Building an email list as a small business owner is a great way to capture new leads, encourage engagement among your current audience, and increase sales & conversion rates.
Learning how to build an email list from scratch can seem intimidating or like a daunting task, but that’s why we’re going to break down 10 easy tactics you can use to build a targeted email list for your small business.
Let’s get started.
What is Email Marketing and Why is it so Valuable?
Email marketing is a digital strategy that allows you to build and maintain relationships with your current customer base and potential prospects. A few key reasons email marketing is a valuable strategy to implement include the following:
- It’s a wise investment. Email marketing costs less than running digital ad campaigns and is much more effective at sending targeted messages to your audience. Building an email list may take more time, but the investment is worth it.
- You own the email list. Once you’ve established your marketing list, you own it! This is incredibly valuable as you don’t need to worry about buying a list with few results (nor would we ever recommend you do that!)
- You can create personal email campaigns. Based on your customers' behavior and engagement with your website, you can create personal campaigns like follow-up emails to collect reviews, send promotional emails to encourage repeat business and more!
- It’s easy to segment and target your audience. By segmenting your email list based on demographics, purchase behavior, and interests, you can create personal and targeted emails that speak to your audience specifically.
- You have more potential to increase sales. An email list ultimately has the potential to capture additional sales through an easy-going, organic approach that typically fosters much greater engagement compared to digital ads.
Email marketing begins by collecting emails from your audience through various methods we’ll discuss below. Once you’ve established the email list, you are ready to develop an email marketing strategy and create campaigns that highlight your small business's products or services. Marketing messages may include newsletters, promotional emails, company news, etc.
The central aspect to remember about email marketing is that your primary goal should be to provide value to your audience and encourage them to buy your product or utilize your services.
10 Steps to Build a Targeted Email Marketing List
Now that we understand email marketing and why it’s so valuable, let’s explore 10 strategic tactics you can implement to start building your dream email list.
1. Choose a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
Before you build your email list, the first couple steps you’ll want to include 1) creating a professional business email and 2) choosing an email marketing platform, also known as a customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Create a Professional Email
A professional email is beneficial as it contributes to your overall brand image, serves as a central place for customers and prospects to contact you, and allows you to manage your business better than personal emails.
I recommend you set up a business email with your domain in it that is easy to pronounce and spell (e.g., hello@terracestudios.com). The other option would be to use a free email provider like Google to create an email like hello.terracestudios@gmail.com. While that email is a little longer, it is still a great option when you are first getting started.
Choose a CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) software is where the real fun begins regarding email marketing campaigns. A CRM will allow you to create and customize email marketing messages, segment your audience based on purchase behavior, monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns, and more.
A CRM is like your home base for managing your customer relationships, so you’ll want to make sure it’s software that works for your brand and business needs. A few CRMs I would recommend to small business owners include MailChimp and Constant Contacts (*if you are an e-commerce brand, I would recommend Klaviyo).
MailChimp and Constant Contacts are a great starting point for small businesses for a few reasons, including:
- They are affordable. Compared to other CRMs, MailChimp and Constant Contact offer similar baseline capabilities that a small business would want to get started in email marketing for an affordable price.
- They offer a variety of pre-built email templates. Getting started with a pre-built template allows you to skip the full design process by making minimal font and color styling updates while maintaining a professional and friendly email style.
- You can create automated marketing flows. Automated marketing flows are like the bread and butter of email marketing. After the initial setup of segmenting your email lists and making the flows, the emails are sent automatically to your customers.
- You have the option to send SMS messages. Short Message Service (SMS) are text messages that can be sent to your list when customers & prospects provide their cell phone numbers. As SMS becomes more popular, this is a great option to consider!
- The platforms integrate smoothly into many CMS platforms. These two platforms integrate easily with many popular website builders, including Webflow’s CMS (Content Management System), which I recommend to small and growing businesses for its design-customizability and scalability.
2. Place forms strategically on your website
When placing newsletter signup forms on your website, you’ll want to make sure they are in high-volume areas that will easily stand out to your customers and prospects. Some of these areas may include the following places on your website:
- Homepage: Many users will start here, so having a simple signup form on your homepage is an excellent opportunity to grab another lead.
- Hero Sections: Hero sections are the top section of any webpage. This is high-volume real estate in web design, as most users will land here before scrolling the page.
- Footer: Footers are typically global elements and are the same on every page of your website. It’s great to have a simple newsletter signup form in the footer for consistency.
- Sidebar: A sidebar is often on a blog template or service page. This is a great spot for a signup form as it offers quick, easily accessible information to users.
Don’t be afraid to change where you place your newsletter signup forms and test out different sections and areas of your website.
3. Optimize CTA’s on your website and landing pages
The Call-to-Action (CTA) on your website persuades your audience to interact with your content in some manner, whether it be clicking a button or filling out a form.
You’ll want to create a convincing CTA that encourages your readers to provide their email addresses. One easy way to do this is to demonstrate how you will provide valuable content that helps them solve a problem.
Spending time crafting and testing a few good CTAs is worth it, as you will see which ones work best for your audience and promote increased engagement on your website.
4. Create a pop-up for your website
While pop-ups have been known to disrupt the user experience, when used correctly and crafted carefully, they can enhance user interaction and offer valuable insight into your business's current offers and promotions.
Your pop-up can include a newsletter signup form within the design, or you can have a button directing to a landing page for a newsletter signup. Either way, you’ll want to include a compelling CTA to help encourage your audience to provide their email addresses.
5. Use a referral program
A referral program encourages current subscribers to share your small business’s offers with family, friends, and coworkers to grow your email list of a like-minded audience.
When implementing a referral program, you’ll want to include an offer or incentive of value to the subscriber, such as a coupon, discount, free e-book, gift, or something similar. The person they invited will need to sign up first to receive the incentive item.
You can learn more about MailChimps referral program integration, ReferralCandy, to help you get set up today!
6. Offer valuable incentives
Valuable incentives help your prospective subscribers feel more at ease and confident about providing their email addresses to your small business. But that’s not to say your only goal should be to get as many subscribers as possible on your email marketing list. You want subscribers who are genuinely going to engage with your brand.
One way to attract the right subscribers is to create an incentive that can provide value and help them with an issue they may be experiencing. Creating a targeted incentive will demonstrate your business's knowledge and care for your community.
A great incentive may include a free mini e-book, printable, digital asset, or even a coupon or discount to apply to your services.
7. Create targeted landing pages
Landing pages are unique, stand-alone pages that increase your website's conversion rate by generating lead data, including newsletter signups.
You can direct your audience to the landing page through social media, a pop-up on your website, or even in-store with an easy-to-remember link or QR code printed at your reception desk.
As stated earlier, you’ll want to ensure your landing page includes a compelling CTA with a valuable offer that enhances your audience's interest and encourages them to fill out the form and provide the requested information.
8. Offer Enticing Giveaways
Social media is a great way to connect with your community and offer entrancing giveaways that help spread the word about your brand, encourage new interactions with your audience, and ultimately promote email signups. The giveaways should point to a landing page on your website that captures leads emails.
Note, a giveaway should be something unique and enticing that you would not usually offer through a typical incentive or referral program. Also, consider doing a limited amount of annual giveaways to keep them unique and geared towards more significant campaign movements.
9. Collaborate with other businesses
Collaborating with other businesses in your industry that complement your brand is one way to grow your email list by tapping into an established audience who is likely to have interests similar to those of your current community.
Together, you can help each other grow your email lists by highlighting each other's services or products in a special promotional offer on social media or through an email newsletter.
10. Promote offline email signups
While you will want to primarily focus on gathering email signups digitally through your website, landing pages, and social media, including offline methods promoting email signups is not a bad idea.
You can do this simply by networking, building your community at local business fairs, having a signup sheet at hosted events, or having one at your shop's checkout or front desk.
One note to consider: If you add emails gathered offline to your distribution list, you’ll want to ensure you have the same legal statements you would online, asking their permission to subscribe to your newsletters.
Summary | Email Building Tactics
Building an email list from scratch is worth the investment in time and resources, as it’s a great way to grow your community and capture new leads that have the potential to become loyal customers. In summary, you’ll want to take the following steps to get started:
- Choose a CRM
- Place forms strategically on your websites
- Optimize CTA’s
- Create pop-ups
- Use a referral program
- Offer valuable incentives
- Create targeted landing pages
- Offer giveaways on social media
- Collaborate with other businesses
- Promote offline email signups
As you grow your email list, you’ll have the power to segment your audience and cater to their unique needs based on their previous behaviors and interactions with your business. Ultimately, this will help you build better relationships with your customer base and encourage healthy new sales.
While email-building tactics can seem overwhelming at first, breaking down each method into easy and digestible steps will allow you to effortlessly integrate the practices discussed in this article. Don’t be afraid to test different tactics and discover which ones work best for you and your business.
