How to grow your email prospect list in 2021

Email remains one of the most effective marketing tools with a strong ROI, even in 2021. The key to success comes from creating meaningful and impactful content but also building a prospect list that is relevant and helps deliver conversions for your business.

What is an email list?

Nearly 300 billion emails are sent every day around the world and more than 80% of businesses use it as one of the primary marketing approaches. An email list contains a whole bunch of people who are interested in your business and likely to buy from it or hire your services.

• Anyone can create an email list. The challenge is developing something that is filled with people or businesses likely to engage with your business.
• To do this, you need a range of approaches and strategies that work for your business and attract the right kinds of people.
• Selecting the right methods to attract prospects onto your email list generally means looking at a range of different approaches.

Why should people join your email list?

The first thing to nail down is why people should give you their email address and ask you to contact them.

It’s okay to have a sign-up page when they register with your ecommerce business, for example, but you also need to make it explicit what sort of information you’ll be sending them.

Whether it’s information about updates to your products or blog posts concerning your services, if you want a good email contact, you will need to fulfil the wants and needs of your potential customers.

Embed sign-up forms

The next thing you need to do is to make it easy for your customers to join your mailing list. Embedding sign-up forms on your pages is the simplest way to do this. Put them at the top of your service or product pages as well as your blog posts.

Should you use pop-up forms to get people to sign-up to your business or subscribe to your newsletters?

These work very well when used properly. For example, if you have an ecommerce business, opening with a banner that offers 10% off first orders when customers sign-up can work particularly well. 

Create great content

People are more likely to join your email prospect list if you offer good content. That means crafting emails that meet your customer needs rather than simply pushing products.

Another successful way to attract prospect emails is to offer a giveaway such as a professionally produced white paper or ebook.

If you provide consistently good content, including landing pages, you’re likely to attract more quality prospects and, just as importantly, keep them subscribed to your email postings for some time to come.

Gamification and email lists

Gamification simply means taking a gaming approach to building your lists. It could involve, for example, running a quiz or offering a reward to customers in a competition. It’s not about selling directly but getting people interested enough to subscribe. This is often used along with other email list building approaches and can work pretty well.

Create a loyalty programme

Another approach is to create a loyalty programme for your business. This works well because you know that those who take up the offer are interested in your product or service and are, therefore, more likely to engage.

Use social media

Social media is a great option for getting prospects to sign up and many platforms like Facebook and Instagram offer features to do this.

Social media engagement requires a whole strategy for itself but can be a powerful tool if you’re prepared to put the work in.

Keep your subscribers engaged!

Whatever method you use to boost your email prospect list there is one very important rule of thumb:

Any content needs to be useful to your audience!

What is your visitor looking for, how can you provide it and how does it get them to sign up to your email prospect list? It helps to be more altruistic here rather than looking to sell a product or service.

Keep it honest

You can use all sorts of techniques to get people subscribing by the thousands to your email list. But if this doesn’t convert visitors into customers it’s not worth very much at all.

Email list building is a complicated business. There’s also not a one size fits all solution. Get your approach right and build a strong email prospect list and you should reasonably expect to get more conversions. This applies whether you run an ecommerce site, offer a service such as legal advice, you’re a local builder, store owner, events organiser or any other kind of business.

Where to begin...

You can read more about planning and creating your email marketing campaigns with my previous popular blog post: 5 tips for developing your email marketing campaigns

I hope you have found this article useful. If you wish to receive more marketing goodness like this, don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter – subscribe here

If you're not sure where to start with your marketing plan - Download my free guide here: ‘How to create your Marketing Masterplan Blueprint’

If you need ‘a fresh pair of eyes and ears’ to have a closer look at how you market and grow your business, let’s talk / meet for an informal chat – message me or email: [email protected]