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Creating an email list is a process you should approach carefully. You can’t put quantity over quality, otherwise, you risk not only getting poor results but jeopardizing your sender’s reputation and your domain.
Hence, to build your email list, you need to consider every step mindfully and understand the outcomes your decisions might lead to. So, how to build a mailing list efficiently and avoid any issues? Find out in this article.
Best Practices In Creating A Mailing List
Are you worried about how to build a mailing list right? Truth is it is not as difficult as you might think, especially if you know the main principles you should follow. So, we have gathered the main tips to build an email list that would help you.
But let’s start with the basics. There are two main approaches to gathering the contacts of potential customers: you can invite them to subscribe to the list through other media you have, like websites, social media, messengers, in-store forms, etc., or you can use special tools like file email extractor to scan the web for relevant contacts.
Tip #1: Extract only public contacts
If you decided to use a marketing automation solution to find and scrap emails, make sure that it will work only with contacts you are allowed to use. Businesses have contact emails that place on their website, social media, and directories, so others would be able to reach out to them. You can easy this, but never even consider extracting or buying contacts of private addresses you didn’t get in a legal way, otherwise, you will receive a lot of complaints.
Tip #2: Use incentives to encourage people to subscribe
Your audience might need an additional reason to agree to get your emails. Offer them a loyalty program, a one-time discount, a bonus, or a valuable content piece that they would receive only after joining your email list.
Tip #3: Start a dedicated campaign to get contacts of potential customers
Again, people might not want to receive another newsletter in their mailbox. Hence, just asking them to do that might not be enough to actually drive the result you are expecting and grow your email list. But you can give them an additional reason to join. You can start a giveaway and offer something special to your audience, something which has a value that will overweight their unwillingness to subscribe.
What To Do After Forming An Email List
When you have collected email addresses, you need to validate the emails you got. There are might be different problems with contacts that might affect your marketing strategy negatively. So, before uploading emails into the email sender program of your choice, you need to check if there are emails with typos if there are spam traps, invalid emails, bot accounts, emails associated with domains that are shut down, etc.
Luckily, this can be also performed by special validation tools, which will automate the process and guarantee that no faulty contact will get to the final version of your email list.
Final Words
Collecting contacts for email marketing is a long-term process, and you should be seduced by buying pre-made contact lists, as most probably, they are stolen and obtained illegally. Take your time to gather contacts from your real customers or possible prospects who opt-in to subscribe, and you will not only avoid compromising your email address and domain but ensure good conversion rates, trustworthy relationships with customers, and a great brand image.