How To construct an Email List: 12 Winning Strategies

While email is one of the oldest digital marketing channels out there, it’s also one of the most effective, with powerful conversion rates across multiple industries. In truth, the average conversion rate for landing page traffic sent through email is over 7%—a large jump from the standard ecommerce conversion rate of 2%. Email marketing is also expense effective: businesses may earn up to $42 for every dollar spent on email marketing.

Convincing someone to provide you their email address during their first visit to your ecommerce site is easier than convincing them to make a purchase: it doesn’t expense them anything, and you can layer on incentives, like discounts or freebies.

Of course, to unlock the potential of email marketing, you first require to construct an email list. While your email subscriber list will develop as you commence generating sales, there are steps you can receive today to commence building your email list before you even sell your first product or subscription.

What makes a great email list?

Every successful email marketing campaign begins with a high-standard email list. There’s no point building advanced email campaigns with sophisticated design, engaging copy, and special offers if your email list isn’t properly segmented and targeted. 

To construct a great email list that generates sales, your three priorities are:

1. standard. Get real, complete information from real people—and never buy email lists. Bots, spam accounts, and abandoned email addresses don’t make purchases.
2. Relevance. It’s challenging enough to convert prospects who already desire what you’re selling. When building an email list, only target people who are genuinely interested in your products or services. Otherwise, you’ll view leads unsubscribe as quickly as they joined.
3. amount. Once you’ve checked off the first two priorities, you can commence focusing on growing your email list and expanding your reach to include recent or wider audiences.

How to construct an email list for marketing easily

1. Add a pop-up propose to your homepage.
2. Put an opt-in form in your navigation or footer.
3. Collect emails at your brick-and-mortar or in-person occurrence.
4. Add a signup button to social media.
5. construct personalized landing pages.
6. Include a newsletter signup alternative at checkout.

1. Add a pop-up propose to your homepage

While you shouldn’t train shoppers to wait for or expect discounts, promotional offers can be a powerful tool for converting first-period website visitors before they hit the back button. With homepage pop-up forms, building your email list and saving a potential sale in the procedure, is straightforward.

If the term “pop up” gives you pause, consider that the average conversion rate for pop-up forms is just over 3%. Depending on your overall website traffic, numbers like these can dramatically boost your email signups.

To commence using pop-up forms to capture emails on your ecommerce site, commence with an exit intent pop-up. These will only display if a visitor moves their mouse off the page, which typically means they intend to navigate somewhere else. Using the targeting options in your marketing platform of selection, you can disable these pop-ups for previous customers and visitors who are already on your list. This lets you focus your copy around recent customers only.

After visiting a “How It’s Made” post from the Grovemade newsletter, the customer receives an propose of 10% off their first purchase.

Because a visitor lost before their first purchase can be challenging to get back, you should consider including a discount of some benevolent—so long as the math makes sense. Your product’s overall worth, profits margins, and potential propose will all determine how viable various discounts are for your business.

2. Put an opt-in form in your site’s navigation or footer

One key to capturing recent subscribers for your email list is giving visitors ample chances. That’s why in addition to a homepage or product page pop-up form, you should also consider adding an email signup form across every page on your website. 

Most website platforms enable you to place opt-in forms in locations where shoppers look for additional information about your business, including the margins, navigation bar, and footer. Because these forms are often subtle and located below the fold, your conversion rate will likely be low overall. However, the contribution they make to building your list can add up over period. 

To boost your conversion rate, make sure you’re adding a powerful CTA about the worth of signing up, whether it’s a coupon, exclusive content, or regular information and updates. As a shopper makes their way down to your site’s footer to discover more about your brand, what sorts of offers might catch their attention and inspire them to subscribe?

Beardbrand describes their newsletter in terms of the worth the reader can expect to receive. It’s not just product updates: it’s a place to discover the art of grooming

3. Collect email addresses at your store or in-person occurrence

If you are looking for how to commence an email list, face-to-face connections are still the most effective tool for converting leads into customers—even if a trade doesn’t happen in person. Whether you have a brick-and-mortar store, or you’re promoting your business at an occurrence or pop-up shop, your in-person interactions can assist you construct your email list for marketing, leading to more digital sales.

recall, forms often associated with email marketing and navigator creation can easily make the shift from URL to IRL. For instance, you can bring a clipboard and inquire people to write down their name and email address or, to better sync with your email marketing tool of selection, you can provide an iPad where people can submit their address directly. You can even include a CTA on your business cards to incentivize email signups.

As with your online forms, make sure you use a powerful CTA to incentivize in-person signups. For example, “Sign up for our mailing list for a chance triumph a $25 gift card,” or “Subscribe to our newsletter for 25% off your first online purchase.” It’s also a excellent concept to segment these lists by location or occurrence, so that you can send emails tailored to each spectators’s needs.

discover More: How to Write an Effective Welcome Email

4. Add a signup button to social media

People pursue brands on social media for many reasons, including to remain up to date on recent products. By adding an alternative on your Facebook, Instagram, and other social media accounts to sign up for email updates, you can provide followers another way to remain in the recognize while pulling them into more personalized email nurturing campaigns. 

Most social media platforms back buttons or forms, enabling you to add a straightforward email signup alternative to your page. For instance, you can include a call-to-action button on your Facebook business page to inspire your followers to sign up for your email list.

For social platforms that are less link amiable, like Instagram, explore workarounds to drive email signups. For instance, you can use Linkpop to include multiple links in your Instagram bio: one for your ecommerce website, and another to direct visitors to a sign-up form for your email list. You may desire to consider separating recent subscribers added through Instagram so you can track roughly how well it’s influencing the growth of your list.

5. construct personalized landing pages

When it comes to convincing visitors or followers to provide their emails, there’s no one-size-fits-all propose. Depending on where they discovered your online business and where they are in their buyer trip, different prospects will respond to different email signup CTAs. With that in mind, you should schedule on creating multiple landing pages with opt-in forms and messaging tailored to a particular segment of your spectators. 

To commence using personalized landing pages, consider your ecommerce website’s traffic sources. What are Facebook users looking for? What about Amazon users, or trade display leads? Whether you’re crafting a landing page for an evergreen spectators, or capitalizing on an occurrence or holiday, Be sure that your on-page communication and CTA are obvious and consistent with the propose that inspired prospects to click over to your site in the first place.

Shopify’s App Store includes dozens of tools with straightforward templates to assist you quickly design, test, and publish landing pages to generate more email signups. While it will require an up-front capital apportionment, creating individualized landing pages will pay off in the long run: research shows personalized calls-to-action have a 42% higher form submission rate than generic CTAs.

6. Include a newsletter signup alternative at checkout

It’s unsurprising that many online business owners neglect their checkout page as a marketing tool—after all, they’ve already secured a customer. Yet the buyer’s trip doesn’t complete with a single trade. Indeed, many customers opt to complete their purchase without creating an account, limiting your upcoming interactions to messages about their trade. By encouraging users to sign up for your email list at checkout, you can turn a single trade into a lifelong fan and repeat customer.

Adding a checkout newsletter signup alternative can be as straightforward as including a checkbox under the field customers are using to provide an email for their order confirmation. Be specific about the worth buyers will receive, whether it’s email-exclusive discounts, how-to content, or updates about recent products. This will not only outline their incentive to opt in, but also ensure you’re in lawful operation with GDPR and other privacy regulations.

Apart from a checkbox or text field, you can also receive your checkout CTA to the next level with a popup or banner on your purchase confirmation screen. By investing in a more exciting design, you’ll have a better chance of grabbing a customer’s attention and earning an email list signup.

6 advanced strategies to accelerate email list growth

Once you’ve laid a solid foundation and started adding subscribers to your email list, it’s period to look at more advanced tactics to accelerate the growth of your email list. Here are a few out-of-the-box solutions to assist you receive your email list building to the next level.

1. Add chatbots to engage with prospects.
2. debt third-event email list growth tools.
3. Drive email signups with ad campaigns.
4. Survey your target spectators.
5. Entice visitors with valuable content.
6. Run contests or giveaways on social media.

1. Use a chatbot to engage with prospects

While it’s still realizing its packed potential, chatbot technology already offers a number of effective tools to assist you automate your messaging with website visitors. This can assist you not only save you valuable period and attempt in customer back, but also make distinctive offers generate email list signups.

Shopify Inbox (available on all plans) allows you to make automated messages for customers and boost insights to focus on chats that will convert. Messaging is an extremely popular way among consumers for interacting with brands, and may achieve where a standard navigator capture form or landing page fails.

2. debt email list growth tools

There are lots of straightforward-to-use apps to assist you construct your email list, some of which add clever twists to proven approaches. Shopify Forms is a free app that helps you develop your marketing list and convert recent leads. Here are a couple of third-event tools to also consider:

Spin to triumph is an app that can be used to collect email addresses on your website Wheel of Fortune–style. In an fascinating, well, spin on the usual pop-up propose, by entering their email shoppers can triumph various prizes (such as discount coupons) that you set. Just be considerate and cautious about what it might cruel if shoppers “misplace” this game and miss out on an propose completely.

Personizely includes a host of features to assist you prompt visitors with a just-in-period pop-up. What makes it fascinating for merchants looking to construct their newsletter is the built-in capability to use a traditional form or the Facebook Messenger integration, which gives you the chance to contact Messenger users the same way you’d contact a subscriber on an email list.

Many pop-up tools like, such as Personizely, propose a variety of ways to convert passerby readers to subscribers, whether through email or messaging apps.

3. Drive email signups with ad campaigns

Since landing pages are usually built with a single outcome or conversion point in mind, they’re often very useful for building your email list. By isolating landing pages to specific campaigns, you can not only craft a obvious propose on a distraction-free page, but also assess your results more accurately. Because of this, landing pages are also a great place to send traffic from digital ad campaigns.

Whether you’re looking at social media, search, or some other advertising channel, there are countless options for driving email list signups with online ads. For instance, you can place banner ads on YouTube videos related to your industry, or run targeted Facebook ads to drive visitors to a downloadable navigator that’s related to your product (e.g., a recipe book to pair with your kitchen gadgets.) 

With the powerful spectators targeting tools in Google AdWords and Facebook Ads Manager, you can construct an propose with an spectators already in mind, then tweak attributes like location, age, gender, profession, interests, and more to reach the correct people.

4. Survey your target spectators

Building an effective digital marketing schedule is all about collecting the correct data. With visitor surveys and questionnaires, you can gather valuable information about your spectators’s wants, needs, and feedback while capturing their emails for marketing purposes. 

To use an online survey, commence with a specific objective, like trade research or even crowdsourced blog content. You can include a field in your survey to capture email addresses, then invite survey takers to opt into your email list at the complete. Once you have a objective in mind, there are plenty of lightweight tools and services out there for creating customer surveys, including Google Forms, Typeform, and SurveyMonkey. 

Send your survey to friends and household, post it in Facebook groups, mention it on social media, and include a special propose for people who fill it out. For example, you could declare, “Upon filling out our short questionnaire, you’ll get a special code for 10% off your first online purchase.” You might even consider sending out a questionnaire before your product launches. This is a great way to get your email list started and bring friends, household, and potential customers on your recent business trip.

5. Entice visitors with valuable content

When building your email list, it’s significant to recall that your physical product or subscription is not your only worth proposition. You started your online business to solve a issue or address a require, which means you have some valuable ideas and solutions. By sharing those ideas in the form of blogging or downloadable content, you can make a navigator magnet that adds worth for your target spectators and builds depend in your brand, generating more email signups and, eventually, more customers.

Tortuga backpacks offers a free packing list in addition to ongoing tips for travelers, when you sign up for their newsletter.

Content marketing is a large, complicated topic, and there are lots of content options that will inspire prospects to provide an email address, including podcasts, webinars, and videos. If you don’t currently have a great understanding of how much the average subscriber is worth to your business, you may desire to invest in an initial content marketing propose that has an upfront expense, but no ongoing costs once the propose is complete. 

A free ebook or navigator, usually in the form of how-to content, case studies, or additional tips and tricks in your product category, is the perfect example. After the expense of your period (and yes, your period is very valuable!) or the associated writing and design fees, you can propose a powerful incentive to join your email newsletter and you won’t have any recurring costs, aside from hosting the navigator itself.

6. Run contests or giveaways on social media

Contests and giveaways can assist accelerate list growth by turning the act of subscribing into a shareable and winnable occurrence. The added momentum of a contest can be especially valuable in the early days, when your list of subscribers is tiny and you don’t have existing traffic to debt.

One way to amplify this schedule is by partnering with other ecommerce brands who sell to similar customers. With the correct associate, your products will complement each other, making the propose more compelling than if you ran the contest alone.

Another alternative is to look for influencers who are already reaching your ideal customers on social platforms like Instagram. Since influencers often use giveaways for their own purposes—typically, to shatter through the noise and develop their following—you may be able to justify the expense of offering your product in trade for their ability to kickstart your giveaway campaign.

If you desire to make a dedicated landing page for your giveaway so there’s a single goal and traffic is easier to track, you can try solutions like ShortStack or ConvertFlow.

Marketing tools for managing your email list

As you develop your email list from a few subscribers to a few thousand, it’s significant to invest in tools and platforms to assist you manage, organize, and debt your data. Here are a few email marketing solutions to get you started.

Shopify Email

If you require to construct an email list for your ecommerce business, look no further than Shopify Email, Shopify’s own email marketing answer. With Shopify Email, you can make, send, and track campaigns to develop your email list, automate key marketing moments using pre-built automation templates, and capture leads for free using Shopify Forms—all from within your existing Shopify account. With your first 10,000 emails free every month, and affordable rates after that, Shopify Email is the perfect tool to assist you commence putting your email list to work.

MailChimp

MailChimp’s offerings commence with a free schedule that offers basic email template creation, as well as scheduling and automation options. With a paid subscription, you’ll have access to more additional expense email templates, as well as advanced tools to provide you insight on your email list and campaigns.

Zapier

One of the most challenging aspects of building and leveraging an email list is figuring out how to seamlessly integrate all of the different platforms and technologies you’re using to run your online business. Zapier allows you to make automated workflows that close the gaps between your tools without the require for a software developer. With Zapier’s workflows, you can automatically pull recent email subscribers from social media, landing pages, survey tools, or live events into your email database, eliminating the manual labor of organizing your lists.

Read more: The Top 11 Email Marketing Software for Online Stores

Building an email list is just the beginning

No two businesses are exactly alike, so it’s significant to test various strategies for building your email list to discover what works best. Once you have a solid collection of targeted, relevant prospects, you can commence refining your email marketing to achieve your specific goals. 

For ideas and examples of successful email marketing campaigns, check out our navigator: Ecommerce Email Marketing Campaigns.