20 Ways To Collect Email Addresses For Email Marketing

If you are looking for ideas to collect email addresses from your targeted audience, here are 20 ways to do it. According to research conducted by Content Marketing Institute in 2019, 87% of marketers use email campaigns to improve their sales.

I run email marketing campaigns twice a week and around 13% of sales and referrals come from that every month. If I compare the cost of conversion from email marketing with regular PPC or social media leads the cost is 50% less than other lead channels.

That is why I am focusing more on collecting the email addresses of potential clients than ever, and this guide will help you with similar ideas.

Why Collect Email Addresses

Email marketing is a type of marketing in which you send out messages to advertise your new line of products. Maybe it could also be announcements of discounts or any other service your business provides. You can also use it to keep your target audience engaged and informed.

20 Ways To Collect Email Addresses For Email Marketing

Email lists of the relevant audience can yield better conversion ratios than regular channels.
The cost to collect these email addresses is cheaper.

The benefit of referrals, Upselling, and Cross-selling opportunities in future through customer email list.

Email lists, also known as subscriber lists, grow as you accumulate more email addresses. However, they also shrink when your customer or members unsubscribe and leave.

Sometimes your email marketing contact database withers over time and gets smaller. That’s because your contacts’ may change their email addresses with time for any number of reasons, they might also choose to unsubscribe or just altogether ditch the email address they filled out the form with.

How to Collect Email Addresses for Email Marketing

To get an email address from your prospective clients, you must understand what they are looking for. Collecting random emails from all audiences won’t have the impact or the conversions that you are looking for.

As a business owner or a marketer, we need attention to the relevant audience segment that is smaller in number. Thats the target on which we need to focus our time and resources.

Work on these 3 principles steps to collect email and whichever approach you use, it will work:

Get attention (Hook)
Show them the benefit (Value)
Ask for an email in return ( CTAs)

These are the steps that we need to implement to get what we need, now all you need is one of the below-given ideas, and either one or two or many multiple suggestions shared below will work for your business.

20 Ideas to Collect Email Addresses

20. Provide Incentives

Offer up the same kind of incentive to your email contact list. It may be a free ebook, an online tool they can use, a time-limited discount, early access, or even the chance to win something, etc. Make sure you keep something in it for them.

Here are some examples of incentives that can help you get more email address submissions:

eBook
Guides (Downloadable)
PDF files

Discounts
Coupons
Newsletter Content

Premium Content

When writing up an email that you are sending to your targeted audience, place yourself in their shoes first.

Think back to all the emails you opened and kept in your inbox as well as those you deleted right away. You probably kept those that were somehow profiting you.

19. Say No to Spam

All email accounts have a spam folder. Why is that? Because spams are annoying and irritating for everyone. No one wants to read another email, just an hour later after they already read the previous one.

How to write effective emails

Start Email With a Hook

Provide Value ( Info, Discount, Coupon, Update)
Make them feel valued
Ask them to subscribe or Insert some CTAs

Provide Unsubscribe Option
Clearly Mention Contact Details
Don’t waste their time with anything extra or meaningless

Another thing of note is that spam emails often contain fluff and have nothing to offer of value. So if you continue spamming your email contact list, it will more often than not end up ignored, and eventually, your audience will end up opting out.

Try keeping your emails informative, interactive, and intriguing which keeps on bringing your audience back to you for more. This will also help expand your target audience and help in collecting more email addresses for email marketing.

18. Offer up Helpful Resources

Websites like Chegg provide textbook solutions and other helpful answers to students who sign up through their email addresses.

Popular Posts/Content
Trending Content
Relevant Niche Content User searched for or interested In

eBook
Info Brochure

Offer up any kind of helpful resource that your business may be able to provide them with. This is a surefire way to collect email addresses for email marketing.

Social media advertisement is an amazing tool that can be used for the collection of emails. This kind of advertisement is relatively cheap, shows quick results, and helps you in connecting with your target audience.

Here is how you can do it:

Select a channel like Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media.

Create an attractive ad.
Design a landing page where you will collect email addresses
Set up an Ad campaign with Traffic as a goal and optimize for the best Click CTR & CPC.

Now you have the funnel ready.

People who see your ad on social media will click on the ad and get directed to the landing page where they will enter their email address to subscribe.

Social media accounts are tailored according to the preferences of the user. The advertisements appear in front of audiences with the same interests and preferences as your email contact lists.

Link a sign-up form or add a link to your website with the ads that you are creating and promoting for hassle-free signup.

If you own a website, use it to promote signups for your newsletter to collect email addresses. Share engaging tidbits and other small announcements, with the additional statement that the newsletter will contain more. This will entice people to sign up.

Usually, websites have a pop-up or a header that induces people to sign up, such as the New York Times, which contains a link for easy sign-ups. You can include a box or a form on your website through which people can sign up.

Screen Shot 2022 07 08 at 10.28.44 PM — *Example of newsletter box on the website*

Keep it in front of visitors. Do not hide it all the way down at the end of the page. Out of sight is out of mind.

Any chance you get, show the path to your newsletter. However, do keep an option through which people can opt out if they choose to do so, or you’ll attract the kind of audience that is not right for you.

15. Send Personalized Emails

When sending out emails to the people on your email list, keep in mind these are actual people you are interacting with and not robots. They have feelings, emotions, and preferences.

Try sending them personalized emails, based on the content they choose on your website or the resources they have used or bought from you before.

Keep your emails entertaining, and informative, and avoid fluff. This way the recipients will look forward to what you have to say and encourage them to keep coming back.

This could also prompt them to share about your business or content through word of mouth or other means, widening your audience and gaining you more subscribers.

When thinking of pop-ups, you might think of flashy signs that attack you all of a sudden, when you quietly wanted to browse. That kind of advertisement is not going to work. However, well-designed and thought-out pop-up advertisements are very effective at expanding your email lists.

According to statistics, the average pop-up form converts at 3.09% which is not that bad. If you’re worried about scaring away potential targets, you can set your pop-ups to appear after a certain amount of scroll so that they appear to people who seem interested. You can also set them to be triggered when people are intending to exit.

Although the idea of pop-ups seems annoying and flashy, they are a great and efficient method for collecting email addresses.

13. Content Gatekeeping

Gatekeeping is having authority over and restricting someone’s access to something.

On your website, you can offer up services with discounts or free resources for just the people who sign up using their email addresses.

People are always looking for free or discounted resources just to make their lives easier and if they only have to give their email address for it, they will surely sign up.

However, sometimes the content you are gatekeeping might not be of interest to other people.

In this scenario, you can offer them free access and later on offer them bonus content that they can only avail of if they sign up or warn them about their access being restricted if they don’t.

12. Just Ask

If you’re new and just starting an email list, instead of going for expensive options to target audiences why not just reach out to people you already know? Family, friends, and acquaintances are a great way of advertising and they will be eager to help you out.

Keep in mind, that you do not want to bother them but asking them once or twice should not be much of an issue.

Apart from your known contacts, reach out one-on-one to individuals and just ask them. Do not be afraid. The worst thing that can happen is they say no.

This is how email lists begin, and when you have collected a decent number of email addresses then you can always avail stuff like SEO or online forums, etc.

11. Advertisement through Subscribers

When sending out marketing emails to subscribers, one additional detail you can add for the collection of email addresses is to insert a share button or ‘email to a friend’ type of button, offering up discounts or rewards for it.

At the bottom, also add a subscribe link so that the emails being forwarded can be used as an easy method for signing up.

In this process, you will get an entryway into your customers’ contact list, their friends, colleagues, etc, providing you with a wider audience you can target.

10. Refresh Your Email List

After a certain time period, you should go through your email list. Send an email to your old subscribers engaging them and enticing them to opt in once more. At the same time, add a warning that you will remove all the contacts who do not participate or respond in any way.

While it may seem like this will shrink your email contact list but emailing the contacts that interact with you better your business range for new audiences and improve the chances of you collecting emails from the right kind of audience for your business.

Stale email lists might look very big and project the image of growth but they are, in fact, counterproductive, for effective marketing and expanding your business.

9. Use Facebook’s Call-To-Action Button

Facebook business pages let you add a call-to-action button at the top of your page. In that, you can attach links to sign-up forms or even your website where you can prompt people to sign up for a resource or service available only to your subscribers.

You can bring more attention to your business by sharing previews on your business’s social media accounts. Creating a post that contains a fragment of what your email newsletter contains, will entice more and more people into signing up. In the post, include a sign-up link for easy and effortless sign-ups.

They will be drawn to all the possibilities of what you have to offer and will sign up, continuing to expand your email list.

You can captivate your target audience by promoting your business through a youtube channel. Showcase surface-level information on what your business has to offer, and then place a link for subscription in the description which leads them to a sign-up form, for more information. If they are intrigued and interested, they will definitely signup.

Additionally, you can place a link to your sign-up forms in the header of your channel as well. If it is well-designed and striking, it will definitely bring the limelight to your content, prompting people to sign up.

6. Feedback from Visitors

Something that people always enjoy giving away for free is their opinions, whether anyone asks for it or not.
On your website, include a field, post, or form that prompts the visitors who come to your page for their feedback.

Ask them about any inquiries they might have about your business, anything they might like to see, what new you can add that could have made it a better experience for them, etc, and then, in the end, ask them to submit their email address.

People enjoy giving feedback and when you respond, it will just bring them back for more, expanding your email list and customers.

5. Cut down on Forms

Sometimes customers might want to interact or buy from you, but when looking at all the details you are asking of them will drive them away.

Collecting as much user information as you possibly can is a very alluring thought. But, adding a lot of fields to your forms and lead-ensnaring pages scares away people.

Cut down on the length of your forms. Shorten them to three or four fields, if possible. Once you are sure, they are here to stay you can always collect more information.

4. Customer Reviews

Customer reviews are the evidence for other people which motivates other people to engage in something.

You ask people to sign up for your newsletter. Do you know what sounds better? The same thing coming from your much-satisfied customers. Publish reviews coming from your previous customers on your website, social media, etc.

In short, anywhere that you are advertising, post reviews to show people that other customers have engaged with you and left you feeling very satisfied, especially anywhere near sign-up forms and posts.

Adding customer reviews to your business will add an authentic air to your work, which will provide the push needed by those people who are a bit hesitant to sign up for your email list.

3. Host In-person Events

A great way to collect email addresses for email marketing is by hosting offline, in-person events. It can be a charity fundraiser, a seminar, anything. These events allow you to meet and work with the audience you are targeting.

The ones who attend are the right kind of people for your email list because they came. It was in their range of interest and will probably be future subscribers.

Use events like these and make contacts. Collect email addresses from the people who opted to attend. To get them even more interested, send them a welcoming email, telling them a bit about what your business has to offer, and encouraging them to join.

2. Collect Emails In-Store

If you own a shopfront where you have daily face-to-face interactions with customers, you could offer up memberships that include discounts and other special privileges like those that target members get. They can sign up for membership through their email addresses when they are checking out. You can also incorporate such a system or launch an email campaign that lets your consumers avail loyalty points and helps you interact with them.

Another thing that you could do, is put up a QR code near the registry or at different places in the store that provides information. Then you can set it up in such a way that people have to sign up with their email addresses to use it.

1. Partner Up

Creating an Ebook or hosting an online webinar with someone else helps you in two ways. Firstly, it splits up the work and secondly, this helps you target a new audience. After you release the content, you can divide the generated leads between the both of you.

Partner websites that have a similar business as yours are a great help in targeting new websites.

Summing Up:

All of the above are simple ways that can help you grow your business’s email list. Don’t just choose one but go all out, with multiple different methods so that you can approach a larger, wider audience and up your chances of increasing your email list.

Focus on the opportunities that come your way, but keep in mind, which stage is your business at and what it needs at the moment. Engage with your customers and subscribers. As you go onwards, you’ll find that your email list with new contacts and fresh subscribers will help you nurture and grow your small business into a booming one.

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