How to Build an Email List

Email is still one of the best ways for a brand to build and maintain a relationship with its customers. Creating a qualified, segmented email list is important to the success of your digital strategy.

Statistics that prove it

Acquisition and retention rates vary significantly across different digital marketing channels, such as email marketing, organic search, and paid search. Below are updated figures for each of these channels:

Email Marketing:

• Email marketing remains one of the most effective ways to reach customers and drive sales. The average email open rate is 21%; however, segmented and personalized emails can achieve open rates of up to 50%. In addition, email marketing generates a return of US$ 44 for every US$ 1 spent, resulting in an ROI of 4,400%. Intelligenzia

Organic Search:

• Organic traffic accounts for more than 50% of all website traffic, representing 51.5% of total traffic, while paid media traffic represents 35.3%. In addition, 70% of companies generated more sales through SEO than through PPC (pay-per-click). Intelligenzia

Paid Search:

• Paid search, or PPC (Pay-Per-Click), returns approximately US$ 2 for every US$ 1 invested. Facebook ads and Google Ads have the highest ROI of any paid channel. However, only 45% of small businesses have a paid search strategy in place. Ranktracker

Based on the results above, we can see that building an email list and launching email marketing campaigns are essential for acquiring more customers and then retaining them.

Never buy an email list

I'm sure you've heard this from many people, but it's my job to reinforce this point in this article: never buy an email list.

Although it may seem like a quick way to start sending email marketing campaigns, it's also one of the best ways to get poor results, damage your reputation, and waste money.

Engagement with purchased lists is extremely low because the people on the list don't know your company and often aren't looking for the services you're offering.

Remember: It's better to have a list of 1,000 people, where 300 open your message (a 30% open rate), than a list of 10,000 people where the same 300 open your message (a 3% open rate).

Beyond the difference in open rates, with purchased lists, the fact that someone opened your message doesn't mean they're actually a potential buyer.

So, how do you build an email list?

A qualified email list is one of a brand's most important assets. After all, significant investment goes into getting potential customers to share their email addresses so your company can communicate with them.

You can use some interesting techniques and tools to collect contacts for your list, including:

• Landing pages: In exchange for exclusive, valuable content (often called a lead magnet), you ask users to fill out a simple form, which typically requests their name, phone number, job title, and company in addition to their email address. Common lead magnets include e-books and infographics;
• Newsletter forms: Encouraging readers to sign up for your newsletter through forms so they can continue receiving updates is an old technique, but it still works very well;
• Exit-intent modals: These are the "popups" that appear when you move your mouse to leave a page and ask you to provide some contact information (always including your email address) to keep receiving updates;

Let customers leave your list

Always include a link in your email marketing messages that allows people to unsubscribe.

It may not seem like it, but unsubscribes can be a good thing. They signal that a user is no longer interested in receiving your content, so if this happens frequently, you can look into a few things:

• Is the content I'm sending really useful to the user?
• Am I sending emails too frequently?
• How did the users who unsubscribed get onto my list? Is there a pattern or an unqualified source?

Also, it's better for a user to unsubscribe from your list than to mark your email as SPAM and damage your reputation.

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Read also: Why use email marketing?