Hey there! In this article we talk about ten insanely actionable ways to build email lists to build ecommerce store profitably. Before we jump into details, let’s understand what list building and how it helps in growing your ecommerce brand profitably.
An email list is full of people who have given your brand explicit consent to contact them. It’s an owned channel – as in, your brand owns the data, and no algorithm switch-up can take that away from you.
What is List Building?
List Building is one of the most powerful levers to supercharge your email marketing strategy. Whether you are starting from scratch, or going from a few hundred to a your first 1000 subscribers, or maybe look at growing to 10K, 15K, 500K or 1M subscribers – this article will have strategies that you can action with ease and watch your store propel sustained growth levers across the ecommerce growth formula traffic, average order value, conversion rate, revenue and ultimately profitability.
What is an email list?
Taking traffic on your site and converting them into your email subscribers is the process of email collection
Email collection is an aggregation of email addresses from visitors, customers, subscribers on your digital website or ecommerce store. This additionally contains valuable first-party data such as name, age, gender, location that should be gathered via explicit user consent respecting all privacy guidelines.
A mailing list can be built both online and offline via website pages, pop-ups, embedded forms, via social media accounts or in-store sign up forms.
Why Email List Building is important?
Benefits of List Building
List Building helps power email marketing ROI. Simply put the list building formula for growth is as follows below:
Base Opt-in Rate + Value X Traffic = More Subscribers = More Revenue
As you know, email marketing offers the highest ROI across marketing channels. For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average expected return is $42.
At first, it is imperative to start collecting a baseline by launching an opt-in form to assess opt-in rates, traffic, click rates and conversions you receive. You could implement list building even long before you launch your products or services.
So, what are the benefits of list building? Well, in summary list building provides a rock-solid foundation to grow store profitability, lifetime value and customer experience by accelerating AOV lift and increase in both first-time customers and repeat purchasers. List Building is the first step to building a solid foundation to profitable email marketing growth for your brand.
How List Building can help meet marketing goals?
1. Idea Validation:
Ecommerce entrepreneurs can stress test a product idea, features and benefits before product launch and rectify product positioning and features in an extremely competitive and crowded marketplace this tactic is pure gold.
2. Establish Trust with your Brand:
The core benefit that list management serves are the ability to funnel your incoming visitors or traffic to your website or ecommerce store. The single intent is to convert first time visitors to first time buyers and eventually to repeat visitors and repeat purchasers in time. This cannot be accomplished without customers gaining familiarity with your brand values, imagery, proposition, features and benefits. Hence list management is a key lever than enables your brand to establish trust with its potential customers and build a one-to-one relationship with the brand.
3. Serves to meet marketing goals:
List building serves to channel traffic to serve the AIDA model of the marketing funnel. It aids driving awareness, engagement, product evaluation, consideration and ultimately driving purchases by funneling visitors seamlessly through the purchase cycle customer retention, loyalty, and advocacy. Helps you get more people top of funnel and retain and grow more customers at the bottom of the funnel
4. Learn more about customers:
List building done creatively can help you understand your customers product feature preferences and uncover how they perceive your brand. Besides this these forms can help identify new product ideas, content preferences all with the goal to engage and serve your customers, identify their needs, and provide products or services that match and fulfil these need gaps.
5. Fix Product Errors Prior to Launch:
List Building can help you uncover critical product errors in design, features, and positioning prior to launch by enabling a speedy feedback loop from customers directly during a beta launch of your product. This can save millions of dollars and save precious time and resources.
Email List Building Strategies for Growth
We will cover ten list building strategies for growth in the context of the list building growth formula. Each of the below strategies are sub-categorized in the context of how ecommerce entrepreneurs could increase opt-in rates and grow value for potential customer with the goal to increase cash flow, profitability and lifetime value for your ecommerce store
1. Leverage Sign-Up Forms
Target New and Prospective Customers – Target new and prospective customers who do not have a profile yet in Klaviyo or Privy. Make sure to use delayed timers to ensure potential customers have a good onboarding experience.
Embedded forms – being non-intrusive you could leverage these form types to target all visitors.
Mobile-only – target customers with mobile only forms specifically where your ecommerce business skews towards the mobile device as a % of traffic or sales.
Returning Customers – can be targeted specifically to remind them of new offers, discounts, loyalty programs or new product launches with the goal to better engage with them.
Pro Tip: Don’t waste money driving paid traffic to your opt-in form until you have got your list building strategy in place.
Types of Sign-Up Forms
a. Pop-Ups
Pop-Ups are the highest converting type of signup form as they appear on top of your site’s content and temporarily prevent visitors from interacting with other elements of your website. There are two types of pop-ups:
i. Welcome Pop-Ups:
A welcome pop-up incentivizes a visitor landing on your website to join your email list or SMS list. It typically appears a few seconds after someone lands on your site.
ii. Exit Intent Pop-Ups:
appears when a visitor is about to navigate away from your site and encourages them to subscribe to your marketing communications or take a deeper discount before they exit the website. Be sure to include your value proposition for signing up. Gather additional information about customers.
i. Offer a discount code with a countdown timer
ii. Launch after 30 seconds of time delay
iii. Launch after 60% of page scrolled
iv. Before cart abandonment
iii. Flyout Form:
A flyout form will “fly out” from the side of your website after a set delay time period i.e. upon a scroll or time on page. This type of form is less obtrusive than a popup form, but more attention-grabbing than an embedded sign-up form. Great for offering brand guides, how to downloads or discounts.
iv. Embedded Forms:
These forms typically always stay inside of the page. They are less intrusive. They get opt-in rates are less than pop-ups, but they get more traffic from 1-5%. Add to header and footer of all pages ensuring there is synchronicity of brand imagery, colors, brand voice and design.
v. Sticky Bars
A sticky bar is a horizontal bar that you can “stick” to the top or bottom of a page on your website. It’s easily customizable and makes sure that your key message is always displayed prominently and non-intrusively.
If you expect a significantly high mobile traffic on an SEO optimised page, sticky bars are a good option to maintain your on-page SEO. Custom forms and dynamic text replacement can personalize the customer experience for your customer as they get exposed to the sticky bar.
With sticky bars timing is everything. One could launch sticky bars in the following manner as recommended by Unbounce.
Sticky Bar Settings:
a. On Arrival: as visitors land on your website launch a drop-dead offer they cannot resist
b. After Delay: Got a content heavy page? Give them time to read and absorb before they see a sticky bar
c. On Scroll: if your sticky bar message goes well with a particularly convincing section of your blog article, try launching the sticky bar with a time delay around that section of your article
d. Scroll Up: Capture someone as they are scrolling up. This is particularly effective as a strategy for mobile skewed brands
e. On Click: when a visitor clicks a CTA on your page, it triggers a sticky bar
f. On Exit: this gives you one last opportunity to win visitors over before they exit your page
Pro Tip:
Leverage A/B testing to check the efficiency of exit intent pop-ups, embedded forms, and sticky bars.
They are a great option for announcing product launches, special offers, invitation for subscriptions and announcements such as limited time offers, free shipping
Segment your customers, offer exclusive discounts and perks to VIP customers, flash sale and BOGO offers to repeat customers and complimentary gifts or coupons to your first-time customers.
2. Make Opt-in rates Stronger in these Ways
a. Personalize your message based on their past spends
b. Try asking for fewer details to make it easier
c. Add a human element using photos of people
d. Don’t annoy people; make it easy to close your pop-up
e. Offer a complimentary but useful gift
f. Try different types of forms to see what works best
g. Look at what your competitors are doing
h. Create targeted forms e.g. desktop vs mobile or homepage vs product pages
3. Increase Value to the Customer
Focus on building high value content: 2023 and beyond is all about entertaining your customers and engaging them at every stage of the marketing funnel. Shoppers consume content across channels all day long.
Make every moment count by educating and entertaining prospects at the top of the funnel. Make it less formal but provide incredibly inspirational reasons for why customers should love and purchase your brand. Focus more on the customer by identifying your key customer segments and build a connection with each segment throughout the funnel.
4. Provide Social Proof
For customers at the middle of the funnel, drive consideration through product demos, customer testimonials and how to guides, lastly drive purchases by focusing on building a strong offer, optimizing your content on product detail pages specifically on landing pages.
Read more about how to acquire qualified shoppers through customer reviews and social proof.
5. Build a Strong Community
Before you build your brand community, think about what the community stands for. Have a clear brand mission statement. The purpose of your community will drive the core content strategy for your brands community. Ideally your community should help customers interact with each other, post advice, share their experiences and learn more about the distinct benefits of your products or services. Building a community, will attract your ideal customers, help build trust with your brand, raise awareness and move visitors seamlessly down the customer journey. Host your community on your website, through social media and via local meetups.
6. Build exclusivity through VIP programs
VIP Programs can make your brand feel exclusive. The best VIP programs only give the top tier customers entry level rewards, discounts, free shipping, exclusive birthday discounts, early access to sales and complimentary gifts. If you already run a loyalty points program, VIP tiers make a fantastic addition because of their ability to add even more incentive for earning points.
7. Build Loyalty Programs
Loyalty program members spend more and more often. These members are also likely to shop more often with your brand and less with your competitors. The point of any loyalty program is to make your customers feel special and let them know you appreciate them. Birthday points are a great way to do reward customers. It doesn’t get much more personal than someone’s birthday.
Learn more about how email marketing personalization can be a powerful revenue driver for growth. Also, learn more about how brands can leverage email and SMS marketing together to scale DTC growth.
Doe Lashes sells natural beauty eye-lash extensions made from Korean silk hair and cotton. Their rewards program name, “Doe Rewards”, and points currency, “Doe Bucks” are on-brand and memorable because of their clever and cute names.
In order to ensure a healthy outcome post list building, it is critical to ensure list hygiene via list clean-up and segmentation to ensure sustained results. List hygiene by deleting and suppressing unengaged contacts serve two benefits. One, they help increase email deliverability and result in considerable cost savings ($100s to $1000s a month depending on list size).
Now that we have run through how one can build a stellar email list let’s also learn how to start segmenting the list created. As we know, email list segmentation is what unlocks more revenue for your store and build engagement with your customer.
Learn six incredible ways to scale DTC growth via SMS marketing here.
