4 Ways To Build Your Prospect Email List

This blog is an excerpt that was originally published on WhatSayTheExperts.com

Email Isn’t Dead.

Email’s imminent demise has been heralded by media pundits for almost as long as I’ve been in the business–20 years now. And yet it remains a top 3 channel for profitability, engagement, and conversion rates for nearly every brand, with $38 gained for every marketing dollar spent on email.

If anything, email has become increasingly important for brands, particularly e-retailers. We live in an unprecedented age of interconnectedness and email is a part of that which is why it’s important to build your prospect email list. Moreover, most marketing tools and large media sources have evolved to tie directly into your email service provider (ESP). These days campaigns can be set up to feed customer data directly into your database and, likewise, be dynamically fed to media sources like Facebook to improve your ad campaign targeting. People who have signed up to your email list and added something to the shopping cart but not completed the purchase can also be retargeted across a wide swath of the Internet.

With such flexibility and return on investment, it makes good sense to explore how to grow your email list size. There are a ton of different ways to accomplish this. Some are great, some will yield a disaster. Choose wisely or work with someone like Chameleon Collective who can help you avoid the pitfalls. Below are a few tips that can give you a jump start.

Tip 1: Know Your Audience

Successful list building begins with knowing exactly who your audience is. Google Analytics is your friend. Doing surveys or (gasp!) talking to existing customers will help clarify further. Explore tools like SEMRush. Figure out who your audience is as specific as you’re able before doing any advertising to acquire new users.

Next, you need to create a simple financial model of the value of those who do opt-in. You should also set the KPIs that drive the value. You’ll want to update it frequently. This will become your sextant to guide what you’re willing to pay to acquire a new user to your prospect email list and what you expect users to do once they’ve opted-in.

Once you’ve done your homework it’s time to implement a mechanism that is simple and quick for users to opt-in to your email list. And make sure you’re GDPR-compliant. You don’t want to capture a lawsuit instead of an email address.

Tip 2: Collect More than Just their Email

As the saying goes, a broken clock is still right twice a day. So while pundits claiming that email is dead is a far cry from reality, their crystal balls have accurately predicted (some 15 years down the road) that email as a consumer medium is not as powerful as it once was. Site traffic and purchasing behavior have in the past five years shifted hard to mobile, especially with younger audiences. As AdWeek recently pointed out, 73% of Millennials use their phones to shop online. Figuring out ways to build relationships via SMS and text should be at the forefront of any list building strategy. So still collect emails, but also realize that it is imperative to explore ways outside of email that provides a similar mechanism and engagement level.

Tip 3: Make Creative Social Campaigns for Your Email List

Remember the work you did in Tip 1? You can use all of that on Facebook & Instagram to acquire very targeted opt-ins cost-effectively. There are a variety of different ways to do this as they clearly explain on their website. For users it’s a simple two clicks to sign up—no lengthy forms to fill out and no landing pages for you to manage. It’s common for a brand to add some form of incentive to induce the opt-in. This can include a contest, a discount off first purchase, or some other form of enticement for your email list. A great thing about this method is you can easily have the folks who opt-in automatically feed into your prospect email list’s database.

You should make sure to have different types of emails set up to send to your prospective clients once they have joined your email list or you could lose your audience just as quickly. 

Bonus Tip 4: As with the mobile shift noted above, a similar trend has been happening in the social channels. More people now use social messenger apps than the social platforms themselves. Because of the relative newness of messengers as a marketing medium, open rates and conversion rates tend to be notably higher than email. There is any number of different platforms that can assist you in implementing a messenger-based lead generation program; you’ll need to research and find the one that fits your particular needs best.

Implement these 3 tips and you’ll have a full prospect email list of potential leads in your possession. Before you begin to send out those emails, make sure to read our blog on the 41 ways to add value when cold emailing prospects.