How to Build an Email List from Scratch: 8 Incredibly Effective Strategies

• Email List
• Email List

Emailing lists lie at the heart of targeted marketing and ongoing customer relationship management. Having a few hundred emails to start working with is significantly easier than starting with none. Building it from scratch may appear way too challenging, causing you to drop the ball and refer to some other way to kick-start your marketing online.

You are not alone in this. There are hundreds of thousands of people asking the same questions. Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. Sophisticated techniques and cutting-edge software such as eLearning software can help you start building that list today.

Here are eight incredibly effective strategies to build an email list from scratch.

1. Enable Onsite Retargeting

In case you were wondering, onsite retargeting is just a fancy phrase for what some may consider bothersome pop-ups. But the pop-ups game has evolved over the years and today you can use them in a smart way to start building your email list. Restrain from bombarding the website visitor with pop-ups as soon as they arrive on your website.

You can use a pop-up that appears after a visitors tries to leave the website, spends a specific amount of time on it, or only after he returns to the website. In this study, fine-tuning an onsite pop-up strategy resulted in almost 3,000 new generated leads and up to 60% more time spent on the page.

2. Offer Free Courses via eLearning Software

eLearning software is a valuable tool that can, besides many other things, help you generate more leads and start building your email list. Modern eLearning tools can be integrated with the website for a seamless course experience. Create relevant courses for your target audience and offer them for free once visitors sign up for the email.

You can extend your offer by promising your visitors a new course every month. Just make sure to live up to your promise. eLearning software will help you automate the course and results sharing, and engage your leads to push them even further down the sales funnel.

3. Personalize Your Call-to-Action Strategy

Your website visitors are humans! Never forget that! It is important to acknowledge this fact because it gives your visitors motivation to hit your link in the search results in perspective. Each one of them has personal needs and preferences. Feeding them with one CTA page is not going to give you the results you want.

Personalize your CTA pages as it might bring you up to 40% more subscription rates. Bring your team of content creators on board and create as many personalized CTA pages as you can. If you appear helpful, visitors will opt-in gladly and your email list will grow exponentially.

4. Change the Language You Use

“Subscribe”, “Sign Up”, “Click Here” are washed out phrases that won’t get you far in your email list building strategy. The sign-up button doesn’t’ have to contain only 1 or 2 words. You should get more creative to inspire people to give you their email address. If you are offering them something in return for their email address, use the opportunity to tell them so.

Write a brief intro of how your free content can benefit them and finish it with a button that says “Download Now”, “Get Your Free eBook”, “Exclusive Access”, or something similar. You have a variety of options here. You can even create a sense of urgency by integrating a ticking clock.

5. Leverage Your Social Media Presence

Email subscribers are sort of your followers. They resemble your audience on social media networks. If you have put time and effort in building a follower base on social media, why not use it as a resource to kick-start your mailing list.

Make sure you mention your newsletter and the benefits that go along subscribing to it to your social media followers. You can make this a two-way street by attaching links to your social media profiles in the email signature. This way, you will be able to capture more leads and build your social media following and mailing list at the same time.

6. Launch an Onsite Survey

This is one of the smarter ways to engage your website visitors and give them an opportunity to decide whether they want to give you their email address. Onsite surveys are really popular these days.

Instead of creating CTA pages, you can create several pop-up surveys relevant to the content on the pages where they will appear. This is a viable strategy that can help you grow your email list in a short time frame. Time the survey to pop up after visitors appear interested in what you have to offer (10 or more seconds) and present them with a simple yes or no question.

7. Make Changes to Your About Us Page

Information found on your “About Us” page plays an important role in customers’ purchasing decision. Many customers or clients tend to visit this page to check the company’s credibility before they settle with a final decision.

This is why you should make sure this page contains relevant information and pictures. For the convenience of your potential customers, you can even include an email list CTA here as well.

8. Engage Visitors with Humor

Generic CTA messages are boring and not engaging. They won’t get you far. If you want to appear professional and play along with your brand voice and personality, it is fine you don’t want to experiment with humor.

But if you do, you can start using humor and a few of your CTAs and see the results. You’ve probably seen those pun-intended CTAs, they are everywhere – “Yes, I want in” / “No, I don’t want to grow my email list”.

Bottom Line

The efficiency of any of these tips will depend on your target audience and the type and quality of the content you deliver. This is why we encourage you to try all of them and see which one delivers the best results.