Building Your Foundation: Email List Builder and Its Impact

Let’s look at the key benefits of building an email list for your business.

• 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, having your own database of interested customers and sending regular emails to your email list is much more budget-friendly!
• Personalization: You can’t personalize online ads, and Facebook posts the way you can personalize an email. You can even create automated sequences to continue to engage with customers using event or time-based triggers.
• 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!
• Customer retention: Email marketing is not just for acquiring new customers but also for retaining existing ones. You can segment your lists and send content to keep your current customers engaged, which can lead to repeated sales and brand loyalty.
• Data insights: 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.
• Compliance: 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: If you’re cold-emailing subscribers from a list you bought online, it can result in a lot of spam complaints. A combination of spam reports, unsubscribe requests, and unopened emails can catch the attention of ESPs, who will then assign you a poor sender score, bringing down your email sender reputation. This increases the likelihood of your emails getting caught by the spam filter 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 engagement and poorer conversions. If you mail thousands of uninterested people, that’s also a waste of your email marketing budget.
3. You could get blacklisted: If some of your recipients decide to 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, both Gmail and Yahoo are turning up the heat on spammers!
4. Your brand gets tarnished: In the long run, you will severely damage your brand image 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 shady emailing 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. Elite rules bring us elite results!

Here are some key aspects of list builders:

• Data collection: Email list builders primarily help collect email addresses from various sources. This includes website sign-up forms, social media, and other lead-generation activities.
• 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, such as demographics, purchase history, or engagement levels.
• 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.

Here’s a step-by-step guide on the best way to grow your email list:

1. Create great content: Before you start collecting email addresses, make sure you have valuable 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 always confirm their opt-ins!
4. Write amazing 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 campaign metrics to see what works and what doesn’t. Email marketing is a constant learning process, so keep tweaking your methodologies!