Deciding to grow your email list is one thing, but achieving success can be a challenge for online retailers. This is especially true because managing an e-commerce store involves various responsibilities.

The key prerequisites for effective email list building include:

  1. Generating a good amount of website traffic.
  2. Incorporating user-friendly sign-up forms on your website.

What's even better is that the 12 strategies we'll discuss for email list growth are simple to implement, and you can start seeing results within a matter of hours or days.
For quick insights into the best practices for building your email list, check out these five brief, three-minute videos. They'll help you create a robust email marketing plan.

What is an email list?

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An email list is like a digital address book, filled with email addresses collected from customers, potential clients, or people who visited a website. These addresses serve as a way to send personalized marketing messages, newsletters, special offers, or updates directly to people's email inboxes.

In the world of email marketing, these lists are super important because they help marketers in a few key ways:

  1. They let you create and nurture connections with your audience.
  2. They boost customer engagement.
  3. They can lead to more sales or conversions.

What's cool is that you can organize your email list into groups based on things like age, interests, or what people have bought. This way, you can send messages that really speak to specific groups of folks, making your marketing campaigns more effective and on-point.

The main goal of building an email list is to gather potential leads, turning them into loyal customers down the road. It's like planting the seeds for future success.

Why email marketing strategy is important

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If you're just starting your e-commerce journey, know that building an email list is a bigger deal than you might realize, and the advantages are plentiful. In fact, for most e-commerce stores, their email list is their most cherished asset.

Here are the main perks of creating your own email list:

  1. It's budget-friendly: Costs for digital ads are rising, and their impact is dropping. Sending regular emails to your email list is much more cost-effective.
  1. Email is personal: You can customize emails, which isn't as doable with ads. You can even set up automated emails based on customer actions, something you can't easily do on social media.
  1. Precise audience targeting: Targeting on platforms like Facebook is becoming less accurate. With email, you can zero in on your subscribers based on things like location, gender, or their past actions (like purchases or clicking on emails).
  1. You own your list: You won't have to rely on another company or platform. That email list is yours, and it's extremely valuable.
  1. You can nurture relationships through email: Digital ads often use a broad approach, hoping to reach as many people as possible with the same message. With email, you can create personalized, automated emails that guide a customer through their unique journey. That's not something ads can easily achieve.

Optimal Approaches: Guidelines for building an Email List

Before we start talking about the specific ways to grow your email list, let's first go over some important guidelines. Following these rules will make sure that your email list is of high quality, keeps your audience engaged, and effectively contributes to increasing your business sales.

Get a reliable email service provider (ESP)

Before we begin, it's crucial to find an email marketing service that you feel comfortable with and one that can genuinely assist you in growing your email list.

While we'd recommend our own service, Omnisend, as it's trusted by over 80,000 e-commerce brands for list growth and they enjoy using it, there are plenty of other options available for list building.

Regardless of the app you choose, it should allow you to:

  1. Easily create and personalize various signup forms and landing pages.
  2. Keep track of how effective each signup form is by monitoring clicks, signup rates, and more.
  3. Segment your subscribers based on various metrics and behaviors.
  4. Send automated emails to different segments of your audience.
  5. Seamlessly integrate with other marketing tools to facilitate list building across multiple channels.

Get more visitors to your site

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Let's quickly discuss some effective ways to increase the traffic to your website. Here are your top options:

  1. Use ads, especially Facebook ads: They allow you to target your ideal audience at the right time and on the most appropriate platform. Many e-commerce businesses use Facebook ads for building their email lists because they're cost-effective and can grow with your business needs.
  1. Produce compelling content: If you create high-quality content that has the potential to go viral, share it on platforms like YouTube (for videos), TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and elsewhere. Ensure you have a clear call to action and a direct link to your stor