Building Your Foundation: Email List Builder and Its Impact

There are 6 key benefits to building an email list for your business.

1. It’s affordable: Social media platforms are getting expensive, and running an ad campaign can cause a serious dent in your marketing budget. In comparison, email marketing costs are lower; having your own database of interested customers and sending regular emails is much more budget-friendly!
2. You can send personalized ads: You can’t personalize web-based ads and Facebook posts the way you can mass-personalize emails. You can even create automated email sequences to continue to engage with customers using event or time-based triggers.
3. Customer data is valuable: If you grow an email list yourself, you will appreciate how valuable it is for your business. You won’t be at the mercy of a third-party platform — this email list is yours!
4. It’s better for customer retention: Email marketing is not just for acquiring new customers but also for retaining existing ones. You can create customer segments and send content to keep your current customers engaged, which can lead to repeated sales and brand loyalty.
5. You get insightful data: Your email list provides valuable data about your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and demographics. This data can inform not only your email marketing strategies but also your overall marketing and business decisions.
6. It helps you comply with regulations: Building and maintaining an email list ensures you are complying with email marketing regulations, such as CAN-SPAM or GDPR, by obtaining explicit consent from subscribers and giving them the ability to opt out at any time.

We’re going to list all the reasons why you should NEVER buy an email list:

1. Your sender reputation will take a hit: Cold email open rates are almost always poor and can result in a lot of spam complaints. A combination of spam reports, unsubscribe requests, and unopened emails can catch the attention of mail services. They will then assign you a poor sender score, bringing down your email sender reputation. This increases the likelihood of your emails getting caught by spam filters in the future.
2. Low-quality customers: Communicating with a customer who may not be looking for your product or service at all, results in poor email engagement and poorer email marketing conversion rates. If you send thousands of emails at once to uninterested people, that’s a waste of your marketing budget.
3. You could get blacklisted: If some of your recipients report you to privacy regulation agencies, there might be legal repercussions. You should be aware that the authorities enforcing GDPR in Europe and the CAN-SPAM Act in the US are diligent. Additionally, Yahoo and Gmail spam updates are turning the heat up on spammers.
4. Your brand gets tarnished: In the long run, you will severely damage your email branding by sending out irrelevant emails to people on a list you purchased online. You will lose the trust of potential buyers and your company may never fully recover.
5. Your ESP could remove you from their platform: By indulging in bad email marketing practices, you also affect the reputation of the ESP you work with. With enough complaints, you will be swiftly booted off the platform. For example, at Campaign Refinery, we do NOT allow cold emailing, and that’s not all — we only accept validated email lists. Strict rules bring us elite results!

Below are key aspects of list builders:

• Email lead generation: Email list builders primarily help collect valid email addresses from various sources. This includes website sign-up forms, social media, and other lead-generation activities.
• Marketing automation: Automation is a crucial feature of list builders. It allows you to set up automated email sequences, trigger emails based on subscriber behavior (like abandoned cart emails), and schedule email campaigns in advance.
• Email segmentation: Many email list-building tools offer methods to segment your email list into separate groups based on different criteria. For example, you can opt for demographic segmentation, behavioral segmentation, or psychographic segmentation.
• Analytics: Email list makers also offer analytical tools that allow you to track the performance of your email campaigns. You can monitor open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and other metrics to assess the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts.
• Software integration: Email list builders often integrate with other marketing tools and customer relationship management (CRM) systems to streamline your marketing efforts and data management.

Below is a step-by-step guide that explains how to grow your email list.

1. Create great content: Before you start collecting email addresses, make sure you have valuable email content to offer your audience. Ensure your content is something you would enjoy reading yourself!
2. Choose a good email platform: Select a reputable email marketing platform that will help build your list. At Campaign Refinery, besides accessing excellent features and tools, our clients also enjoy the benefits of excellent sender reputation and market-dominating deliverability rates. This combined with automated list cleaning, which gets rid of all invalid emails, spam traps, and dormant email IDs, our clients have seen their email lists flourish.
3. Optimize your website for conversions: Place sign-up forms prominently on your website, including landing pages, blog posts, and the homepage. Don’t be shy to use eye-catching CTA buttons and compelling copy — and remember to implement the double opt-in method.
4. Write amazing email CTAs: This tip is the key to success. Give your readers a strong reason to sign up with you.
5. Incentivize: Encourage people to join your email list by offering exclusive discounts, free guides, or access to resources. Hosting contests and giveaways is also a great way to collect email addresses.
6. Use pop-up forms sparingly: Pop-up forms can effectively capture email addresses, but they can also be annoying if overused. Use them strategically and set them to appear after a specific user interaction or time on the website.
7. Create high-value lead magnets: Develop high-quality lead magnets like eBooks, whitepapers, or exclusive video content that requires users to enter their email addresses for access.
8. Optimize your email campaigns: Once you have subscribers, ensure your email campaigns are engaging and valuable. Consistently provide content that meets subscribers’ expectations and needs, and use segmentation to send targeted emails.
9. Analysis: Constantly study your email campaign metrics to see what works and what doesn’t. Email marketing is a constant learning process, so keep tweaking your methodologies.