11 Tried and Tested Email List Building Strategies that Works in 2023

Email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to connect with your customers and grow your business. While the tactics you use might change over time, these 11 tried and tested email list building strategies will continue to work in 2023. So, if you’re looking for some new ideas to build your email list, look no further.

What is an Email List?

An email list is a collection of email addresses meaning anyone who has subscribed to your newsletter, blog or website or any emails you collected from people in person. Your email subscribers are simply people who want to hear from you.

Why Email Marketing Still Matters for B2B

One digital marketing strategy has stayed relevant for so long, and it is none other than email marketing. Email marketing stayed even when algorithmic changes, third-party cookies, and AI revolutions happened. In a recent study, nearly 75% of marketers reported that the effectiveness of their email marketing is either improving or stable.

For B2B companies, this is even more, the case. Longer marketing funnels and more engagement with decision-makers mean immediate access to leads is critical to success.

Sales reps can connect personally with leads using email addresses without depending on social media adverts to target barely relevant prospects. Gathering email addresses let you cater to your leads’ needs directly and personally.

Why are Email List-Building Strategies Essential?

Email list building can let you achieve the crucial marketing goals below:

1. Effective branding campaigns through storytelling and nurturing.
   
   
2. More clicks & website traffic.
   
   
3. Improve blog readership by using this as a cost-effective content distribution mechanism.
   
   
4. Direct sales and conversion campaigns.
   
   
5. Resilient “owned” media that is immune to social media algorithms and search engine penalties.
   
   
6. Stupid-simple performance tracking KPIs (Open rate, Click through rate).
   
   
7. Among the most straightforward and cheapest marketing channels to operate.
   
   
8. The average cost per email subscriber is low, particularly mid-to-long-term.

11 tried and tested email list-building strategies

1. Keep Your Email List Database Clean & Updated

Do you know that over 30% of subscribers change their email yearly? That means if you did not clean or upgrade your database your genuine subscribers will be lost. Also, any dormant subscribers will be forbidden to open and engage with your email harming your marketing efforts.

Therefore, it is important to clean up your list and remove those who do not open or engage with your emails from time to time. Remember they were never helping your business as email engagement is an important metric.

Also, before even sending that first welcome sequence, you have to ensure that the email verification has taken place so you are only sending emails to valid and accurate email addresses.

2. Nudge everyone to sign up immediately

To boost your signup rates, you have to strategically place personalized CTAs where it matters, such as landing pages and blog posts. But how can you attract real visitors who want to sign up immediately?

For instance, if your newsletter primarily focuses on one or two topics, it’s pretty easy to make a personalized CTA — write a CTA that reflects your newsletter’s purpose, such as, “Want free SEO hacks? Sign up for our newsletter!”

3. Add a CTA on your About Us page

When it comes to email list building strategies your About Us page plays a crucial role in terms of conversion potential. Think of it like this: how frequently do you visit About Us pages for businesses you don’t care about?

Ideally, you’re About Us page will help your prime visitors to know more about your business, but it might not be enough to persuade them to purchase. A CTA prompting them to sign up for a newsletter is easier to concede to than “buy now”.

4. Spin Wheels are the Wheels of Email Fortune

Offering discounts is one of the common email list building strategies that is slowly becoming redundant. According to retailers and business owners, a free coupon or a certain percentage off does not work for prospective email leads. Most offers lie unused and do not lead to any further engagement.

To level up the game, developers have shifted towards gamification in pop-ups. Game design components are widely used for more engagement and to add a fun element.  

It has been around for a long time but it is routinely used in online games. Now, businesses are using it to rope audiences with an opportunity to spin the wheel and win exciting prizes or discounts.

5. Use the Right Words

Make sure that visitors notice your incentive’s value across your email opt-in forms. You should be clear about its value, whether offering a discount coupon or a downloadable template. Most of the time, this implies paying attention to the copy of your signup forms.

So, consider experimenting with CTA copy like “subscribe,” “download,” and “get my ebook” to understand which performs better. You can make this part of your list-building strategy by testing different graphics and languages. 

6. A Targeted Landing Page

You can also create an email list outside of your home page. It will help if you focus on specific funnels to get your sales or subscribers when conducting your marketing and advertising campaigns.

For instance, you can offer a limited-time, exclusive sale or a free plus shipping offer.

Instead of directing them to your homepage, consider sending them to a landing page.

This landing page will include fewer elements than your store pages, as it is meant for high conversions by focusing only on one product.

Visitors must subscribe to an email list to get that product or offer. With good testing, you can enhance your landing page’s conversion rates, build your email list and increase your sales.

7. Powerful Lead Magnets

People are naturally skeptical of new stores and usually quite reluctant to buy anything the first time. Therefore the average conversion rate for multiple ecommerce stores is about 3%, which means that a complete 97% of visitors will leave your store, and most will never return.

To bypass that, you can transform your visitors into subscribers with the help of a lead magnet.

A lead magnet is a helpful resource—like a PDF guide, ebook, gift guide, stock images, etc.—that your visitors like and one of the best ways to build an email list.

To get that resource, they must sign up for your newsletter and email campaigns.

8. Choose a Trustworthy Email Marketing Platform

Another best email list building strategy is to select an email marketing platform. Before sending email campaigns, you must manage your first contacts through platforms like Gmail and Outlook.

But to efficiently collect and organize your growing email list and send automated email campaigns, you require a reliable email marketing tool. So, you need a platform to get more email subscribers and rely on its features to create engaging emails.

Investing in a powerful email marketing platform will save precious time while making your email list from scratch and capitalize on the full potential of email marketing.

NotifyVisitors is an intuitive email marketing tool to boost email signups and offers advanced segmentation options to maximize the efficiency of your campaign. 

If you want to build your list organically, look for other useful features in the email marketing platform of your choice. Such features contain a landing page builder, marketing automation, and A/B testing capabilities.

9. Contests & Giveaways

Another way of bringing people to sign up for your newsletter and boost your email list is to conduct a contest or a giveaway to win a free prize or a significant discount on your product or service.

You have to make sure contestants sign up with their emails and invite people to participate in your contest or giveaway for more entries. It will boost the virality and the success of your marketing efforts. You can furthermore set up custom email flows for your contestants to keep them engaged and updated as the contest progresses.

10. Testimonials and Numbers

In this competitive era, if you want to grow your email list, you have to showcase your subscribers and how many people have already subscribed to your blog, validating your services.

It is a great email list-building strategy that works well, but if your email list fails to reach double figures, there is no sense in putting it out.

However, there is a better way to solve this issue; instead of showing the number of people who have signed up for your newsletter, show testimonials from those who have already subscribed and display them on the signup page.

Testimonials from others will boost your credibility, facilitate your reader’s trust, and thus improve your subscriber count over time.

11. Collaborate With Other Companies or Brands

Collaborating with other companies can help reach a wide audience to host a joint campaign.

While pitching to them, you should highlight how they would be benefitted from the collaboration. Here are some of the ideas to collaborate on:

Host webinar: Usually, interview-style webinars perform the best. So either you can invite someone and promote them to both your and the guests’ email list. Or you can be a guest and ask them to promote it to their audience with your subscription forms.

Discounts: Associate with another company to offer a discount to their audience. For instance, if someone has a newsletter around coffee and you have an online course coming up on baking cookies, you can collaborate with that company to present a 10% discount to their readers.

Cross-promotion: You can collaborate with a brand to share each others’ social media space for a few days or share the same booth in an offline event.

You have to ensure that the collaboration is a win-win for both and get qualified leads. Collaborate with brands that cater to the same audience that you are looking for.

Conclusion

Email list building is one of the most important aspects of an online business. By using some or all of these email list building strategies, you can bring in more leads and customers who are interested in what you have to offer. Which strategy will you try first?

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