What is an email list?
An email list is simply a customer list that you use for email marketing. It will be larger than your business customer list, as it will include previous clients and prospects as well. Clients are customers who have already patronized your business, whereas prospects are people who have voluntarily expressed interest in your business but haven’t patronized it yet.
The goal of an email list is to turn your previous customers into repeat customers and convert your prospects into paying customers. This requires a careful email marketing strategy, which we have a full guide about here.
How to make an email list
The values of an email list are evident, but it’s important to know how to build one. If you’ve been in business for a while (especially in a service-based industry), then you likely have a shortlist of current customers and their contact information. Going forward, if you haven’t already, you can add their email addresses to that list. This gives you an email list of your current clients right away. As more customers come to your business, be sure to get their email addresses so you can manually grow your list with each new sale.
A good email list will exist on a CRM platform, such as SalesForce, Constant Contact, or MailChimp. Having direct access to these contacts on those platforms allows you to build your email marketing strategy and send it directly to your customers.
How to grow your list with lead capturing
Making an email list of your current customers is a large step forward, but there’s more you can do to push it further. This is where lead capturing comes in. You want to use your email marketing as a way of reaching out to people who voluntarily opt-in and convert them into paying customers.
On your website, it’s important to have a lead capturing device. This can be in the form of a free estimate for people who provide their contact information or potentially a discount on their first service with your company. Your lead capturing method will look different depending on your business model, so be sure to look around at similar businesses online to get an idea of what works for you.
Once you have people giving you their contact info, you can add them to a separate email list of those who are interested in your business but haven’t converted yet. At that point, you can craft specific email marketing to motivate them to become customers. It’s worth noting that your list of current customers and potential customers should ideally be separate. With the difference in audience, you can be more targeted with your messaging and see better results with your marketing dollars.
Touch up your list
After you set up your email list(s), your job doesn’t end there. It’s important to routinely visit your current lists and do some list hygiene. People change email addresses, can give you incorrect ones, or you could’ve typed in repeats. Most CRM platforms will flag if you have any bad emails or non-existent ones in your lists, so it’s just a matter of going through manually and scrubbing those out. Email platforms typically charge by customer volume, so you don’t want to waste money on bad contacts.