A well-maintained email contact list of your customers, and people who are interested in your business is important for a number of reasons:

  • You can tell them about your business and your offers
  • You can provide them with information that helps them
  • You can give them recommendations about complementary products and services
  • You can come up with your own specific reasons for sending your subscribers an email based on your business

There are any number of reasons that you would want to have an email list, but how do you get people to sign over their personal data to become part of your list?

You need to have something that they REALLY want. Provide them with information that will solve a problem they have, or a discount for something they need. Asking for their contact details and not offering value in return just won’t work these days.

Make sure it is as easy as possible for visitors to your site to be able to give you their email address if they want what you are offering. Speak to your web developer about including a sign-up form in a prominent place on your site, after all, without somewhere for those visitors to type in their details, you’ll never get them on your list!

Look at what larger companies do. Have you ever received an email from Tesco, or Nat West, or Sports Direct, or Zara, or any of the other high street brand names out there? Everyone has at some point.

While some will get your details through a service that you have agreed to, there are other places on those types of websites where you can sign up to receive news and offers. And usually you will get some sort of reward for doing that. If those businesses see the value n collecting your customers email address, then maybe you should too!

So, what exactly are you going to give a visitor that will mean they will leave their email address? Well it will be different for every business, but here are a few ideas:

  • How-to guides – how to change a tyre/plait hair/take the perfect selfie
  • Discounts off the next purchase to entice people to start buying
  • Free goods – either straight out sampling, or free goods with a purchase

Your business will determine what type of offer will work best, and you may have to test different types of offers in order to find the ones that really stand out to your customers and visitors to your site.

Once you have found the offers that suit your business best, you can continue to grow your list of email contacts, growing your relationship with them so that you become their trusted business in whatever sector you are in.