How to Build an Email List From Scratch

Did you know that 22.5% email marketing databases degrade each year?

Definitely, it’s a HUGE amount to consider for your business. Hence…

What could you adopt for retaining these lost contacts?

Do you know, how to build an email list?

If you are a newbie in this sector, you might haven’t heard much about the topic.

Well, no worries, you are in the right place to take some relevant values. Strategic marketers know well about the different ways that can entice people to join your email list. Let’s go into the deep…!

Let’s Have Some Numbers & Percentages

Do you know that 2.6 billion people are using email while Facebook users are only 1.7 billion that is the largest social network?

One of the researches happened by DMA shows that 99% of consumers open and check their respective emails every day. Not only that, some consumers range between the personal email addresses and corporate emails address to check their inboxes even up to 20 times a day.

More than 80% of retail marketers say that email marketing is still the driving force behind their acquisition and customer retention strategies.

Still, in marketing, email marketing is the most cost-effective and widely acceptable strategy and on average, the ROI yields $38 for every dollar spent, this figure is the highest among other strategies as well.

But without a proper strategy, your email campaign wouldn’t work. Because one study by Hubspot where 63% say that generating leads is the top challenge from the rest.

That’s why you need to learn the strategies for having a proper email list that works for your business. If you are struggling with finding the appropriate strategy and have run out of ideas, don’t worry! Here, I am going to show you how to build your email list from the bottom line and recover your lost subscribers.

How to Build an Email List

There are a ton of ways that can be implemented for creating a proper email list. Here are the most significant ones that need to take into firm consideration:

1. Put out a user-centric sign-up sheet

A sign-up sheet could be the best bet for your business. Whatever business you are running, now, these days it’s easy to collect the emails from them. People are now more aware and they agree to sign-up if they can be assured that they will get value from it. Simply just put a sign-up form on your website and make them convinced that you will get a certain benefit from it and encourage them to write down their details on the sheet.

2. Place a personalized CTA on your landing page.

Make a personalized CTA on your landing page that will catch users more than the basic one. One study of Hubspot found that a personalized CTA performs 202% better than the very basic one. This is a practical observation that impacts psychologically to every visitors on your site.

You have to entice your visitors to subscribe to your email list. It means when any visitors visit on your site and grabbed by CTA, then they get attached personally and eventually they ended up with providing their details. For instance, you can include a simple personalized CTA like this: “Click here to download a free digital marketing ebook.” You also could offer a fun quiz, toolkit, or an exclusive article, and so on.

Of course, to make this happen you need to produce quality contents to make the whole thing personalized. If your contents are more specific and directly related to your audience’ need, your email newsletter wouldn’t seem like a deceitful advertisement.

3. Give away discounts or coupons

Though this is pretty common these days of marketing still it serves a decent amount of purposes. People like to have a discount and coupons when they want to buy products. So, offering some sort of discount or coupons while visitors come to your website to purchase any specific product could be a great option for joining them in your email list.

You just simply can do that by giving a discount code or coupon code to join your email list.

4. Give a reason to subscribe

There are lots of options out there in the marketplace and people are so much confused which one should they pick. At this situation, why would they subscribe to your email list?

Provide your visitors a legit reason so that they would agree to subscribe to your email list. If you are a starter, maybe no one knows you but you have some great products on your hands. Reaching out to them and make them convinced that you are worth enough and able to provide values to them. For instance, you can say your subscribers that they will be the first to know about a new product release, promotion.

You can use a pop-up that says enticing texts about your promotion that could be engaging enough to reach out those leads to your email list.

5. Set up a lead magnet

One study says that more than 95% of visitors wouldn’t buy anything on their initial visit of any website. It’s because they just wondering through browsing, or they are just searching the right products. Usually, it takes time to gain trust, confidence, and build a relationship. A lead magnet helps to get you there. It’s like a free value that you offer to convince your visitors to give you their email address.

The best part of lead magnet is, you are offering value in exchange for value to others.

A lead magnet is also known as “opt-in inceptive” or a “content upgrade”. You can offer something that actually they need and want from you. In this case, you can offer some freebies like ebook, courses, and so on. You also can offer a cheat sheet to your visitors. There are some aspects of creating good lead magnets. Here they are:

• Create specific contents rather random contents that don’t provide any value.
• The lead magnet should provide a solution to any specific problem.
• Don’t focus on the number of contents and length. Your lead magnet content could be only small in type.
• Try to provide instant benefits to the users of your website.

In addition to this, you can show tutorials of any specific subject matter. You also can provide a tutorial by a simple PDF document. Prompts are little snippets that could help your users to generate ideas for any specific topic.

6. You can pick a suitable platform

One of the most important aspects of building an email list could be selecting an email marketing platform. There are lots of options out there in the market to pick. But choosing the right one could be the best bet for you.

Selecting the right one depending on many factors like if you are a small company, there will be one type of need and if you are a big company, then you need will be different. For instance, Constant Contact email marketing tool could be great for the beginners level.

But you also can choose the following option depending on your need:

• MailChimp
• Campaign Monitor
• ActiveCampaign
• GetResponse

Most of the case, they all are come up with almost the same features and benefits. But it’s the pricing and preference for the interface that matters most in choosing.

7. Create & publish regular viral contents

You are probably thinking, how can it be a strategy for list building? But the thing is…

This is one of the best solid strategies for collecting lead. When you create and publish viral contents regularly on your site, they will likely to share those contents on different social media. When people share it, they will get your “email sign-up form“. The more people get the email sign-up form, the more lead you will have. This is pretty simple and straight.

Suppose, you have written a content that is based on your practical experience like: “This blogger has chosen a wrong blogging platform, and it almost ruined his blogging career. Here is how I saved his interest.”

Imagine, if someone newbie thinking about how to start blogging, they would definitely appreciate it and share as well. This is what viral content impacts.

8. Creating multiple gateways for the email list

In the above, I shared you to create a reason for your users so that they will provide you their emails in exchange for something better, something valuable to them.

This is pretty fine…

But create reasons for them, I want to mean that make multiple gateways to them. Different people have different tests. If you create a single gateway, it couldn’t be perfect for lots of people. So make an alternative to them.

Because, not everyone will like your offerings but if you provide the different options, you people may be stuck by the alternate one. That’s why it’s wise to set multiple gateways to your users so that they would find their suitable one and turn into your potential lead.

9. Set up an email pop-up

Though apparently, it seems that most of the people don’t like to see a pop-up when they serf any website but it works in collecting lead too. Don’t use a pop-up that blocks your entire page. Full page pop-up will penalize you in Google search result. Place suitable pop-up for your website that could ultimately collect leads.

In this case, one thing should keep in mind that if you have quality contents then people can’t ignore your site in any way. When people search for a specific query and they will find your website on top of the page, they can’t but accept your pop-up for sign-up to the newsletter.

10. Use social media to pitch email newsletter

If you have accounts on different social media, you can make the best use of it. Suppose, you don’t have a long email list, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have a network. You may have enough followers on Twitter and Facebook page likes, Instagram fans, LinkedIn connections or you have business communication through email.

Reaching out to those social media people and make an effort to collect your potential leads. The people those who follow you already like you on those social media. Provide them away so that they can subscribe to your newsletter. Moreover, you can communicate with those diverse group of Facebook, Linkedin, Quora forum, and so on.

11. Upgrade and make your content gated

Content creation is an ongoing process, it should be upgraded on time. This content update makes you able to cope up with the search engine. Focus on making some contents gated. Gated content is your contents are the most enticing content that will not be accessible until readers enter their email address.

In this case, you can use any quality content locker plugin for your website. This could be a great trick to collect your potential lead.

12. Host a webinars or podcast

These days, audio is getting popularity in the marketplace. People are now likely to hear something when they get free times instead of viewing. So, host a webinar, or podcast service for your audience. This could be a great source of collecting lead.

In addition to this, you can collaborate with the industry peers to host an in-person event. In this case, you can give away tickets for free, it returns you may ask for their email address.

13. Creating a quiz poll

You can create a quiz poll for your users and set an input field for the participant. A participant can join the quiz without providing any credential but anyone wants to have the result, he/she needs to prove his/her email address. There are tools like Qzzr to make it happen for your website.

14. Adding card to your videos

Use can add a call to action cards to the YouTube videos. This CTA link could also help to opt-in your lead into your landing page. The more leads on your landing page, the more you can collect ultimately. You also can use SlideShare lead forms to collect more leads with your powerpoint presentation.

15. Use cross-promotional techniques

Cross-promotion is a great piece of technology that can be used for your marketing. This is like a win-win battle for both parties. You should set up the goal for growing your site visitors first, then if you have an ample amount of visitors, you will probably collect the expected lead you want.

Wrapping Up

Building an email list is one of the most vital things for blogging or in-fact, any kind of business. However, for having a sound email list, you still need to work hard by incorporating different types of techniques. Moreover, to keep your users interested and get engaged, especially the people who may be ready to bounce, you need to try hard to stick them on your website and able to make them provide their email address.

I just wanted to show you some of the exact processes that are proven practically. You can apply these to your system and take a look at the result. You will get to know more about the whole process when you have got involved in person. I mean, you need to execute the entire tactics described here in this article.

So, get going and start collecting your expected lead using content marketing through your blog. I hope you have enjoyed the post and got some value from it. If you still have any query regarding the context, feel free to share with me leaving a comment in the below. I would love to get back to you shortly.