List building 101: How to rapidly build an email list

If we had to choose one marketing activity that anyone in any industry should focus on while growing an online business, it would be list building. The goal is to make potential customers or students actually want to share their email with you. Building an email list requires a combination of skills: content marketing, design, copywriting, sales, and paid acquisition.

This post is designed to be your go-to guide on how to build an email list.

• Just getting started? You will learn all the fundamentals of list building allowing you to start growing your mailing list today.
• Have some list-building experience? You will get inspiration and ideas from amazing case studies to accelerate the growth of your email list and marketing strategy.

Email list building strategies

List building simply means whatever marketing strategies you use geared towards adding new subscribers to your email mailing list. On a strategic level, think of list building as exchanging valuable content for contact information. When you share exclusive blog posts or downloads, that can be accessed by a sign up form for your email list, then you’re offering valuable content in exchange for contact information. If you want website visitors to give you access to their inboxes, you have to give them something that makes it worthwhile.

On an execution level, activities to build email lists can range from small and quick tactics like adding a popup to your site, to more comprehensive strategies like hosting evergreen webinars. All of these strategies can be used to create an email list you can use long term for promoting your business or courses.

The art of growing email marketing lists

Commentators love to talk about how email is dead, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, building an email list is the single most important way to grow your online business.

These are just a few reasons, based on a recent consumer survey:

• 72% of U.S. adults prefer email (over postal mail, TV ads, newspapers, magazines, text messages, social media, and in-person communication) as a channel of communication with companies.
• 91% like to receive promotional emails from companies with which they have a relationship.
• 69% of the respondents made purchases influenced by promotional emails.

If you haven’t built an email list yet or you don’t put much effort behind it, you’re probably missing an opportunity to take your business to a whole new level. Luckily, this post is all you need to boost your list building game.

How to use this guide

Don’t read everything at once. There is a lot of great information in here, but it’s easy to feel overwhelmed after reading through all of the content in one sitting. Instead, take incremental steps. For example, if you want to find out where or how to ask people for their emails on your site, or pitch your email list, read the content in chapter 2. Implement it, then come back later for the next steps.

Don’t feel like you have to do everything on this guide. If you already have an email service provider and are happy with it, you can skip over chapter 1. Invest your time on other things that will generate value for your business. If your email service provider becomes an obstacle, you can revisit this later on.

Get creative. Since every business is different, some of the strategies in this guide might not work for your online course business if you implement them exactly as described. However, most of what’s described can work for a large majority of businesses with just a few tweaks. In some cases, you might even get greater results than the people who wrote these posts.

How to build an email list: the ultimate guide

From choosing the right email service provider to sending a welcome email to your subscribers, this is the only guide you need to build an email newsletter list.

Chapters

 01   Selecting email service providers  

 02  Creating content upgrades  

 03  Capturing emails  

 04  Building your list rapidly

 05  Using giveaways  

 06  Using webinars  

 07  Using free courses  

 08  Using social media  

 09  Sending emails

Choosing an email service provider for your mailing list

If you’re new to list building and email marketing, look around and see which services will allow you to do these important activities: segmenting subscribers, tracking email marketing metrics, broadcasting emails, customizing email messages, and building automated funnels.

Consider your email needs now but also the needs you’ll likely have as your audience grows too. You don’t want to get used to one marketing tool only to have to switch to a different one later on. So take into consideration your future needs.

Read:

A definitive review of the top 7 email marketing services (2017)

Creating content upgrades for valuable content

Content upgrades will be your most powerful tool to get email subscribers. Also known as lead magnets, these are premium pieces of content you can freely offer to website visitors in exchange for their email addresses. You can use a single content upgrade to grow your list by thousands.

If you have a particularly popular blog post, consider updating it, or turning it into downloadable content. Then you can use it to offer as exclusive content for those who sign up for your email list. You can create guides, worksheets, or checklists that your students or customers would find particularly useful. Then use that to pull them in as leads.