Five Simple Ways To Grow Your Email List From Scratch
Quick Summary: To grow your email list from scratch, BAM Advertising suggests five key methods: use pop-up forms on your website, leverage social media for sign-ups, collect emails through website inquiries, organize existing customer lists, and implement a referral program. They also recommend including an opt-in message for legal compliance and better list quality.
So you have a business and want to send emails to potential customers, but don’t have an organized list anywhere. How do you capture these emails? You could do this by spending little to no money. Read on to learn how.
Your list isn’t going to grow overnight. A quality email marketing list takes time to build up. Additionally, you should research the best email marketing tool to use for your business. Mailchimp and Constant Contact have free or low-cost plans allowing a certain number of subscribers. They make it easy to organize your lists with tags, so you can send the right email to the right audience.
So how do we build your list? Here’s the top 5 ways to build an authentic email list for your business.
- Pop up forms on your website
- This can include basic messaging that suggests that the consumer should sign up for email marketing from your company. Or it can be an exclusive offer like 30% off your first order.
- Social Media
- There are many ways through social media to encourage people to sign up for an offer or service if it relates to them. Contests are a good way to build up a list more quickly but that doesn’t always mean the list will be quality. Promoting offers exclusive to social media is a great way to build up your email list.
- Website Inquiries
- When someone fills out a form on your site, you have their information housed in your website’s content management system to send them other marketing materials down the road depending on what their interest was from your site. Create an “opt-in” check box that automatically populates to authorize consent for these users. Read more about this below.
- Current Customers
- If you’ve been in business for a while, you may already have a list of customers living in an excel doc somewhere on your computer. Dust them off and organize them with tags on your email platform so you are able to send out relatable marketing emails to them down the road.
- Referrals
- If you have a killer referral program, make sure you’re asking your referees to capture their references’ emails. This is an easy way to have someone else collecting the emails for you for free.
Bonus tip: include an opt-in message when asking for someone’s email address (or any contact information in general). Consent authorization is a legal, safe best practice – and it will improve the quality of your list and reduce spam reports. It’s okay to have an opt-in box automatically checked on your website forms. Just be sure to clearly state what their information can be used for in your site’s privacy policy.
Need more help building your email list? Give BAM a call! Email marketing is one of our primary services. We help grow lists for businesses just like yours every day.
