Email Marketing List 101: Why Do You Need One and How Do You Use It?
As a business owner, one of your priorities is building brand awareness and reaching your target audience. There are many ways to achieve this, and one of them is email marketing.
Email marketing is a type of direct marketing, where you use email to advertise your company’s products and services. It allows you to get in touch with a specific group of customers or even individuals and introduce them to your business.
Benefits of Email Marketing
You might think that advertising through email is outdated because most people focus on social media and other channels. However, statistics show that email users are estimated to grow to 4.3 billion in 2022. This provides you with a lot of opportunities to start an email marketing campaign, reach out to your target audience, and enjoy the benefits email marketing can offer:
Products and Services Recognition
The first step to selling more of your products and services is to let your target audience know about them. You can achieve this with email marketing by sending out messages to your target audience that contain valuable information about what you offer.
Make sure to include the USPs of your products and services to entice your prospective clients to support your business. Including a CTA in your emails is also a must to guide your target audience on what to do next and push them to the next stage of your sales funnel.
Cost-Effective
Email marketing is considered one of the most practical ways of connecting with your prospective clients. This is because you do not need to spend too much of your marketing budget to use this strategy efficiently.
With email marketing, you can target any person who has an email address and introduce them to your products or services. You can also use emails to guide your prospective clients through your sales funnel until you convince them to convert without shelling out a lot of money.
Accessibility Through Mobile Devices
Through email marketing, you can reach your target audience whenever and wherever they are. This is possible through the mobile devices that almost everyone owns nowadays. In fact, 36.6% of email opens in 2021 were done through mobile devices.
This means that if you want to engage your target audience directly, email marketing is the way to go. The emails you distribute can keep them updated regarding your business, especially your ongoing promos and upcoming projects without requiring them to visit your website or social media accounts.
Larger Audience Base
When you launch an email marketing campaign, you have a chance of targeting a larger audience base that fits your criteria. As long as a person has an email address, you can include them in your email recipients and convert them into a paying customer.
Having a larger audience base for your marketing strategy also means that you can gather more leads for your business. With the right approach, you can transform these leads into clients who are willing to support your business for a long time.
Relationship Building
You can use email marketing to build lasting relationships with your existing customers and prospective clients. One way to do this is to provide them with personalized emails that will address their current pain points and make them feel heard and appreciated.
Instead of simply bombarding them with marketing messages, you need to let them know that you understand their needs first. Then, offer your products or services as a solution.
This method will position your brand as a trustworthy company that cares about its customers and does not focus solely on sales and numbers. You can then use the trust you’ve gained to forge meaningful relationships with your audience and encourage them to support your business in the years to come.
Tracking and Analytics
One of the most important benefits email marketing has to offer is the ability to track how many people opened your emails and converted. This makes your marketing efforts measurable, so you know which strategy is working and which is not.
Through the tracking capabilities of email marketing, you can also continue improving your strategy. Whenever you learn that one of your methods isn’t working, you can evaluate it and determine what you can do to improve it. You can also use the data you’ve gathered to look for new marketing strategies that you think will work for your target audience.
To enjoy all the benefits listed above, you need to work on your email marketing campaign. For a more effective email marketing campaign, you should use an email list.
What is an Email List?
An email list is a directory that contains the email addresses of various individuals, groups, and companies. This list is commonly used by individuals and organizations to send out emails containing their new blog posts, announcements, or products and services.
Benefits of Using an Email List
Using an email list to boost your email marketing campaign provides you with a lot of opportunities to grow your business. Specifically, email lists allow you to enjoy the following benefits:
Reach Your Target Audience Directly
Get Returning Customers
Once a user visits your website and abandons it, there is a 70% to 96% chance that they will never return. So, aside from working on the interface and content of your website to entice visitors to stay, you should find a way to get them to return to your website.
The best way to encourage them to revisit your website is to use your email list and send an email that focuses on any of the following strategies:
- Reintroduce your brand
- Remind them why they should choose your company
- Offer an incentive
- Ask for customer reviews
You can also use these strategies to reestablish your relationship with previous customers and convince them to pay for your products and services again. By sending the right message to the right users, you can add more people to your sales funnel and increase your revenue.
Personalized Message
Another reason why you should take advantage of an email list is the ability to personalize every email you send to your target audience. When you have a mailing list, you can learn more about your prospective clients, including their names, locations, phone numbers, and even professions. With these pieces of information, you can write your emails to contain the message that a certain person or business needs.
For example, your business focuses on providing products and services to lawyers. Then, you see that several professionals in your lawyers’ email list focus on tax law. You can use this information to compose a personalized email directly addressed to the recipient and talk about how the products or services you offer can be used in practicing tax law. You can then send it to the tax lawyers on your mailing list and wait for them to read your personalized message.
Although it might seem too tedious, personalizing your emails with the help of your mailing list offers great returns. In fact, emails that have a personalized subject line have 50% higher open rates.
High Returns for Lower Costs
Using email lists for your marketing campaign is much cheaper than running paid ads on social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. This strategy is also valuable because it boosts a company’s sales at almost the same rate as paid advertising does.
This is why big companies focus on their email lists. They know that these are excellent long-term investments that will provide them with the results they want for lower costs. Email lists are such great tools that even social media companies use them to advertise their brand.
Where to Get an Email List?
Now that you’ve learned about the benefits of using an email list, you might be thinking about getting one for your company. But you might be wondering where to get one. Can you simply search for an email list online or do you have to collect email addresses by yourself?
Build Your Own Email List
One of the most common ways of coming up with an email list for your company is by building your own. Although it might seem challenging to do so, here are the steps you should follow to create an email list.
Use Your Website
The best way of finding people who are likely to subscribe to your email list is by using your website. You can entice users to subscribe to your mailing list when they visit your site. Here’s how you can do it:
Make a Branded Pop-Up or Slide-In Form
To build an email list, you need to ask your website visitors for their emails. The best way to do this is with a form that pops up or slides in whenever a user visits your website
The first thing you need to do is design your form with the user experience in mind. Make sure that you follow design tips and best practices to make your form more effective. You should also include any elements that represent your brand for better recognition.
Next, you should set the display timing of your pop-up or slide-in form. To determine this, consider the average amount of time a user spends on your website.
If you know that individuals don’t tend to spend much time on your website, set the form to appear immediately. On the other hand, if users tend to browse through your website, you can add a 20-second delay to your form. You can also place a scroll-based trigger, which allows your form to show up when the user reaches a certain point on your webpage.
Create Content for Your Form
After preparing the form you’ll use to gather the email addresses of your prospective clients, you should start composing the content that comes with it. Here are some tips that you can follow:
- Write an attractive headline–Include an important benefit in your headline, which users can enjoy when they subscribe to your email list. This can include promos, exclusive content, and early access to sales.
- Add a relevant description–Support the claim you’ve included in your headline by adding a brief and concise description. An effective description will allow you to improve your conversion rates.
- Create a personalized CTA–Write a CTA for every blog or landing page where you’ll place your pop-up form. Doing this will allow you to meet users’ unique needs at the right time. For example, a user visited your article about link building. Instead of simply enticing them to subscribe to your email list, your CTA can be like this: “Subscribe to Gain Access to Exclusive Email List Content.”
- Be creative with your “No” CTA–Instead of providing users with a simple option to refuse to subscribe from your email list, you should remind them of what they’re missing if they do so. One way to do this is to phrase your “No” CTAs as “No, thanks. I don’t want [insert your unique selling proposition here].” This strategy can make users hesitant to refuse your offer.
Publish Your Form
Now that you have the content, design, and display timing sorted out for your email list subscription form, you should publish it on your website. You can do this by pasting your code into your site’s HTML or using your website builder.
Once updated, your website should show your pop-up or slide-in form at the time you’ve set. Then, you can start collecting the information of your website visitors, including their email addresses, and begin building your email list.
Harness the Power of Social Media
Although email lists are mainly used for sending out emails to your target audience, it doesn’t mean that you can’t use the influence of social media in building it. To expand your mailing list, you can advertise the newsletters you send out on your social media accounts. This allows you to make sure that your social media followers—who already like your brand—can also become one of your email list subscribers.
To entice them to give their email addresses and other information, make sure you’re giving them something in return. This can include exclusive promos, vouchers, and valuable content.
You can also create a Facebook ad to promote your mailing list. Doing this will allow you to target users who fit the same criteria as your existing contacts.
Start by creating an ad that leads to one of your landing pages that has an opt-in form. So, when a user clicks on your ad, they will not only get to access the content they need but also have the opportunity to subscribe to your mailing list. It’s a win-win situation for both parties.
Monitor Your Success
To ensure that your mailing list is working, monitor its effectiveness from the moment you start using it. Determine if all the elements of your opt-in form are encouraging users to sign up to your mailing list.
A better way of doing this is through A/B testing. This involves making different versions of your opt-in form and comparing them against each other to see which one performs better.
Buy an Email List
Another way of getting an email list for your business is by purchasing one from a reputable lead generation company. This method of acquiring mailing lists can provide you with various benefits:
Time-Efficient
When you choose to buy an email list, you can get your hands on a directory in no time. You won’t have to spend your time manually creating pop-up forms and waiting for users to subscribe. This will save you a lot of time, especially when you are trying to reach your business goals within a specific timeframe.
Convenience
With an email list, you can immediately start your email marketing campaign and begin building relationships with your prospective clients. You don’t have to worry about learning how to create pop-ups, designing opt-in forms, and other skills that you don’t really need. You also don’t need to hire other professionals just to set up your opt-in forms.
Instead, you can focus your resources on learning how to create engaging emails that will encourage your audience to convert. Ultimately, you can use your efforts to increase your revenue and bring your business closer to success.
Validated
Should You Build or Buy an Email List?
Building and buying an email list both offer several benefits. When you build an email list, you can be sure that every piece of information included is from a real user. You can also learn more about the behavior and preferences of your audience, which you can use in your other marketing strategies.
On the other hand, buying an email list provides you with convenience, which then allows you to execute your email marketing campaign immediately. Buying an email list also helps you focus your resources on other important tasks instead of manually creating an email list.
To answer the question “should you build or buy an email list?”, the answer depends on your business’s capacity. If your bandwidth allows, you should use both methods to acquire an email list.
You can start by buying an email list and expanding it by creating pop-up forms and adding more information to it. You can also buy an email list and use it to expand your existing mailing list, which you may have created beforehand.
How to Use an Email List to Generate Revenue
An email list’s most important use is bringing you closer to your business goals. You can use your directory to make money and earn more revenue through the following methods:
Market Your Products and Services
Perhaps the most obvious use for an email list, taking advantage of this opportunity allows you to sell your products and services to organizations and individuals who might be interested in them. All you need to do is make sure that you make your products and services as appealing as you can. With the right approach, you can turn the leads in your email list into paying customers.
Reuse Old Campaigns and Strategies
With mailing lists, you can run campaigns that focus on your products and services. If you had a certain campaign in the past that greatly helped your brand, you can run it again with the help of your email list and relive its success.
Distribute Valuable Content
Aside from focusing on promoting your products and services, you can use your newsletters to provide valuable content to your target audience. Through your email list, you can assume what content topic and format your target audience might want or need. You can then start creating content that will be engaging for your audience and that will encourage them to convert.
Should You Build or Buy an Email List?
Building and buying an email list both offer several benefits. When you build an email list, you can be sure that every piece of information included is from a real user. You can also learn more about the behavior and preferences of your audience, which you can use in your other marketing strategies.
On the other hand, buying an email list provides you with convenience, which then allows you to execute your email marketing campaign immediately. Buying an email list also helps you focus your resources on other important tasks instead of manually creating an email list.
To answer the question “should you build or buy an email list?”, the answer depends on your business’s capacity. If your bandwidth allows, you should use both methods to acquire an email list.
You can start by buying an email list and expanding it by creating pop-up forms and adding more information to it. You can also buy an email list and use it to expand your existing mailing list, which you may have created beforehand.
Segmenting Your Email List
Email lists can help you address your customers’ pain points based on their specific position in the sales funnel. This allows you to reach your target audience and provide them with your products and services right when they need them.
However, it is not that simple. You need to segment your email list properly to target specific individuals or organizations efficiently.
What is Email Segmentation?
Email segmentation refers to the practice of dividing your email list into groups based on characteristics like interests and demographics. You can also segment your email list based on users’ buying habits, familiarity with your company, and professional background
Segmenting your email list properly makes your email marketing campaign more powerful. This practice can also allow you to do the following:
- Personalize your emails for more conversions and happier customers
- Speak more intelligently and directly with your customers
- Send out email filled with information that your audience actually wants
Build Customer Personas
Determine who your best customers are and create personas for every group. Doing this will allow you to determine which segments like which type of message. To help you start, here are some questions you can ask yourself:
- What demographic data do you know about this customer?
- What are this customer’s pain points?
- What do they want and how can you help them achieve it?
What do you know about their daily life?
Choose Your Email List Segments
Using your email list and customer personas, create some email segments you can experiment with. Don’t hesitate to get creative with the segments you create based on the specific knowledge you have about your target audience.
Create Personalized Content
After finalizing your email list segments, you should start writing and designing personalized content that suits every group’s unique needs and characteristics. To start, you can learn how to write effective emails for your subscribers and begin personalizing your content once you’ve understood the basics
Start Sending Out Emails
Once you’re comfortable with writing engaging content for each of your email segments, you should start hitting send. If your content is effective, you should see improvement in your conversion rates.
Verifying Email List
Checking the authenticity of your email list is important for the success of your marketing campaign. This process helps you ensure that every entry in your directory is active.
It also allows you to avoid sending newsletters to incorrect or inactive accounts, which can negatively affect your sender’s reputation. If your sender’s reputation gets damaged, your newsletters may be flagged as spam by email service providers.
When Do You Need to Verify Your Email List?
There are no strict rules that require you to verify your email list at specific intervals. However, you are recommended to validate your mailing list when:
- New recipients have been added to your directory
- You last verified your email list more than a month ago
- Your bounce rate is nearing or has exceeded 2%
- Your open rates are declining
How to Verify an Email List
There are several ways to verify your mailing list. Some of the easiest and most common ones are the following:
Choose Your Email List Segments
Using your email list and customer personas, create some email segments you can experiment with. Don’t hesitate to get creative with the segments you create based on the specific knowledge you have about your target audience.
Send a Test Email
The easiest way to check if an email address in your list is active is to send a test email. Using a dummy account, send a message to the email address you want to verify. If you get a hard bounce, remove the email address from your directory. You can also use this method for bulk verification.
However, this method might be too tedious and time-consuming. If you manually check the responses, you might take up too many resources instead of dedicating them to more valuable tasks.
Check Syntax
Another thing you need to do when verifying your mailing list is to check every email address in your directory for typographical and syntactical errors. Make sure to carefully inspect the email addresses’ unique identifiers and domain names.
An email address’s unique identifier has a limit of 64 characters. It should also only consist of upper and lowercase English letters, digits 0–9, and special characters—! # $ & % ‘ * + – / = ? ^ _ ` | {.
On the other hand, an email address’s domain name should be preceded by the @ sign. Most of the time, email addresses often end in @gmail.com, @outlook.com, or @yahoo.com. However, in the case of businesses, their email addresses’ domain names might be unique to their organization.
Keep an Eye Out for Disposable Emails
Disposable email addresses are temporary addresses that are only valid for a certain period. When verifying your email list, make sure to check for emails generated by Nada, Mailinator, and other disposable email generators.
Use Online Email Validators
You can also use online email validators to check if the entries in your email list are accurate. These email verification tools can save you the hassle of manually checking every email address on your list. So, you can begin your email marketing campaign immediately without any issues.
Source Your Email List From a Trusted Company
The easiest way to confirm that your email list is authentic is to obtain it from a reliable lead generation tool. By doing this, you won’t have to go through the trouble of checking every entry in your directory either manually or automatically.
With the lead generation tool that we offer from Leads Biz, you can gain access to a validated email list based on your specific needs. We make sure that every entry in our mailing lists is accurate and up to date by collecting our data from organizations, media companies, mailing lists, websites, and other trustworthy resources. We also verify the quality of each lead using our in-house technology.
Email Lists are the Key to Your Business’s Success
Every piece of information in your mailing list is verified to protect your sender’s reputation and reach out to more prospective clients.
For verified mailing lists that target different industries, turn to us at Leads Biz. We offer an outstanding lead generation tool, which you can use to generate qualified leads for your business. Try our tool’s free demo today to discover how we can help bring your business closer to success.