It may surprise you, but email marketing gives you the best return on investment (ROI) of any of the basic digital marketing techniques*. The reason? The people who have given you their email addresses. If someone decides to share their email address with you, it means that they have engaged with you in some way (visited your website, gone to your Facebook page), have given you enough of their trust to let you into their inboxes, and subscribed to your email marketing list to get updates and news. Given the amount of email so many of us have to plow through daily, it’s quite an honor!
Once you have access to someone’s email inbox, you can provide them with information and resources you think they’ll be especially interested in, along with links to your website, where you can share your expertise, highlight your services, and direct your visitors to take actions like scheduling a call with you. Finally, emails and newsletters are the perfect way to share special offers with your audience.
Six Simple Ways to Build Your Email List
Here are six simple ways to build your email list:
Quality content
Perhaps it should go without saying, but it doesn’t. A primary key to email marketing success is creating quality content. In the case of email marketing, that means creating content that your audience finds useful, entertaining, or emotionally moving. If you create quality content, you will lose fewer subscribers, so you will need to spend less time figuring out how to build your email list.
Incentives
The second key way to build your email list is to provide incentives. Typically, these take the form of free downloadable content such as convenient cheat sheets, handy templates, comprehensive toolkits, actionable blueprints, interesting case studies, entertaining video series, inspiring manifestos, and compelling infographics.
Webinars
Although more effort-intensive, webinars are a way to not only build your email list but also sell your products and services.
Giveaways
Most people love to get things free, from brand swag to complimentary consultations. This method of building your email list is tried and true.
Targeted Contests
Targeted contests are a great way to build brand awareness, get engagement, and build your subscriber list — all at the same time. Contests also let you get creative. Contributing a poem and publishing it on Facebook is fun for the participants. Still, it’s also rewarding for you as a marketer or business owner to help people share their work.
Traditional Marketing
If you promote your business via public speaking and events, don’t forget to collect emails. This is one time when multitasking pays off.
If you were wondering how to build your email list, now you have some concrete ways to get started. Most of the above suggestions are inexpensive and relatively simple to implement. To get faster results, use all of these tactics to build your email list. If you’d like to discover even more ways to build your list, check out this Email Marketing Best Practices guide.
A large, targeted email list is a great asset. It helps you grow your business with your own database of warmer leads. Not only that, but a good list is attractive to other business owners who want to get the word out about their own business. 
So get growing!
Questions About Email Marketing?
We love questions! To learn even more about email marketing and how to grow your email list, schedule a complimentary digital strategy session with Colibri Digital Marketing founder Anna Colibri.
It’s fun 🙂
*The basic digital marketing techniques include: search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, search engine marketing (PPC), and email marketing.
{photo credit: torange.com}
