Email list building refers to the process of collecting email addresses from users or visitors of a website. The purpose of this is to build the subscriber database and further future business communications with both existing and prospective clients.
Building an email list is an essential strategy for most marketers. Research shows that almost 60% of consumers state that marketing emails will either have a positive or negative influence when making purchasing decisions. Around eighty percent of business professionals state that email marketing increases customer retention.
Can You Build a Free Email List?
An engaged email list is a great asset for a business since it is part of owned media, or any media channels that your business has complete control over. One of the main benefits of owned media is that it is not affected by sudden algorithm changes, unlike SEO and social media, for example.
Owned media allows you full control over shaping your brand storytelling, and achieves a better reach compared to other paid media types, along with being more cost-effective.
Because of this, it’s important to consider your strategies for building your email list. While it is possible to build your email list for free, it is a complex task. Don’t expect to create a lead capture form and generate thousands of new subscribers within a day.
To build an effective email list free of charge, you will need a strategy and lots of patience.
How to Get an Email List for Free
If you are on a tight budget or simply looking for a cheaper technique for lead generation, then you might be considering free email lists. The good news is that many free email marketing services have the option of generating email lists that are filled with leads.
However, it is worth bearing in mind that not every free marketing tool is going to provide you with a reliable mailing list and using unreliable addresses for email marketing campaigns can have the opposite effect, with detrimental results for your email marketing efforts.
How to Get Free Email Lists
The best way to get a free email list that is effective for your marketing purposes is to spend time building it. While building an email list from scratch is hard work, can be time consuming, and will require a lot of patience, it is worth the effort.
This is especially true when you are busy focusing on other aspects of your business like building an online store, providing customer support, and creating content.
Building your own free email list is one of the best things that you can do for your business. This is because when you build your own email list, you will end up with a mailing list that is much higher quality and helps you get better results.
How to Build a List of Email Addresses Free on Social Media
Social media can be an ideal platform for staying engaged with your customers and generating new leads. There are several things that you can do to make the most of social media to build a list of email addresses free of charge.
Add a CTA to Your About Us Page
When writing your ‘About’ section or bio on social media, you can use this space to include a call to action that has the main purpose of building your email list. You can do this with any social media platform, and it can be an effective and easy way to gather more emails for your mailing list since your bio is likely to be one of the first places that interested prospects check if they like your content.
Create a CTA Post on Instagram
While you can run Instagram ads and do so easily with the use of Insta ads software, it is also possible to get more subscribers to your email list for free. One of the best ways is to create an engaging call to action post indicating that followers can find the link to sign up in your bio.
Pin a Tweet
If you use Twitter for your business and get a lot of engagement, then pinning a tweet to the top of your profile including a CTA to a sign-up form for your email list can be an ideal way to grow your email list. All you need to do to pin a tweet to your profile is click the grey arrow at the right of the tweet and select ‘Pin to your profile page’.
Use Facebook CTA
When setting up your business profile on Facebook, you can customise the blue button on your profile next to the Message button. Have this button link to a landing page where interested visitors and followers can sign up to your email newsletter to find out more.
Create a Subscribers Group
When it comes to building an email list, you can incentivise your visitors to go ahead and fill that form out. And exclusivity is a great way to grow your list for free. You can easily do this on Facebook by creating a group that only subscribers have access to.
How to Find Email Lists for Free With Your Website
Your website can be a very powerful tool when it comes to building your email list for free. Some of the best things that you can do to use your website for building your email list include:
Create Original Content
No matter what industry your business operates in, original and high-quality content will help encourage people to take an interest in your brand. And updating your website regularly with fresh and interesting content will boost organic traffic to your site from search engines.
Offer Lead Magnets
Lead magnets can be a very effective strategy for generating leads, as they offer something of value in return for a subscriber. You do not need to use optins or popups to deliver lead magnets; a simple graphic or link alongside your chosen delivery system will work just as well.
Promote Upcoming Products
Promoting and upselling upcoming products can be an ideal way to generate more leads for your email list without the need to spend any money. Use your website to show customers information on products that they might be interested in that haven’t yet been released.
Then, add a call to action of ‘Notify me’, encouraging customers to sign up for your email newsletter to get the latest information on the product release.
Optimise the ‘About Us’ Page
If you have a website visitor that is browsing your ‘About Us’ page, then chances are that they are interested in learning more about your brand.
You can optimise this page to generate more emails for your list free of charge by including a simple section about the benefits of signing up to receive email updates for you alongside an opt-in form.
How to Get Email List for Free
There are many ways that you can grow your email list organically and for free. The best way to start is by nurturing leads into paying customers. Not everybody who visits your social media profile or your website is going to be immediately ready to spend their money, but this doesn’t mean that they won’t be ready eventually.
If you don’t have the option for them to sign up to an email list, you could end up missing out on potential customers or clients because they found your site at the wrong time.
But when you optimise your website to collect their email address and encourage them to sign up to your email newsletter before they leave, you can show up in their inbox regularly to provide them with more information and engage them until they are ready to buy.
One of the best ways to do this is to offer an irresistible incentive to encourage people to sign up. If you are hoping to engage with your leads to the point where they feel ready to buy, then offering a discount on their first purchase when they sign up to your email list can be an ideal way to do this.
You can also offer a range of lead magnets including free video training courses, free templates, free tools or worksheets, or free eBooks to encourage visitors to your site to enter their information in the sign-up form and become a subscriber.
Is Free Email List Bad for Your Company Reputation?
A free email list can help or harm your company depending on how you gather it. Getting a free email list that you have not built by yourself from scratch could end up being more harmful than helpful when it comes to your company’s reputation.
This is because when you buy an email list or get a free email list that’s already been put together, you might end up sending emails to people who have no interest in hearing from you.
This leads to more emails being marked as spam, which can ultimately damage your sender’s reputation and make it harder to reach subscribers who do have a genuine interest.
While it’s possible to build an email list for free, it’s best to do this organically, take your time, and only add subscribers to your list who are genuinely interested in hearing more from your brand.
