Even in these times of commonly used social media marketing, email marketing continues to offer tremendous return on investment. Unlike social media or television, email marketing allows you to customize your content for different consumers, and create personalized experiences for them. One of the keys to success with email marketing, however, is coming up with an email marketing list full of email addresses of people likely to be interested in your product. The question is, how do you build a list of email subscribers?

Begin with your existing customers

If you haven’t ever tried collecting email addresses from your customers, you should start now. When you send marketing email to your mailing list, you foster brand loyalty, and improve the probability of repeat sales.

Try to get referrals

Getting existing customers to refer their contacts to you to add to your mailing list can be an effective way of gaining new subscribers. When you attempt to reach out to a new subscriber through someone they already know, you do so from a position of strength. You can offer discounts and other incentives to encourage existing customers to refer their contacts for addition to your mailing list.

Do your best to avoid sending out spam

It’s important to collect information from subscribers to find out what their interests are, and send out email marketing content that is relevant to them. It can help to make sure that you don’t send out too many emails, as well. If you aren’t careful to put value in every email that you send out, you risk having people unsubscribe from your list.

Don’t let old email addresses go to waste

Studies estimate that email mailing lists lose about twenty percent of their currency each passing year. This means that one in five email addresses on any email list becomes inactive or irrelevant each year. Nevertheless, there is often a chance that old addresses are still active. It’s important to send out marketing emails to old addresses every now and then to see if they can be revived.

Offer high-quality content

Create high-quality e-books or videos, and offer them for free to anyone who is willing to share their email address with you. If you offer genuine value with your content, you’ll find that many people are willing to sign up just to be able to view it.

You don’t even necessarily need to create all your high-quality content yourself. Instead, you can sponsor content on websites that have readership among your customer base. Readers can have the option of signing up to your own newsletter if they find the content attractive.

Launch a giveaway or contest

When you announce a giveaway or contest, you’re able to collect the email addresses of people who enter. These email addresses can go on your marketing list.

Businesses are aware that email marketing comes with a great return on their investment. For this reason, many will do anything they can to build their email lists, including buying them. It’s important to understand, however, that bought lists rarely have the effectiveness of lists built organically. When you build a list through trial and error, you fill it with addresses that are relevant to your business.