What are your main strategies to boost online sales? I would guess you’re implementing email marketing, social media ads on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, or even a brand new method such as Gmail ads. Whatever ways you’re trying, you need a huge email list as your audience.

Why is a growing email list imperative to the long-term success of an online business? Reaching out to customers to actively sell is vital, running ads to sell on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram where customers gather for social networking is vital, getting bouncedor unhappy customers back via personalized follow-up emails is vital too. Basically, without catching their contact information, you will lose visitors who enter your site for the first time and leave.

Below are ten creative ways to double your email list month over month. Nothing complicated, nothing too costly, these are just successful strategies many online businesses use to grow their email lists.

Important: Make sure that your list building efforts are in compliance with GDPR regulations if you’re planning to add subscribers from the EU.

Sign-up smart bar in homepage

Sign-up-smart-bar

Source: SumoMe Smart Bar

Perhaps the easiest and most widely used in eCommerce is the homepage heading bar to collect emails from new visitors.

The color and text font in the heading bar should be well designed so it looks like a natural part of your website.

What drives whether customers will sign up via the heading bar is the text copy. Make sure your copy delivers a clear, compelling message with values attractive enough to make customers want to sign up and subscribe.

Turn visitors into email subscribers with coupon pop-ups

An alternative and even more effective form of action request to website visitors is a coupon pop-up. When visitors first visit your store, you can trigger a beautiful welcome coupon pop-up that offers an exclusive discount coupon if they subscribe.

Appearing right in the front of a web-page, pop-ups are better at catching a visitor’s attention than static forms. Plus, while static forms cannot be turned off, pop-ups give customers a choice to turn them off if they don’t want to be disrupted while exploring the site.

A well-designed coupon pop-up can look like this:

email subscribers

Source: Better Coupon Box app

Make sure your coupon pop-ups are responsive on all mobile devices as well as on desktops since more and more eCommerce traffic is coming from mobile.

Ask for email in checkout step

You’ve probably been advised how making the checkout process as simple as possible and giving customers an option to checkout without registering will boost conversion rates.

Although that’s true, you can still collect a lot of emails from people who reach your checkout page by adding a field to ask for their email there. How can you still ask for email in checkout step while keeping it simple? Make it an optional choice, and offer them a benefit if they submit their email such as receiving an e-receipt, faster shipping, free gift or discount code.

Run exit intent pop-ups to capture bouncing away visitors

68% of online shoppers abandon their order from the cart page and never come back. You’re literally losing sales from 68% of potential customers on cart pages.

If you already have their emails, you can send cart-recovery follow-up messages to convince them to come back. But what if the leaving customers are brand new visitors whose emails are not on your list yet?

Exit intent pop-ups are a good way to go. When customers are about to leave the site, a pop-up will be triggered to prevent customers from exiting by offering a special deal attractive enough to make customer stay and finish their order.

email subscribers

Even if customers do not finish their purchase, they may subscribe to your list or follow you on social media, which means you capture their contact info and can recover their abandoned cart later via email or social marketing.

Offer credit points in loyalty programs for email subscriptions or account sign-ups

Another great idea to collect email leads and even motivate purchases at the same time is loyalty point-based programs.

As a kind of reward to motivate customers to take an action, you give away points according to which actions they take. Submitting emails or creating an account are both easy and quick actions to earn points on the loyalty program.

Facebook

Source: SweetTooth app

If you are focusing on growing your email list, consider giving away lots of points to encourage your customers to submit their email or create an account with your store.

Live-chat box: collect emails when agent is not online

You can also collect emails from customers who are interested in your products by implementing a live chat box on your site.

Based on specific customer behaviors, you can trigger the chat to pop up in the corner, asking if customers need any help. When the agent is offline, the chat may require customers to email so you can reach out to them later with answers to their questions.

Offer valuable content such as free eBooks/tutorials

These days, people are increasingly skeptical when being asked for email subscriptions on the Internet, unless you can show how they will be receiving real value from the action.

If you’re running an online store that sells kitchen gadgets, why notoffer a free eBook of recipes in exchange for their email?

This is a nice example of asking for customer’s email in exchange for a valuable eBook:

email subscribers

Make sure you understand what your potential customers need, and provide real value in the free eBooks or tutorials.

Whether you write the eBooks/tutorials yourself, outsource it to a freelancer, or purchase them from Amazon, it’s an up-front investment that can be used forever to convert interested visitors into email subscribers for your store.

Referral campaign: a smart way to multiple email leads at a time

As a good source of traffic, referral marketing multiplies traffic from current visitors.

What you can do is design a referral campaign, in which customers can refer your products/services/websites to their friends in order to get rewards.

Normally, each referrer will have a unique link to share with friends. Once a referral clicks on the link and enters their email to participate, you’ve successfully collected an email lead! Make sure you design a campaign attractive enough for people to refer their friends to it.

For example, Refer us to your friends and get a 50% discount code for all of you!

Conduct a survey to collect emails from responders (and maybe offer them a thank-you gift for taking the survey)

Another active method to interact with customers and get their email is through surveys. A survey can be about products, user experience on your site, pricing, customer support, and so on.

Hotjar is a great tool for conducting surveys on websites. Before or after the survey, you can ask for respondents’ emails either to send them new updates based on their opinions, or a thank-you gift.

Keep in mind that your survey should only be 2-5 questions long. Lengthy surveys will discourage customers from responding.

Set up email signup tab on Facebook page

If you’re running a big Facebook fan page with either huge or growing numbers of followers, capture them on your list through Facebook itself.

The powerful Call-To-Action button on Facebook pages allows you to set up an Email Signup button right next to the Like button, as is shown below:

email subscribers

Constant Contact, Aweber, and many other popular email services have integrated with Facebook email sign-up to help business owners build their lists overnight with Facebook pages. If you have a Facebook page for your business, try this method right way.

Conclusion

If you ignore your email list, your business will really suffer. You just cannot afford that.

Now that you know about all the most effective list building strategies, there’s no excuse to postpone this vital task for growing your business. Good luck!

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