Collect email address by yourself, if you feel email marketing is crucial for your business; do not buy or rent any email list.

Email marketing is a very good tool if you can use it properly. It is also important to remember that email is not an advertisement media, it’s a promotional tool. Most effective way of using this tool is to keep the mail customized so that the mail looks personal. Do not send offer through email, rather send information. Send mail to someone after initial interaction, do not send the mail to strangers. Hence, you need collect email address by yourself for your business.

I want to highly discourse you to buy or rent email list as a good email list is not available to sell. If you are buying email list, you are actually buying dead or silent emails. That mean you should not expect higher engagement rate from that list. Again this list has been sold to many advertiser before, hence possibility is high that you are sending the mail to junk folder.

Then where can you get a good email list. The answer is build your own list, after initial interaction. It can be face to face interaction, or the interaction can be virtual.

Buying email list for email marketing is a bad idea

Email subscription: one of the finest way of building own email list is email subscription. Put a box in your website to get subscription. You can also provide a list to know what kind of information they want to get in email. Once they subscribed, send a link to that email address to confirm. This is how you can confirm that your email is not going in spam folder.

Registration: In your web portal you can offer some service for registered user. Make sure the registration is done through email. Try to understand their interest based on their activity as registered user. Send email based on their interest.

Collect email during sell: It is a good practice to collect customers email id and phone number. Send a mail as soon as possible thanking them for buying your product. Also encourage them to reply if they need any after sell service. Later you can use this email to send notification for repurchase or upsell or cross sell. Again, do not send offer, send information. Also send session greeting on special occasion. You can send birthday wish if you can collect birthday.

Market Visit/ Activities: If you are going for any market visit or consumer contact, make a plan to collect their email address and send a mail as early as possible mentioning your contact.

Hotline call: When someone is contacting with your customer manager offline or through hotline, keep the record of his/ her email address. Send a mail right after the call mentioning your discussion.

 

These are some techniques to build email list by yourself and you can think for some other innovative way of collecting email address. Here is 25 Simple Ways to Grow Your Email List. You just keep in mind that you should not force anyone to provide email address. Moreover, providing email address should not be an obstacle in consumer journey.

 

Their first mail from you should be related to the activity for which they shared their email address. You should also take their permission to send promotional information.