Have you been asked to collect emails and build an email list by your marketing manager? Like many business owners, you may be doubtful about taking email marketing seriously.
It’s true that several new strategies like social media and viral marketing, growth hacking, paid media advertising, etc. have come into the digital marketing scene in recent years.
However, email marketing has stood the test of time. Creating email newsletters is the most effective way to build stronger customer relationships, and grow your business revenue.
In this article, we’ll share the top reasons why email marketing is still important and why you should collect emails. We’ll also show you how to start building your email list step by step.
Introduction to Email Marketing and Email List
Email marketing is one of the oldest and most popular online marketing techniques in the world. It involves the process of sending emails to your prospects and customers to make more sales.
To start an email marketing campaign, you need a couple of things first. They are an email list and email marketing software.
An email list is simply a list of email addresses whom you can send emails. Ideally, they’re the people who permitted you to send them emails from your business.
Once you’ve plenty of subscribers in your email list, you can start sending out emails to them using an email marketing software. We’ll explain about that later; keep reading.
Benefits of Building an Email List
As mentioned above, email marketing is a highly effective marketing technique in the world. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing sees a 4300% average return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the US.
Similarly, ExactTarget stats shows that every $1 spent on email marketing generates the average return on investment (ROI) of $44.25.
These facts are enough evidence of why you need to create an email list and start email marketing.
If you want to know more, here’re the top 7 reasons why emails are important, and you need to build your email list right away.
1. Email is Personal
Being personal in online conversations make your users feel more human and real.
Email lets you make your business messages personal. You can address each user with their names, and give a message you want.
Not only the language of emails is personal, but the technology itself is personal. When you send an email, you land into a person’s private email inbox directly.
2. Users Prefer Emails to Other Media for Businesses
Even though several new messaging technologies have emerged, people still prefer emails for business messages.
For example, people mostly talk with friends and family on social media, but they use emails to talk about businesses.
Hence, a mailing list is the thing to focus on to do more business.
3. Emails Help You to Build Intimate Relationship with Users
Emails are the best way to communicate one to one with your users. It lets your users talk with you in person and ask questions if they’re into any problem.
As mentioned above, an email inbox is a private space. So you can discuss the issues your customers are facing and help them to solve.
Such conversations help to build intimate relationships with your customers. Happy customers can always help to grow your business with word of mouth.
4. Email is Targeted
Emails are highly effective because you can send targeted emails to the targeted groups. You can easily group your users based on their email responses and activities on your site and send them the most relevant offers.
Grouping your users in the mailing list is called segmentation.
You can find this feature in any email marketing software you want to use.
5. You Own Your Email List
An email list is often compared with the number of followers in social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. but there’s a huge difference.
The respective companies, not you actually own the social media followers. The way you can communicate with your social media followers can change with the changes in their policies.
But you own your email list. Having a mailing list means guaranteed access to the inbox of thousands of users, at least until they stop using the email address.
6. Email Is Not Going Anywhere
Many social media platforms, blogging, and advertising techniques that were once very popular disappeared with time. But emails have been here since quite long, and they’re not going anywhere.
Nowadays, almost every internet user has at least one email account. You need an email account also to sign up for a social media account, like an account on Facebook or Twitter.
According to research conducted by Radicati, there are 3.8 billion active email accounts in the world. It’s half the population of Earth.
It means that email marketing will not go away, so adding subscribers day by day will give you a great list that can make a significant impact.
7. Emails Convert More Subscribers into Customers
All the reasons stated above ultimately contribute to your conversions.
For example, you can send personal targeted emails and influence users to buy your products or services.
Now that you know why emails are relevant, let’s go ahead and see how to create an email list.
How to Create an Email List?
If you’re convinced that you should create an email list for your business, let’s see the necessary steps to creating an email list.
Step 1. Create a Website:
A business website is the best platform to collect email addresses. If you’re a beginner, you can use WordPress to create your website. Here’s our step by guide on how to make a website.
Step 2. Add a Subscription Form to Your Website:
Once you’ve got a website, you can add a subscription form to your site. A subscription form allows your users to subscribe to your blog by entering their email address.
If your website is in WordPress, you can easily create a subscription form using WPForms plugin. It’s the most user-friendly form builder plugin for WordPress.
You can also add survey form to your site using this plugin and collect emails of the survey participants.
Step 3. Connect Your Subscription form with an Email marketing Software:
You need an email marketing software to store your collected emails as well as to send emails.
There’re several email marketing tools you can choose from. Among them all, we recommend you to use Constant Contact because it has a beginner-friendly interface for advanced email marketing features.
If you want to see Constant Contact alternatives, see our 6 best email newsletter tools review.
Step 4. Add an Email Optin Plugin to Your Site
Displaying email optin forms helps to grow your email list faster. The optin forms entice users to complete your form and let you collect emails.
For adding email optin forms and popups, you can use OptinMonster. It’s the most popular lead generation tool available in the market.
It has powerful features like exit-intent technology, which helps you to convert your abandoning visitors into subscribers. You can also add countdown timers and create a sense of urgency and collect more emails.
Want to get even more subscribers? See our complete guide on how to grow your email list.
Step 5. Send Emails Wisely
Once you’ve collected plenty of email addresses, the next job is to send emails. Sending messages wisely is the most crucial job because your emails have no impact until they land on your users’ inbox, and they open it.
Compose emails carefully to ensure that it doesn’t look like a spam message, and send using a proper tool. After that, analyze the performance of your emails, and improve them further.
We hope this article helped you to understand why you need to collect emails and how to start email marketing on your own. You may also want to see our guide on how to boost your SEO rankings with Google Analytics.
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Your suggestions are extremely useful!!
Thank you, Adams!