Email marketing: what it is and how to implement it

How to Collect Emails: 10 Tips to Collect Email Addresses for Your Business

 Email marketing is one of the best e-marketing strategies ever. For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you'll get up to $38 in profits, which means we're talking about 3,800 percent of the return on investment from this marketing approach. The first step on the way to building a marketing strategy is, of course, collecting as many potential customers' email addresses as possible, but how?

1. Motivate the user to register in the newsletter

People are usually reluctant to give their personal information such as their names and mailing addresses. But if you give them something in return they will be more willing to share their personal data and subscribe to your mailing list. In some surveys, 85% of respondents said that the first reason they register on email lists is to want to get some benefit, such as discount coupons or special offers.

Try to offer something to site visitors, if you own an online store, you can offer them free shipping in exchange for subscribing to the mailing list. If you own a cooking blog, for example, you could offer your parents access to special recipes, personalized diet information, an e-book, and more in exchange for subscribing to an email list.

Another approach that website owners resort to is to offer free services in exchange for a postal address. These services may be converting a file to another format, drawing an icon, obtaining SEO indicators, or any useful service. When building an email marketing strategy always try to think of useful services to offer to your site visitors in exchange for email addresses.

2. Harvest email addresses from social networks

Take advantage of your social accounts and ask followers to sign up for your mailing list. They follow you anyway, meaning they are interested in you and the content you offer. So convincing them to sign up and giving you their mailing addresses won't be difficult. You can also organize contests on social networks, offering prizes or coupons to winners in exchange for participating and giving mailing addresses. If you have a YouTube channel, you can ask them at the end of the videos to visit your site or visit the landing page.

There are a lot of social networks, but the largest of them is Facebook, which is the largest social network frequented by tens of millions of people from all Arab countries. Whatever the nature of your business, Facebook is ideal for attracting new customers and expanding your newsletter. If you want to reach the largest number of Facebook users in a short time, there is nothing better than targeted ads.

Facebook allows ads to be targeted to a specific segment based on factors such as age, gender, geographic region, and more. Create featured content on your site, and place the content link or landing page link in the ad. Depending on the specificities of your target segment, you can target those ads to show potential customers who are more convertible and subscribe to the mailing list.

3. Avoid words that are used in spam messages

Avoid words and phrases that are suspicious of spam. Don't take too many words like "free," "gifts," "money," and other words that specialists use to send spam or fraudulent messages. The reason for this is that people are used to not trusting this type of message because it may carry viruses or may be deceptive.

Email is a personal space, it's like a mobile number, and people only like to share it with those they trust. So it's essential that the visitor feels that you're not going to send spam messages to their email or flood them with dozens of marketing messages a week. Use words that inspire trust and make it clear to him that you respect his privacy and that he will be able to unsubscribe from the newsletter at any time he wishes.

This is an example of the text of the invitation to subscribe to the mailing list:

How to Collect Emails: 10 Tips to Collect Email Addresses for Your Business

4. Use personal language

Emails have a personal character. Clients love to be treated with privacy and personal treatment that takes into account their privacy and needs. So you should segment your customers and customize your messages for each segment individually. This is made easy thanks to A/B tests that allow you to experiment with several types of content to determine the most appropriate content for each segment.

5. Request a minimum amount of data

Some sites ask for a lot of data to register for the newsletter. Besides your name and email address, it asks for other personal information, such as mobile number, gender, name of the company you work for, and others. It's true that the more information you get about your newsletter subscribers, the greater your chances of personalizing messages to them and turning them into customers. But remember that asking for a lot of personal data will make a large percentage of people back out of the subscription, and this will hurt your email marketing strategy in the long run.

Limit yourself to the minimum amount of personal information in the newsletter subscription form. Ask users only for their names and mailing addresses. If other information is necessary, be sure to explain in brief terms why you want that additional information. In addition to reassuring them that it will be safe and will not be exploited in other matters except the agreed.

6. Place the registration form in the newsletter everywhere

Don't assume that site visitors will necessarily access your site via the homepage. Many of them will enter directly into certain pages or posts. Therefore, the registration form should be placed in the newsletter on all pages of the site. Try to place the registration form in front of visitors in every convenient place. Place them at the bottom of the page or in the sidebar to make it easier for visitors to sign up for the list from anywhere on the site.

7. Use pop-ups

How to Collect Emails: 10 Tips to Collect Email Addresses for Your Business

Have you ever accessed a website and when you walked out a window emerged inviting you to take action or register for the newsletter? This trick is widely used by website owners as a last-ditch attempt to persuade a visitor to take action before going out. There are millions of sites on the Internet, so if someone accesses your site, they may never return to it. So a pop-up strategy may be your last chance to convince them to subscribe to the mailing list.

Unlike annoying ad pop-ups, pop-ups, when a visitor is interested in exiting, do not negatively affect the overall user experience, as they only pop up at the last moment of browsing the site. Therefore, they are as unobtrusive as other advertising pop-ups that appear as soon as the visitor enters the site, and therefore may slow down the site or may block the contents of the site, in particular, on mobile screens.

8. Be persuasive

When a visitor looks at the registration form on the mailing list, they will make a decision on whether to register within seconds. So the design of the form should be beautiful and stylish. The content of the invitation to register on the list should also be convincing, clear, and concise. You should explain to the visitor the purpose of registering on the mailing list and the benefits they will reap in less than 5 seconds.

9. Take advantage of webinars

Web courses or webinars are interactive webinars and use special platforms to organize live and live forums. It is in the form of a lecture in which information, lessons, news, meetings, etc. are presented. Webinars can be an effective pillar of email marketing strategy. Studies show that 79% of B2B business customers said they were willing to give their personal information such as email to come to a webinar.

Try to occasionally organize webinars on topics related to your industry. This is a great way to get email addresses, as the addresses you will get will be of high quality, because people interested in attending webinars in a particular field have a special interest in that area, so they will be more likely to turn into permanent customers.

10. Use A/B Tests

There are a lot of factors that control the success of an email address collection strategy, such as the content of the invitation to register, the design and position of the registration form, the time the pop-up appears, and others. It may not seem clear how all of these factors can affect your mailing list enrollment rate and your email marketing strategy as a whole. In this case, you may want to use A/B tests.

A/B tests are tests designed to measure the impact of changing one of the factors we mentioned earlier, both positively and negatively. These tests will give you a clearer picture of the factors influencing your strategy, and help you discover where there are flaws in your plan to improve your overall email marketing strategy.

To succeed in email marketing you should constantly strive to expand your mailing list, if you have a thousand mailing addresses seek to increase them to two thousand, and if you have 5,000 addresses seek to reach 10,000, the more email addresses the more potential customers there are. Finally, do you have another way to collect email addresses? Share with us the comments!