Marketing your business online: Building an email list
Once you are getting lots of visitors coming to your website, it’s a great idea to get their email addresses so you can contact them again and turn them into customers. If they are on your site they are probably interested in what you do and a simple sign up form can be enough to start building your list. These people actually want to hear more about what you do!
Persuading people to sign up
Sometimes you might need to persuade people into signing up by giving them a free whitepaper, ebook or other downloadable info that is valuable to them. That can be set up by using an ‘Autoresponder’ that will send people a link to the downloadable info when they subscribe.
Some people might immediately unsubscribe after receiving the information, but you will still collect loads of email addresses and build a list of interested readers. Those that unsubscribe still have your download too, so may come back in the future.
Email list management systems
Trying to handle an email list manually will be time consuming and it’s easy to get things wrong. An automated email list management system like Mailchimp, Aweber or Constant Contact comes with code examples you can add to your website that collect people’s email (and optionally their name) then add it to your list automatically. You can even have options on the form that allows people to organise themselves into a sub-list depending on their area of interest.
Prices vary for these email list management systems, but Mailchimp offer a free account to see how it all works.
There area some rules to follow when email marketing. Buying lists of email addresses is a bad idea and you can banned for spamming. A clear privacy policy is required on your website and will reassure people you won’t spam them or sell their email address to unsavoury characters. You should also have unsubscribe links in any emails that you send out to allow people to stop receiving those emails.
Need help building your email list?
If setting up your list management seems a bit too technical, we can help. Call us on 01636 812 551 or email info@fcswebsites.co.uk and we’ll soon have you up and running.