Build your email marketing list

Using incentives to get email sign ups

People are more likely to join your email marketing list if you offer them a valuable incentive. Customers who sign up for your email updates, for example, can be offered special services or discounts on specific products. It's even more effective if you only make offers available through email marketing. You can then be confident that recipients will check for the most recent email from your company.

In exchange for email sign ups, you can also provide exclusive online content, such as access to downloads or entry into competitions.

Capturing customer data for email marketing

You can collect customer data for your email marketing lists in a variety of ways, both online and offline. Encourage email signups through your website is a common method. It's always worth emphasising the benefits of subscribing to your email service and providing a registration form online.

You should make this process as quick and simple for the customer as possible by initially collecting only a small amount of essential data, such as name and email address. You can then follow up with an email in which the customer can inform you of any additional preferences or areas of interest. It is also best practise to inform customers about what they will receive via email and how frequently they will receive it.

Using overlays to encourage customer signups

Overlays on a website are a type of pop-up that appears on the user's screen. They can be set to appear after a certain amount of time, when a customer views a certain number of pages, when they land on high-value pages, or when they leave your website.

Website overlays can be extremely useful in capturing customer data. They interrupt the customer's web browsing to present a message in which you can outline the benefits of joining your mailing list.

The following are best practises for using overlays on your website:

Don't irritate the customer; instead, consider how you can best use overlays. They should not appear on every page of your website. Ensure that the user can easily cancel the overlay and that it will not reappear for the same user for a set period of time after that.

Highlight the benefits - in your overlay, make it clear and brief what you are offering the customer in exchange for their data, such as a newsletter, discounts, or access to premium content.

Capture only necessary data - Capture only the information you require, such as an email address and name. You can always learn more about their preferences later.

Use triggers - think about using various types of overlays that will be triggered based on the customer's action:

When they appear on a specific page, entry overlays appear.

Timed overlay - after they have browsed your website for a certain amount of time or number of pages, they will see this overlay.

After they have scrolled to a certain point on a page, they will see a scroll overlay.

Exit intent overlay - when they are about to leave your website

Cross selling - If you sell products or services on your website and a customer is browsing them, you can use overlays to cross sell other popular products or services, such as customers viewing this product also viewed.

Create a sense of urgency by highlighting special offers, discounts, product availability, or access to premium content with overlays. To entice customers to sign up right away, highlight in your overlay that a special offer is only available until a certain date.

Collecting data offline

Offline methods of building your database include asking customers for their email addresses while they are at an event or in-store. Some retail businesses, for example, collect customer email addresses by offering to email electronic receipts when a purchase is made in-store. As an incentive, you could also provide a small discount or a free gift.

If you can get customers and potential customers to request updates via email, email can be a very cheap and effective marketing tool.