Email Marketing can be a really effective strategy to boost your business, however, to have a successful email marketing strategy you need to create your own email list.
The importance of email marketing
Email marketing refers to the use of email communications to reach specific business goals. An email marketing strategy has several benefits for businesses:
- Increase communication with customers
- Reach an already engaged audience
- Create targeted and personalized content
- Build stronger customer relationships
- Increase the number of conversions
- Improve brand recognition
…especially in a cookieless world!
With the end of third-party cookies, email marketing is even more important to businesses because it is a cookieless marketing channel! Email Marketing will become the go-to first-party data targeting solution.
By creating your own email list, you are collecting users’ data with their consent. Once you have your own email list you can segment your emails and create personalized experiences for your customers.
Why Buying Email Lists is a Bad Idea
First of all, you’ll violate the rules of consent under GDPR. Thus, reputable email marketing services don’t let you send emails to lists you’ve bought.
Besides, you will be sending emails to users who do not know you, who are probably not interested in your offers and your email can be considered spam. This way, your email marketing strategy will be destroying your brand reputation, instead of helping you reach your goals.
You should instead, invest in creating your own email marketing list! This way, you will collect emails from people who agree to receive your emails and are interested in what you offer, increasing the open rate, click-through rate, consumer trust, and brand recognition and reputation.
How to Create an Email List
Step 1: Choose your email marketing provider
First of all, you should start by choosing a platform to collect emails (and send your emails to the list created).
These types of platforms are called email marketing providers. Here are some examples that you can try:
Step 2: Set up your email marketing account
Create your email marketing account and follow the steps of the email marketing provider that you chose. Usually, these platforms are easy and intuitive to use.
Step 3: Create an opt-in form for your website
Finally, you need to add an opt-in form to your website to start collecting emails. The email marketing platforms have several opt-in form options from which you can choose and that you should edit according to your brand visual identity and goals.
How to Grow your Email List
Now that you have an email marketing provider that enables you to collect and send emails, you need to incentivize users to provide their emails. Some very important tips to grow your email list:
> Describe in a few words what people can expect when they sign up for their email.
More important than just collecting lots of emails, is to guarantee that you are collecting emails from people interested in receiving your emails. So, the opt-in should contain a text briefly explaining what people can expect. This way, you optimize your email marketing strategy.
> Have multiple locations for consumers to sign up for your emails.
Do not add just one opt-in form on your website, because there is the possibility of people not seeing it. So, analyze your website content to discover the best places to add the opt-in forms, strategically speaking. Ask yourself: where are people more likely to subscribe to your email?
> Offer an incentive to email subscribers.
You will get more email subscribers if you give users a reason to subscribe. These offers can be a promo code, a freebie, free shipping, an exclusive newsletter, etc.
> Use popups to promote special offers
If you decide to make special offers, you can optimize by using pop-ups that promote your offer and have an opt-in form.
To sum up…
Email Marketing can be a powerful strategy, especially in a cookieless world. In order to have a successful email marketing strategy, you shouldn’t buy email lists, instead, you should grow your own email list and make sure you inform people about what type of emails you are going to send to create a qualified email list.