I know you opened this article in desperation like the previous articles you read, and you don’t expect to see anything but the usual methods to build an email list.
Honestly, methods like pop-ups, CTA, and landing pages are obsolete practices in list building. To build an effective email list, you need creative ideas that attract visitors with their own desire, not by force or begging!
I believe my ideas will help you to do this. First, let’s glance at how email lists can help you. Then I will show you some fresh ideas to generate an email list to convert more, which we are experts in.
Email lists: A Quick review
It’s important, and here’s why
- Email is the first communication channel: Email allows you to communicate directly with users without the intervention of any system.
- Your email list is safe: Any social platform can suspend or delete your account with all your subscribers. But this is not true for emails. You own your email list, and no one can take it away.
- Emails have better conversion: If you still think social media has room for improvement, consider that the average email order is at least three times higher than social media. Emails convert more, like us =).
Buy or Create?
If you want to waste your time, throw your money in the trash, and end up in the spam email of thousands of users, buying an email list is the choice. This is what many business owners do, even your competitors.
At MoreConvert, based on our research and experience, we have concluded buying email lists is wrong. Why?
- There is no guarantee that email addresses are active. They may be fake or belong to users who no longer use them.
- The people on the list may not have any interest or connection to your business.
- The risk of your email account being spammed is very high.
- Email services quickly identify and block your website and email.
Who Is Included
You can build email lists in several ways that include people who have:
- Bought something from you
- Subscribed via your website
- Signed up for your product
- Met you at an event
Your Three Priorities
To build a significant email list, your three priorities are:
- Quality: Avoid purchased email lists with bots, spam accounts, and abandoned emails. You need information from real people.
- Relevance: Approach people interested in your products or services. Otherwise, you’ll see leads unsubscribe before you take a step.
- Quantity: After the previous steps, focus on expanding your email list to welcome new leads.
How To Build an Email List: 8+ Innovative Ideas
Forget all the methods you have studied so far. You don’t have enough time to try them all in your store. Take a step further with me and learn more creative strategies in which the values you offer attract the audience, not marketing formulas!
✅ Optimize Your Form Design to Build an Email List
You may create many pop opt-in forms and subscription pages to collect visitors’ email ids, names, and other details.
With more people getting digital awareness, people now don’t readily provide their details in opt-in forms like before. They have become more cautious.
However, providing a well-designed form may convince potential subscribers to sign up. Here’s what you can do:
🔸Use Fewer Form Fields
As I mentioned, requesting too much info in several form fields is the number one turn-off for customers. 4 is the maximum number of fields.
For best results, you should only have one field. This indicates to potential subscribers that they won’t be spending so much time filling out your form.
🔸Make Your Exit Button Clearly Visible
Having an unnoticeable close button can be very annoying to visitors. Ensure that you make your exit button clear enough on your opt-in forms.
Visitors would quickly leave if they were not interested in your offering by not making your exit button visible.
🔶 Use Power Words
Which one is more tempting?
- Sign up for our weekly newsletter.
- Get current marketing secrets in your mailbox.
The second one contains power words, for sure. Power words are those keywords that get the best of every customer’s curiosity, greed, and desire. Examples of power words are:
- Exclusive
- Limited
- Special
- Fast
- Guaranteed
- Unique
You can incorporate these words into your opt-in copy to excite your visitors.
🔸Be Specific About Your Offering
Show visitors the solutions to “What’s in it for me?” and they’re much more likely to sign up.
Why saying :
Get a Free Ebook on Online Businesses
When you can tell them the fleshy details in the book. For example :
20 Profitable Ideas to Make Extra Money from the internet in 2022
🔶 Use Social Proof
Customers always want validity. The best way to show this is social proof. This can be in the shape of the number of downloads, readers, recommendations, or sign-ups.
🔸Limit The Available Options
Which sounds better to you?
Bringing on cocktails…
…or crying alone in your apartment?
Well, it’s a silly question, but those are the two options Gothamist offers on its exit intent popup.
Another example is Green Mountain Mustard.
Why would these forms give a stupid option like that? Well, these forms have one thing in common:
They make you feel like an idiot for not opting in.
Scientific research shows that two options convert better than one option. So, include a second option (even a silly one) to convert more people into email subscribers.
🔸Get Personal
People are more likely to interact with your form when they feel a personal brand behind your information. To get the best of the psychology behind this, you can use copy words like “join me …” or “Hi, I am …”.
✅ Use Gamification
Sometimes discounts and sales are not enough to engage your visitors. That’s why thinking outside the box is a great idea. Gamification is an interactive sign-up form that is fun for visitors and effective for eCommerce store owners.
Gamification in list building uses interactive game-playing elements to encourage engagement with a lead capture form.
Some examples of gamification include
- Quizzes
- Surveys
- Spin-to-win
- Scratchcards
Gamification offers exclusive prizes, like discounts up to 50%, giveaways, or other freebies that shoppers can win by entering their email addresses.
The value of gamification lies in its ability to drill into psychology. Customers are encouraged by rewards that seem easily achievable. This fascinates visitors who feel they are getting something for nothing and will eagerly sign up.
✅ Quizzes
Quizzes encourage curiosity. That’s why you can use quizzes to capture information from people. LeadQuizzes is the most used quiz maker in eCommerce. It helps you to create a quiz that matches your branding.
The quiz embeds on your site and will be easily accessible. Everyone can enter the quiz but must add their email addresses to see their results.
✅ Spin-to-win (Wheel of fortune)
Wheel of Fortune is a fun game that the visitor “spins” to get a prize. To spin the wheel, the visitor must sign up with an email address. You can determine the prize as you wish. Here are some ideas:
- Spin again
- %X discount
- Free shipping
- Free item
- No offer
Either way, it’s a win-win. You will get the email address, and the visitor gets savings on their purchase when they join.
✅ Leverage Social Media to Build an Email List
Imagine having over 1k followers on Instagram and Twitter. Feels good, yeah?
Now let’s say suddenly your social media accounts get suspended. What happens? There will be two scenarios:
- You know nothing about your followers, and they are gone forever.
- You made an email list of your followers and can contact them anytime.
You prefer the second scenario, surely. But you may not know how to turn your followers into subscribers. Well, each social media needs a different strategy. Let’s see.
Include a CTA in your Facebook page cover image
A customizable header is an option that Facebook offers. Use this header to place a CTA. Include the link to your list in the cover photo caption.
Set your Facebook page’s call to action button
If you want to add the email list opt-in directly, the Facebook CTA button is a good option. The button copy can call the visitor to “Sign Up” or “Join”.
Schedule Facebook post with email CTAS
Using Facebook posts encourages your followers to subscribe. You can offer a freebie in the caption to entice your followers, like Mara.
She offers a gift worth $50 to attract people to click the link.
Start a subscribers-only Facebook Group
Create a private Facebook Group with entry requirements. When requesting to join your Facebook group, ask for their email address.
As your group grows, your email list attracts more social proof, and more people will want to be a part of it.
Include a CTA in your Instagram bio
Do people need to know who you are? Yes, but what is more important? Building a connection with them.
So use your social media bio to drive followers to your email list. The CTA can be your website home or a landing page.
Do a call-to-action post on Instagram
Create an image of your opt-in offer. Instagram doesn’t allow you to add links in the caption. So, in the post image, mention the link to your offer or landing page in your bio.
Use Instagram stories “Add link” Feature
Include the link to your email list in your story. When your followers view your story and click the link, they will directly go to your email list subscription page.
Pin a Tweet with a CTA to join your list
Your pin Tweet remains at the top of your profile. This is the best place to show random visitors the link to your email list.
Promote your tweets
Twitter offers a wonderful feature to help you get noticed more. You should pay an amount and let Twitter promote your content. This way, people will see your tweet even if they don’t follow you.
Include a CTA in your Pinterest bio
Pinterest doesn’t show links in the bio preview. But when someone needs your link, they click on “more …”. So if you provide the opt-in link, there is a high chance of subscribing.
Pin your CTA to a group board on Pinterest
Become a developer of the popular group boards in your industry. Use Pingroupie to find relevant group boards and add your Pinnable images with CTA.
Include other relevant content so that visitors don’t think You want only to contribute your own calls to action.
Share in LinkedIn Groups
Join active groups in your industry. Add value to the group members for a period. When you become an active member, share your offer to join your email list.
Comment on posts related to your work
Your comments are frequently shown in your followers’ feeds. So try to find related topics and include the CTA while you are solving a problem in your comment.
✅ Embrace WooCommerce Wishlists to Build an Email List
Wishlists usually were used as a tool to let customers gather their favorite products. But this definition has changed in recent years.
Email marketing is the main feature of modern wishlists. This means you have the ability to collect visitors’ emails. And that’s not even the best part.
Wishlist puts customers on a path where they provide their emails unconsciously.
Imagine you visit a website and like some of the products. You click the heart button to save the items. This is where wishlists come in handy. Look at what ASOS does.
ASOS allows shoppers to add items to their wishlist without signing in or registering.
However, they ask for an email address to sync saved items on all the devices.
Fortunately, there are a lot of options to ask for emails with wishlists. One way is to enable wishlists for subscribers. This is an option that MC Wishlist offers for free.
The plugin shows its powers when using emails. You can easily create a customized list of users and use it to send promotional emails, discounts, and personalized offers.
✅ Have a captivating lead magnet to Build an Email List
- Please give me your email!
- I want to send you a valuable gift. Would you like to give me your email?
Seriously, does anyone find the first sentence captivating? If you want something, give it something. This is the rule of reciprocity.
A lead magnet is something practical for visitors. Something that grabs their attention even after a lot of thinking.
Some of the popular lead magnets are:
- Educational materials
- Checklist
- Resource kit
- Framework
- Report
- Guide
- Ebook
They will need to sign up for your email list to get any of these gifts.
There are two things you should note:
- Offer a lead magnet directly related to your niche. If you sell flowers, you shouldn’t gift a T-shirt. It may be nice, but it doesn’t meet your sales approaches.
- Instead of nagging customers on every page of your site, make 20% of the great pages with high on-site times greater. Then provide the lead magnet limited to those pages.
✅ Repurpose your content to build an email list
Repurposing, renovating, and recreating, there is “re” at the beginning of each one! So you publish the same content again, but in a different form hoping to reach a wider audience.
There will be 3 questions.
1. How can this help you to create an email list?
The most common way is to offer newsletters to visitors. They require very little work. There is more than newsletters of course:
- Sharing the results of a social poll
- Sharing user-generated contents
- Offering content upgrades
2. What content deserves repurposing?
You have 3 types of content on your website.
- Evergreen: Continues to be valuable and relevant over time, How to boil an egg.
- Popular: Performed so well for a period, What to do in Covid quarantine.
- Outdated: Largely relevant but includes outdated references, need updates, Best 2020 dropshipping products.
Evergreen contents are the best candidates to be repurposed.
Popular posts are your instructors to learn the content marketing pattern. Google Analytics shows you which posts were people’s favorite.
Outdated posts need the most practice. You should refurbish the content, style, and promotion plan.
3. How to repurpose content?
The whole process is simple. You republish evergreen content with a new style.
What do I mean by new style? An attractive form of presenting your current posts that were created in classic form (blog post, PowerPoint presentation, …).
There are many ideas to do this. Some of them are below:
- Webinars – Youtube tutorials
- Website data – Case studies
- Image-based posts – Pinterest boards
- Quora Q&A – Blog post
- Slideshow – Infographic
- Facts and statistics – Twitter post
- Blog posts – Podcast
✅ Bonus Ideas
I think those four ideas can push you far ahead of your competitors. However, there are some additional ways to grow your email list.
🔸Learn from competitors
Are your competitors better in list building than you? Well, figure out what they are doing! BuiltWith is a great tool to help you analyze other websites’ performance without coding.
You should only enter any website URL and focus on the “Analytics and Tracking” section. It shows every tool they are using for split testing and email marketing.
🔸Try offline methods
No matter where technology goes, some people like classic methods. Why don’t you give it a shot?
- If you sell your products in the real world, simply ask for customers’ emails.
- Business cards always remain classy. Design a tempting card and exchange it with other business owners.
- Every day several events are held near you. Participate in or host a related event and have a registration form.
Final Words
From Social Media to the Offline World, there are various ways to build an email list. The most important point is to know what is the best option for your business.
Social media is the widest, and wishlists are the most underrated list-building methods. If you want to start with something accessible for everyone, try Instagram or Twitter.
Wishlists will be there for you when you feel exhausted from doing everything manually.
What do you think about these ideas? Do you have another suggestion? Please share it with us.
