Email

Email list building from the ground up

Building a big email list takes a lot of time and patience, but it isn't impossible. All it takes is a little knowledge on best practices. Read more...

PUBLISHED ON

PUBLISHED ON

Oh, email lists, one of our most visited topics ever. Without your list of recipients, your entire email campaigns would be all for naught. Regardless of whether you’re sending an automated onboarding campaign or your latest email marketing push, without a good mailing list, none of that matters.

However, building a great email list is easier said than done.

All jokes aside, you should never buy an email list. You’ll run into all kinds of trouble with inbox service providers and email service providers alike, and your reputation will take a hit on top of all of that. Don’t do it.

But where do you actually start when it comes to building an email list? Let’s start at the source with your sign-up form.

Simple Email List Sign-Ups

To be blunt, you need to keep sign-up forms, simple, clear, and concise. Think about the last sign-up form you looked at and ended up not completing, what was wrong with it?

Poor design, too many contact information fields, and unclear descriptions often lead to people abandoning your sign-up form and lower conversion rates. The same can be said for any landing pages you place your sign-up on. if it’s a mess, website visitors are less likely to convert into email recipients.

If you need a good baseline to start with as far as contact information goes, simple first name, last name, and email address fields should serve you fine. Anything longer than that, and you should start considering whether or not this is an email list subscription or a contact form. No need to ask 100 questions, just provide the essential information. Remember: Make it clear what your email subscribers will be signing up for, and allow them to opt-in for the messaging they want to receive.  

And to save you some trouble down the road, go a step further by implementing an email validation service with your sign up will also help clean your list up as you go.

Don’t stop at the sign-up

Once someone has submitted a sign-up form for your email messages, it’s time to send them an opt-in form via email. Double opt-in the best policy for email sending, so send one last check to your new subscribers to make sure they really want to be included on your email list. After that, send a confirmation or a welcome email to add a nice touch to your sign-up process.

Where to place your Email List Sign-ups

When you have your sign-up ready, you need to determine where it should live on your site. This is usually where your marketing strategy comes into play. What your marketing and product teams will do is determine where new people are entering into the website, and then decide if the sign-up and overall content of the email campaign make sense for any particular area of your site.

So for example, a blog subscriber sign-up doesn’t make sense on the home page, but it does make sense on your blog landing page or individual blog posts.

Good things come to those who wait

Again, a little goes a long way in terms of building an email list. Tossing a sign up on every page of your site or constant in-app notifications drive people away. Plus, you run the risk of getting more junk addresses if you spam your sign up page. To achieve a high-quality list, a little goes a long way.

What about using social media as a landing page?

That isn’t our area of expertise by any means, so we can’t speak to it as well as a marketing-centric online communications company could. In general, you need to be extremely clear with what you’re doing with any personal data, including emails.

If you do include a sign-up on your social media, make sure that the email list sign-up is clearly presented. You will also have to abide by the privacy agreement determined by the social media platform, as they have their own rules and regulations to individual contact collection for companies.

List building takes time

Building an email list doesn’t happen overnight — it’s a work in progress. Proper sending practices and providing a quality service that people will use will grow your following organically over time. It’s easy to get discouraged when it takes a while or when it’s time to sunset disengaged users, but it will pay off in the long run with better metrics over time, and that helps your reputation.

Sign Up

It's easy to get started. And it's free.

See what you can accomplish with the world’s best email delivery platform.

Related readings

How to send bulk email: The dos and don’ts of mass email sending

Both transactional and marketing email messages can rely on sending massive amounts of email all at once. But while bulk is better when buying toilet paper, that’s not always the...

Read more

Everything you need to know about sending email with APIs

Are you creating an e-commerce web page that needs to send transactional emails to customers? A developer building a web application that needs to send messages to email...

Read more

Best practices for successful email delivery

Composing good email is important but making sure it successfully reaches your recipients is critical. So many well-intended messages end up in spam (60% in a recent analysis)...

Read more

Popular posts

Email inbox.

Build Laravel 10 email authentication with Mailgun and Digital Ocean

When it was first released, Laravel version 5.7 added a new capability to verify user’s emails. If you’ve ever run php artisan make:auth within a Laravel app you’ll know the...

Read more

Mailgun statistics.

Sending email using the Mailgun PHP API

It’s been a while since the Mailgun PHP SDK came around, and we’ve seen lots of changes: new functionalities, new integrations built on top, new API endpoints…yet the core of PHP...

Read more

Statistics on deliverability.

Here’s everything you need to know about DNS blocklists

The word “blocklist” can almost seem like something out of a movie – a little dramatic, silly, and a little unreal. Unfortunately, in the real world, blocklists are definitely something you...

Read more

See what you can accomplish with the world's best email delivery platform. It's easy to get started.Let's get sending
CTA icon