4 Simple Steps To Build An Email List For Your Business

Find Out Exactly How To Build An Email List and Why You Need To.

There’s alot of information available about how to build an email list, list building techniques  and creating a database of customers, but what is it exactly and how can you do it?

You Can Read On Or Watch My “Build An Email List” Presentation Below;

What Is An Email List?

An email list is a subscriber list, containing the details and email addresses of people who have chosen to give you their email address for one of the following;

• To be kept up to date with your products or services.
• To be notified about specific events in connection with your business.
• In exchange for a free download, coupon or other offer.

Why Should I Build An Email List For My Business?

With the latest wave of social and digital marketing platforms online, increased smartphone users and with e-commerce users on the rise, a large number of consumers (I would say the majority!) now use their email address to purchase and keep up to date with companies, friends and brands.

As a business, you need to know how to build an email list, and take advantage of the latest email marketing software available to help you keep on top of your database, and ensure that you keep in touch with your customers on a regular basis with news, updates and offers.

Traditionally, this would taken the form of good old fashioned printed material – brochures, adverts, coupons etc would have been sent via snail mail and delivered to the customer at home.

Nowadays, the customer demands digital information. Newsletters from all the major brands and companies are delivering their updates via email, so building an email list has become an essential and integral part of your business marketing strategy.

The Advantages of Building An Email List

One of the greatest blessings of using an email list for your business is having the ability to send direct links within your email for your readers to follow straight to your website offer or page.

Other awesome advantages when you build an email list include:

• It’s personal
• It’s targeted
• It’s a very fast way of getting in touch with your customers
• Running an email list is cost effective
• You can monitor marketing campaign effectiveness

How To Build An Email List In 4 Simple Steps

Step #1: You will need an autoresponder platform or email marketing software.

Using your own email service provider may seem a more economical way of building a list, but I can assure you, it will be extremely difficult to maintain, sending too many emails can result in your email account being shut down completely. With no reporting tools, you will also miss out on the opportunity for campaign monitoring.

I currently use AWEBER and MAILCHIMP to build and maintain my email lists, and can recommend either of them as suitable for you to use to build an email list for your own business.

When you sign up to either service, you will get a free trial period. Aweber charges around $19 per month after a trial, and Mailchimp is free for life – at the time of this post, Mailchimp allow you to keep up to 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails a month free.

Both services provide excellent video tutorials, showing you exactly how to build an email list and how to tweak all the settings to suit your requirements.

Step #2: You will need to create a sign up form on your website

To collect your customers email addresses and start to build your list, you will need to create a web-form. Now, I won’t get too technical in this post, but if you are using WordPress, there are some amazing plugins for creating email list subscription forms. One of my favourite choices is pop up domination, which creates the pop up form that you see the first time you try to exit my site. The great thing about it, is once closed, your remaining session will remember and so the pop up won’t keep showing.

Select carefully where your form will appear on your site. Homepages and sidebars are firm favourites. Choose colours wisely, make sure they compliment your site, and try to make the submit button stand out and make it a real call to action.

Ensure what you offer in exchange for your customers email address is relevant. I find offering free ebooks or guides always works well. If you sell products, perhaps a discount voucher or offer would work well. As your customers are asked more and more every day to provide their personal details, you can increase the chance of gaining an email subscriber by showing them you value their details and offer them something in return!

Step #3: Think of Interesting Content To Share With Your Email List

This is a very important step when you start to build an email list. In order to build a strong relationship with customers, you will need to share interesting and relevant news and updates, some ideas for this can be:

• An introduction to your company
• A personal introduction from you
• Your social media pages on twitter, facebook, google etc
• Ways to contact you
• Special offers
• Discounts and coupons
• Latest industry news
• How to guides
• Free resources

Keep your list engaged, entertained and up to date with your business. This will help build loyalty, will give your customers excellent reasons to buy from you, and should encourage interaction on the various social platforms your business uses.

Step #4: Create A Series Of Auto-responders For Your Email List

It’s always nice to run your business on automation! Take the headache of responding to new customer sign ups by setting up a standard series of emails that are sent at intervals decided by you.

Once you have decided on the content you wish to share with your customers, you can put that into a one-off email series that all new subscribers receive.

For example: Here is the follow up sequence (auto-responders) for one of my email marketing lists. Once a subscriber enters their email address on one of my forms, they are automatically sent the first message after confirming their subscription, and then they will receive a series of follow up emails with useful information and news. My auto-responders cover the first month of subscription, after which I send blog updates and regular newsletters.

SUMMARY How To Build An Email List

Do you use email marketing for your business? I hope this short guide has given you enough information to get going and start to build an email list for your business.