designed and include relevant content for your audience. Email marketing is an opportunity to capture your audience's interest, deliver value, and drive purchases. Segmenting your email lists based on various traits and online behaviours will also treat your subscribers to personalised and relevant messaging.

Encourage referrals.

If your customers love your email content, they might even want to share it with their network. Think about including a referral reward for subscribers in your emails.

You can also team up with partner brands to encourage email sign-ups from your complementary audiences. Social media competitions that offer the chance of a reward for tagging, following, and subscribing are a fast way to build your email list.

Email lists can make your brand more resilient.

Third-party cookies have been relied on for audience targeting for a long time. However, they are gradually being phased out and brands need to build up zero and first-party data to continue reaching their audiences.

Email marketing is also a cost-effective channel that customers opt in for. You own your email data and can use it in a variety of ways to build your brand.