How to Build an Email List: 12 Essential Tips To Scale Fast

Building an email list is the first step towards starting a strong business relationship with your ideal customers. Email tends to be the most convenient and profitable channel of communication for any business. 

You might have often heard marketers say that “The Money is in the list.“

Yes, it’s 100% true. With email marketing, you earn nearly $38 return on every $1 spent. This is the highest return on investment compared to any other marketing channel. That’s the reason 81% SMBs use email as their primary customer acquisition channel. 

To build a great relationship with your customers and have sustainable growth, you need to have a great email list for constant communication. 

In this article, we will be explaining the benefits of email list, a step-by-step process on how to build an email list and best ways to avoid the most common mistakes.

What are the benefits of building an email list?

Building an email list is the first action towards connecting with  your potential customers and making your business successful. 

Here we will be listing the top  benefits of building an email list, which will help in scaling any business in 2023 and beyond.

5 benefits of building an email list

1. Primary source of business communication

2. Connect to anyone via email

3. Increase returning visitors

4. Emails build relationships

5. Easy to segment and target your audience

1. Primary source of business communication

Email is the simplest and most professional way of sending messages. It is lightning fast, cheap and is used by everyone. These reasons make 70% of business organizations use email as their primary source for communication. Building an email list will serve the primary purpose of starting a business communication with your potential customers.

2. Connect to anyone via email

According to Statista, there are more than 4 billion active email users in 2020. This means more than half of the world population uses email for their communication. What can be a better communication mode for a business professional apart from email?

3. Increase returning visitors

Having consistent website traffic is crucial for every business. For that, you can’t rely only on organic traffic coming from Google search engine. Google makes approximately 500 changes to its algorithm every year. Any major updates can significantly drop your organic traffic. 

In such a crunch situation, with an email list, you can bring back a subsequent amount of traffic and maintain your stability. Along with that, it’s best if you have an inflow of website visitors who are your ideal customers. 

4. Emails build relationships

Emails are the best way to have a one on one conversation with the users. While nurturing prospects by helping them solve critical business issues and build trust in your product, in this way, a healthy relationship is established with your prospect. 

Creating an email list and marketing can be very beneficial in multiple ways to make sustainable business growth. This makes you take a baby step of relationship building that brings colossal growth for your organization.

5. Easy to segment and target your audience

Segmenting and Targeting the right audience is very important for any business. Emails are highly effective as you reach out to large groups in just a single click. 

Just build your email list according to your segments and shoot your emails. That’s how easy it is.

We believe you are very much aware of the importance of having an email list for your business. Without any further ado, let us now learn how to build an email list from scratch.

How to build an email list fast in 2023 and beyond?

Here we shall be describing the best and proven methods of building an email list from scratch that will supercharge your business growth.

12 best ways to build an email list from scratch

1. Blogs

2. Surveys

3. Make them subscribe to your newsletters

4. Landing pages

5. Provide incentives on subscription

6. Write a guest post

7. Social media promotion

8. Reach out for more subscribers in videos and podcasts

9. Conducting networking meetup events

10. Make your customers share their review about you

11. Initiate forwarding option

12. Conduct lucky draws or special discounts

1. Blogs

Blogs have turned out to be the most effective channel of building an email list for the professionals and providing value to the users. The blogs create a win-win relationship between the businesses and the subscribers.

Image source: Digitalmarketer 

That said if, in order to use your blog for leads, you need to have a solid blog promotion strategy. A strategy that works for users at different stages of a sales funnel. Plus, you want to integrate your blog with different lead gen enhancements. Check the different enhancements required in the blog for building an effective email list building.

1.1. Lead magnet

A lead magnet is a freebie gift or some value added material provided to the visitor with an exchange of an email address. This is considered as the most effective method for building an email list.

Providing a digital ebook, research report or ideologies that will be beneficial for the prospect is one of the proven ways of building a powerful email list.

1.2. Offer a discount coupon

Ever got tempted when you get 50% off while signing up to a tool from a specific blog or website?

Well, this is another type of lead magnet where your reader turns himself to a prospect after getting the discount coupon. If they actually need your help, they will definitely signup with your product.

1.3. Content that pulls the readers to subscribe

Here there is a promise built between you and your subscriber to provide valuable information. You have to be persistent and consistent with the quality of your content to attract the right people to your email list.

To achieve that, develop content that will provide value to the readers and help in building engagement with your readers. When the visitor enjoys your content, he will gracefully subscribe to receive more information that you share on your website and blogs.

1.4. Call-to-action

Add appropriate call-to-action in your articles that will help the user easily subscribe to your product or service. These CTAs should be provided at the relevant positions where the user can get value from it. 

For Sales Professionals, the email list from CTAs is considered to be the hot leads.

1.5. Exit intent popup

Image source: Sumo.com

Exit intent popup tends to be one of the most excellent forms of lead generation. It is a last-ditch effort to grab the email of the readers if everything else failed on your website. 

Exit intent popup works really well when you have valuable information on your website. WPBeginner increased its email subscribers by 600% with an exit popup and they get around 445 – 470 new subscribers per day.

One of the tips to increase more sales is to create a sense of urgency in the reader’s mind. Popups are used to pull the attention of your blog readers and make them subscribe to it. Although everyone hates it, using a contextual popup form on your articles helps you in building an extensive and healthy email list.

2. Surveys

Image source: Autogrow.co 

Make your market research more beneficial. While gathering answers from your prospects, try to get their name and email addresses. It will help you with both getting your surveys successful and also building your email list.

Pro tip: Once the research is completed, send a copy to your prospects. It will work as a catalyst for your future email marketing campaign.

3. Make them subscribe to your newsletters

Image Source: tutorial republic

If you share valuable information on your website or be consistent in communities, you will drive the attention of people who are seeking to grow. They will opt for your business newsletter. 

Provide value to the subscribers with newsletter examples. Make them realize the effectiveness of your newsletter. Regularly answer the crucial queries and add beneficial information in your newsletters.

4. Landing pages

Image source: Instapage 

Landing Page can be optimized to get the best quality email list from it. Make the user tempted enough to signup for your product or service and build a healthy email list. Optimizing the landing page is the best answer when people ask how to build an email list for free.

5. Provide incentives on subscription

Image source: Justpositionit

Giving an incentive is one of the advanced techniques for building an email list. Give your active readers some incentives like free ebooks, different useful research papers or periodic assistance through their emails.

If you are the thought leader in your niche, people tend to rely on you to get insightful and first hand research information. You can provide this valuable information in the form of an ebook in exchange for the email address.  

6. Write a guest post

Most bloggers and marketers write guest posts for link building. But if it’s done right, it can be one of the most effective ways to build an email list relevant to your business profile.

With high quality guest posting, you create thought leadership in your niche. People tend to follow your ideas, thoughts and experience you share online. 

While sharing knowledge and information on various top publications, you can turn their traffic towards your website. Proper call to action and email subscription forms can turn their readers to signup for your product, newsletter and many more resources you offer.

7. Social media promotion

Social media promotion is considered a very effective method for getting a verified contact list. Provide value to your audience in your social media content, which will make them follow or subscribe. 

Help your audience by solving their problems or by educating them with modern solutions to their issues will help you in building a great email list.

8. Reach out for more subscribers in videos and podcasts

Image source: Giphy

Getting your subscribers through youtube channels and podcasts are the most popular methods to build an email list. If your followers are inspired by your work and knowledge you share, they are bound to go ahead and give their emails to get the right information delivered straight in their inbox. 

You can send your next video release, product update, a webinar that you are hosting,  or the interview of a top personality on your podcast.

Many top podcast channels like Marketing School and HBR Idea cast helped their audience with their podcast and made them their subscribers to their email list. It helps to drive to build a most curated email subscriber, who are most likely to convert into your customers.

9. Conducting networking meetup events

If you are the speaker or an organizer of the event, you are bound to connect with the attendees directly. Thus networking events become the best place to build your email list with the potential audience of the same taste.  

Conducting a Network meetup will make your target audience signup for your events, keep an eye for future meetups, and subscribe to your newsletter. If you have a beta product launch, you can get the real user test the initial product and give you the best feedback to scale faster.

10. Make your customers share their review about you

Image source: Podium

Delighted customers are more than a payer for you. Make your customers delighted by your product or service, and in return, they become your brand advocate. You can use different email templates for requesting online reviews.

They can share positive reviews about their product in different channels and boost your word of mouth promotion. 

Positive reviews bring more users to signup to your product/service from the existing customer’s connection. Ultimately, This process helps you in organically building a high-quality email list.

11. Initiate forwarding option

Image source: Referralrock

The Share and Referral program has always been one of the most efficient email list building techniques forever. Allow your subscribers to share their thoughts about your content among their connections.

This will increase your reach in your industry and help you in building an email list simultaneously.

12. Conduct lucky draws or special discounts

Image Source: Pinterest 

Discounts, Lucky Draws, and Giveaways always attract the attention of new visitors. Most of the companies start providing offers during Halloween, New Year and Thanksgiving, which attracts a lot of valuable prospects to sign up with your product/ service.

Just provide some additional benefits to your clients, and you can quickly build a massive email list of relevant contacts.

The most common email list building mistakes to avoid

Building an email list by using the best practices is equally important as using it. If we follow the improper practices of building an email list, we will end up with no value from it. 

We are describing some of the most common mistakes that should be ignored during the building an email list. 

6 email list building mistakes to avoid

1. Buying an email list

2. Unverified email address

3. Adding large forms

4. Too many pop ups

5. Failing to send welcome message

6. Not keeping your subscribers engaged

1. Buying an email list

Buying an email list is one of the most common email list building problems. As it’s the easiest way, people out to it.  However, such an email list is usually unverified, expired and unsegmented.

Email campaigns done on an unknown email list will decrease your email deliverability and affect your sender-reputation score negatively. It is suggested never to buy an email list if you are looking to build a unique business relationship.

2. Unverified email address

Unverified email lists are equally dangerous as buying an email list. If you don’t get the email list verified, your email list is more prone to get bounced, which will decrease your email deliverability. 

It’s suggested to double opt-in the email address. The double opt-in process will help you get a legit email address that you can use for your customer communication.

3. Adding large forms

While doing a survey or asking the users to subscribe, you should never ask them to fill a long form. Only ask the relevant and necessary questions.  

Other than the survey question, your focus should only be on email addresses and names. 

For example, if you are surveying to know the best chat software, you should never ask about their prospects and use cases. These questions increase the bounce rate from the survey.

4. Too many pop ups

Image Source: nngroup

Adding too many popups on a webpage will create a lot of disturbance for your visitors. The visitors tend to get annoyed if there are too many irrelevant popups that appear on the screen.

It is suggested to provide only one time popup on a page containing a valuable note for the visitor or an email subscription form.

Sometimes adding an exit popup is also helpful, but try not to annoy the user and make him go through a smooth journey.

5. Failing to send welcome message

If you are not sending the welcome email to the verified subscriber, you are losing the connection. As soon as the user signups or provides his email address, you must send a welcome email.

This will help you build a conversation with your email subscribers. Failing to send the welcome message may lead to a loss of prospects in the future.

6. Not keeping your subscribers engaged

It should be a periodic task to keep your subscribers engaged with you. The subscribers will stay with you if they find some value from you.

Send newsletters, updates, and other things to keep them engaged and maintain your email list.

Staying away from these common mistakes will help you in building a powerful email list. However, you also need to use the email list efficiently to get your desired productive result. 

Below we will be explaining how we can use an email list efficiently to get the best from it.

How to use the email list efficiently for your email campaign

A high-quality email list is critical for every email marketing campaign, but it is also essential to use it properly. You can use an excellent email automation tool like SalesHandy to automate your email campaigns.

Below we will be listing the key benefits of Saleshandy that will be helpful to make the best use of your email list.

1. Send automated email campaigns

With the SalesHandy, you can send an automated cold email campaign up to 5000 recipients in a day from your business account. This can help you by saving a lot of time and effort.

You just need to add your email list on SalesHandy, draft your email and click send. All your emails will be delivered straight in your recipient’s inbox rather than the promotion tab. 

Check How to Send Email Campaigns to get a detailed guide for sending cold emails.

2. Nurturing your prospects

You need to engage with your recipients continuously to make the most out of your email list. 50% of the prospects reply after they receive the 5th followup email. So, it’s essential to add followup sequences to all the recipients in your email list.

With SalesHandy, you can add up to 9 followup stages and add behavioral conditions that will automate your email nurturing activities.

3. Personalizing the emails

Email personalization is the most crucial aspect of email campaigns. A personalized email makes the recipient believe that the email is dedicated to him, which increases the response rate.

With SalesHandy, you can use Mail Merge tags to personalize your message according to the recipient’s perception.

4. Staying away from SPAM filters

SalesHandy uses the best email sending practices that help you in getting the improved email deliverability.

You can verify your email list and segregate them between good, bad and risky contacts. Sending the emails to good contacts will provide excellent email deliverability and make you stay away from SPAM filters.

SalesHandy also maintains a particular time gap between two consecutive emails, which makes your emails feel like human-like sending. The email service providers will trigger that all the emails are sent with a different timestamp and will make your emails authentic.

Conclusion

Building an email list is an essential task, and it should be made in the best way possible. Even after creating an email list, it is also necessary to maintain your email list for email productivity in the long run. You should go for periodic verification of your email list and update accordingly. This will make your email campaign journey happen more productively.