How to Start Building an Email List for Your Business

Read Having an abundant email list for your business is a powerful form of owned media that you can leverage to create more loyal customers and increase sales. Social media is important to creating brand awareness, but having an even more direct way to communicate with both your potential and existing customers is essential. An email list allows you to have a list of potential leads to turn into loyal customers or followers of your business. The ROI for email marketing is actually the highest out of all the marketing platforms; the average ROI is $40 per $1 spent. If you haven't worked on building your email list yet, here are four ways to get started.

Require emails for access to offers or resources.

We're sure your business' website is chock-full of valuable educational resources or sales and offers”require an email sign-up for individuals to gain access to those resources! And if you don't have any yet, create them! Your website visitors and customers are looking for good deals and answers to their questions, so they're willing to take a second to input their information in order to get to them. Here's an example of what this could look like:

The key here is to understand your website visitors' needs and offer content directly targeted to those needs. You'll then be able to gain and retain individuals for your email list.

Create a call-to-action for each landing page on your website.

Your site's landing pages are perfect opportunities to create unique call-to-actions to entice individuals into signing up for your business' email list. Hubspot found that personalized calls-to-action have 42% higher view-to-submission rate than ones that are the same for all visitors across the site. Whether it's your Contact Us tab or a product page, you have as many opportunities as you have landing pages to get visitors to sign up for your email list. The calls-to-action could sound like anything from Click here for an exclusive 20%-off offer to Subscribe to our newsletter for more social media marketing tips. You can totally get creative with the CTAs here! These could be fixed messages on the webpage or they could be pop-ups to get the visitors' full attention--see the examples below! Either way, creating personalized CTAs for each landing page on your website will have you well on your way to building a robust email list.

Offer events with required email registration.

Another way of gathering email addresses for an email list is to offer events exclusive to those who sign up with their email. In the age of COVID, businesses and organizations have had to adapt by holding their events virtually, but this actually works well for building an email list. Hold an online event like a livestream or a webinar with required email registration. Your business' events should be relevant to participants' wants and needs, so they are more inclined to register and attend the event. If your business happens to be able to safely hold events live and in-person, you can even collect attendees' email addresses directly while they are there.

Here are some more tips on how to conduct a successful virtual event:

Host giveaways.

One last tip for starting to build your email list (and perhaps a fairly simple one) is to host a giveaway! Giveaways are perfect opportunities to get more traffic to your website, collect emails for entries, and get your product into new hands. If your business doesn't offer a product, you can still host a giveaway for a free or discounted service you do offer. We've learned that people are more likely to give their information if they receive something valuable in return. It's essential to understand what your potential customers see as valuable and provide that to them, then collect email addresses along the way. 

Here's a great podcast episode with more email list-building strategies:

With these four beginner strategies, you're ready to start building your business' email list. Good luck!