Growing Your Email List

(12 Actionable Tactics Beyond Your Website)

Acquiring emails beyond your website can be a profitable investment if you have a strong conversion funnel.

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Here are 12 tactics you can use to quickly build your email list.

1. Coregistration Advertising

Coregistration is when one company uses another company's subscriber base to gain new customers and build their email list.

Coregistration works at scale by advertising networks letting you advertise on other websites' thank you pages. You are provided a subscriber's contact information for your mailing list if a web page visitor opts to receive your mailing list.

The cost per signup through coregistration ad networks varies between $1 and $4. The quality of the signups you receive from coregistration varies depending on the sites on which your ad runs. Therefore, it’s best to only place your ads on websites similar to yours or in the same industry.

Coregistration can occur incrementally when two website owners with similar credibility, traffic, and audiences collaborate and capture emails together. For example, The European Specialty Tea Association and Tea Biz may agree to coregistration.

"The European Speciality Tea Association benefited from applying coregistration tactic. People opting-in to Tea Biz's emails got a chance to opt-in to our email list."

Bernadine Tay,

Director of the European Speciality Tea Association

2. Collaborate With Other Mailing List Owners

Participate In An Email List Swap

Email swaps involve sending a marketing email to your subscribers on behalf of another website. The owner of the other website takes the same action on your behalf.

It's important to highlight that your business's mailing list is proprietary and classified information. Therefore, you don't exchange lists in an email swap. Instead, you each send an email to your respective lists on behalf of the other party.

The email should contain a lead magnet and multiple links to your website opt-in page to make email swaps effective.

Consider Renting An Email List

You pay a negotiated fee for the privilege of using someone else's mailing list in an email list rental.

Because email lists are classified, renting an email list involves the list owner sending your promotional email to their marketing list for a fee.

You're paying the list owner to email their subscribers on your behalf. Effectively you borrow the permission that their subscribers have given that list owner to email them.

Typically list rentals are priced on a cost per thousand (CPM) basis. Email list rental costs vary between $10 to $200.

This tactic of renting email lists goes by many other names, such as dedicated email sends.

3. Make Your Email Shareable

Making your email shareable involves optimizing content for virality and building in some sharable functionality.

Researcher Jonah Berger examined content virality and created six principles of contagiousness. These principles include social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value, and stories. Consider incorporating these principles into your emails.

For example, subject lines may inspire curiosity (i.e., emotion), the email may tell a story (e.g., case study or testimonial), and the link may go to a page that has practical value to readers (e.g., ebook, blog post, product).

Place social media sharing buttons and ‘forward to friend’ links in your newsletters. This encourages subscribers to promote your content.

4. Archive Email Content On Your Website

Consider posting copies of your newsletters on your website. After sending a marketing newsletter to your email list, you may choose to share the content on social media and then add a copy of that email newsletter to your website’s archive. Such actions extend the reach of your email content and make its value visible to those who are not yet on your email list.

"In the latest Tea Biz website update, we focused on showing some of our archived emails to prove that our newsletter was valuable and set expectations for subscribers."

Dan Bolton,

Publisher at Tea Biz and Tea Journey

5. Make In-Person Requests

Research has found that people often overestimate their persuasiveness in text-based communication and underestimate their persuasiveness in face-to-face communication. So, while asking your social media subscribers to join your email list may work, it’s at least 34 times more effective (Bohns, 2017) to make that same request in person.

Therefore, if you have a brick-and-mortar store (e.g., tea room or cafe), ask customers purchasing products if they would like to subscribe to your mailing list to get discounts and information. If a prospect says yes, capture their email information in person and consolidate it in your ERP.

6. Use Your Email Signature

Businesses send between hundreds to thousands of monthly emails; many are internal, and many are external. Personal emails receive higher engagement and, as such, are a great place to encourage email recipients to sign up for your company's email newsletter.

Growing your email list with this tactic is as simple as adjusting email signatures to have a call to action, to sign up for your mailing list. A more sophisticated approach is adding a link to a landing page where contact information can be captured.

7. Run A Contest Or Giveaway

Running a contest or giveaway can effectively build your email list. The critical success factor for this tactic is offering a prize that is valuable and relevant.

The prize value must be high enough that its perceived value persuades people to exchange their contact information for a chance to win. The high-value prize you offer must also be relevant to your niche, ensuring the emails generated fall within your target market. Implement this tactic by promoting the contest on social media.

8. Social Media Offers

Developing a high-value lead magnet and promoting it on social media builds your email list. Require those interested in accessing the lead magnet to share their email address.

When promoting the offer, consider reach (the number of people who see the offer) and impressions (the number of times the offer has been seen). Strong results are most likely to be obtained when many people see the offer multiple times. Exposing your audience to the offer two to four times ensures sufficient exposure and avoids offer fatigue.

"O5 Rare Tea's focus on premium, single origin tea allows us to run effective giveaways. Our prizes have high real and perceived value. So, we can use the value of our products to entice engagement with the O5 Rare Tea brand."

Pedro Villalon,

Co-Founder at O5 Tea Company

9. Add a Call To Action (CTA) On YouTube

YouTube is the second largest search engine. Users watch more than 1 billion hours of content every day worldwide.

Growing and established YouTube channels should place a call to action (CTA) in the description, with a hyperlink to a landing page, where people can opt-in to your mailing list.

If you are building your YouTube channel, ask people to subscribe to your email list and channel within the video itself. If you have an established channel with many existing videos, add a CTA in the video description.

10. Google Ads

Consider using Google Ads to run a list-building campaign. Construct a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign that drives traffic to a landing page. Those who arrive on the landing page may enter contact details in exchange for a lead magnet. By using Google’s conversion tracking pixel, you can identify keywords and ads that best drive traffic. You optimize the campaign for email signups by using the cost-per-action bidding strategy offered within Google Ads.

11. Events

Use events to build your email list by giving away a high-value prize. Trade shows, industry events, and festivals can be filled with members of a business’s target segment. You can take steps to encourage members of this in-person audience to become email subscribers by giving away a high-value prize.

Also, consider putting QR codes on marketing material (e.g., business cards, banners). When users scan the QR code with their phone, the code should direct them to a landing page where they can opt-in to your mailing list.

After you collect the email addresses of event attendees, you should engage them. Consider creating a custom email marketing campaign for key events. The campaign should send welcome emails to new list members, providing context reminding them how you got their emails.

After the welcome campaign has been completed, consider running an engagement campaign promoting your content to these new email subscribers, or target them with a sales sequence promoting your products or services.

“Co-marketing and events are a great tactic to get brand and product awareness for early business.”

Tim Smith,

Owner of The Tea Smith LLC

"Tea Rebellion used giveaways at industry events, like the Toronto Tea Festival, to grow its email list."

Annabel Kalmar,

Founder and CEO of Tea Rebellion

12. Facebook Page Call To Action

Facebook receives 1.9 billion daily visitors, and those individuals who visit your Facebook business page are a warm audience; they have some degree of interest in your business. Leverage this interest by adding a call to action on your Facebook business page to attract email subscribers. Provide a URL that directs visitors to the landing page where they can sign up for your newsletter.