How to build an email list from scratch: 10 proven strategies that work

The next step of the game—and the most effective way to grow your online business—is to build an email list of interested prospects.

This can seem daunting, especially if you’re starting without a single person in your database. But it doesn’t have to take years to get a sizable number of subscribers. You can take some easy steps today to grow your email list much faster.

Despite what you may have heard from some of the marketing Nostradamuses over the years, “email is most definitely not dead.” (Anti-email marketing articles have popped up nearly every year since 2007—but maybe the tide is finally turning, if this one is any indication) 

The truth is— email is still one of the best ways to reach customers online, especially if you’re a small business. And it delivers some of the best ROI out of all the marketing channels out there.

Source: The Emma 2018 Email Marketing Industry Report

Unlike SEO (which can be competitive and complex), social media (which can be wildly inconsistent), and online advertising (which can cost mucho money), email is practically made for marketers. 

It’s straightforward, predictable, affordable, and easy to use. And with email, you can build relationships that turn one-off customers into repeat business.

But first—you need to start building that email list. So let’s get started.

What makes a great email list?

As we walk you through the process of building an email list, there are a few considerations regarding quality and efficacy—not to mention usefulness for the people you’ll be sending messages to. 

When building your email list, keep these factors in mind: 

• Keep it permission-based: Don’t buy an email list. No one likes spam—instead, focus on building a list of users who have consented to receive your communications.
• Keep it clean and up-to-date: People make mistakes, and typos in a signup lead to bounced messages. Don’t wait to remove those addresses, and consider some basic email hygiene follow-ups, like confirmation messages, to keep your list clean.
• Make sure it’s relevant: Any email list you build should be related to your products and services. It’s great if you’ve got 1,000 signups, but it’s even better to have 500 sign-ups from your target audience.
• Make sure your readers are engaged: Watch your open and click rates. If users aren’t opening, then consider retargeting a new audience or rethinking your email strategy. 
• Make it easy to unsubscribe: If someone doesn’t want to be included in your emails, no harm, no foul. Make it easy for them to opt out. In fact, anti-spam and privacy laws that make opt-out options a requirement
• Segment it: As you learn more about your audience and collect data, use it to segment your audience to support your marketing efforts.
• Keep on growing: Continuous growth is the key here—keep growing your email list, and use the tips and steps we’re exploring in this article to make it happen!

Recommended resources: 57 common email marketing mistakes to avoid to boost click rate

How to create an email list from scratch in 10 steps

We’re not gonna lie, building an email list from scratch ain’t easy. It’s going to take effort and commitment. To help you get the ball rolling, we’ve broken the process down into 10 steps:

1. Get an email marketing tool
2. Create an incentive for email sign-ups
3. Build a landing page to gather email addresses
4. Use popups and sticky bars to gather email addresses
5. Create CTAs on other pages to promote your email list
6. Advertise your email-gated offer
7. Introduce mailing list opt-ins on other communications
8. Start sending emails
9. Build a referral program
10. Try a giveaway

Step 1: Get an email marketing tool

Before you start building your list, you’re going to want to sign up for an email marketing tool like ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, or Mailchimp. These are some of the most popular pieces of software for not only building and sending emails to your customers, but also collecting and organizing your email list. 

(Because, trust us, you’re not gonna want to keep track of all this on an Excel spreadsheet.) 

The initial costs for these tools are very low—and all of them offer free plans or trials that make it easy to get started.

Once you’ve chosen a tool, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with how it works. Each platform is slightly different, but some of the first steps you’ll want to take include…

• Create your first list: You can organize the emails you collect into groups called “lists.” To start out, you may want to create a “Master” list where you can put all email addresses, a “Customers” list for people who have already bought from you, and a “Prospects” list for people who have shown interest but haven’t yet made a purchase.
• Import any existing contacts: If you already have some emails that you want to add to your new database, now would be the time to do so. You can set up your existing email contacts in a spreadsheet to import them all in one go. Remember, these are folks who need to have expressly agreed to receive emails from you per privacy laws.
• Set up tags/segments:  As email addresses come in, you’ll be able to tag leads based on how they entered your database, and send segmented emails to more specific groups of customers or prospects. To start out, you may want to create tags for segments like “Landing Page Leads,” “Newsletter Sign-up Leads,” and other entry points so you know who signed up where.
• Create an email template: These email marketing tools aren’t just for organizing your list—they’re also for sending emails. Get familiar with the different templates, and try designing and sending out a test email from your business.

Pro tip: Unbounce integrates seamlessly with ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, and Mailchimp. That means you’ll be able to set up lead-generation landing pages, popups, and sticky bars that automatically route visitor contact info into your email marketing software.

Step 2: Create an incentive for email signups

Now that you have a tool to collect email addresses, the next step—and possibly the most important part of this entire process—is to figure out how the heck to convince prospective customers to actually give you their emails.

The traditional approach here is to put some sort of “Subscribe” button on your website’s homepage or blog and ask visitors to enter their email address. 

But have you ever actually filled one of those things out just… because? (No, thank you.) Most visitors skip over a form like that entirely because there’s not really a compelling reason to give up your email address in the first place.

An email address is someone’s personal (and private) contact information. Most people aren’t just going to type it out onto any old website, all willy-nilly like that. You’ve got to offer up something genuinely valuable in exchange.

That’s why it’s a good idea to take some time and brainstorm what your business can offer that’ll convince visitors to give up their email addresses first. Getting the right strategy here will help you build an email list much faster later on.

If you’re wondering what most other marketers do, here are a few of the most common ways to get a visitor’s email address…

Offer a coupon or discount code

For ecommerce, one of the easiest ways to get a shopper to give you their email address is to offer them a coupon or discount in exchange. This is the most straightforward approach—but it’s also usually the most expensive. “Get $10 off your first order” or “Get free shipping” can be powerfully persuasive for visitors.ou just need to make sure you factor those expenses into your cost-per-email-acquisition.

MeUndies and other ecommerce brands often offer discounts in exchange for email addresses.

Offer a free tool or resource

The other common way to build an email list fast (especially if you’re in SaaS) is to create a free resource and gate it with a form.

The key here is that it has to be something your audience would find useful that also aligns with your business expertise. So, for example, if you run an online pet store, you might create a free guide all about “How to choose the perfect leash for your pet”. Or if you run a hair salon, you might create a “How to cut your hair at home” guide for customers staying at home during the pandemic.

SaaS companies like Later use free resources to collect email addresses.

Run a sweepstakes, giveaway, or contest

People love free stuff. There’s something about sweepstakes, giveaways, and contests that just appeal to our lizard brains. (“Why yes, I do want a chance to win a lifetime supply of mayonnaise. Where do I sign up?”) 

You could even consider setting up ongoing sweepstakes like this one from Fat Stone Farm to collect customer emails on a weekly basis. 

This example of a giveaway run by Fat Stone Farm and Webistry helped bring in over 15,000 leads. Check out the full story.

Set up an email newsletter

We know we said earlier that people never sign up for newsletters “just because,” but they will sign up if you give them a compelling reason to. 

For example, you can offer a newsletter as a way for folks to hear about your latest products. This strategy works particularly well in B2B, where you can use a newsletter to share stories of how your other customer, users, or clients are taking advantage of what you’re offering.

An example of a newsletter by Toast to help restaurants during COVID-19.

Ultimately, it’s up to you to choose the approach that makes the most sense for your business. You may even want to test a combination of these two approaches to build your list faster.

For example, check out how this baby food brand brought in 14,000+ email subscribers in less than a year using both coupons and a free guidebook. (You may also want to look into other creative ways to generate leads, such as free webinars, templates, quizzes, and online tools.)

A quick word of caution:

Be careful with any emails you collect for purposes other than marketing (like when someone places an order on your website). There are numerous regulations around the world about how you can use the emails you’ve collected for your marketing efforts, so you’ll want to obtain explicit consent from your visitors in order to send them promotional emails.

Step 3: Build a landing page to gather email addresses

Next, you’ll need to create a landing page to start collecting emails for your list. These will be the place where you display your offer and ask customers to enter their contact information. 

Building landing pages is easier than you think—it’s kind of a big deal around here, if you hadn’t noticed—and we’ve even got a few handy resources to help you get started. 

Some of the lead-generation templates you get with Unbounce for collecting email addresses. 

The TL;DR of building your mailing list with landing pages is that they’re a great option if you’ve got a juicy offer that might need further explanation. Think of how you normally download or access free resources like webinars, eBooks, guides, and so on. 

Creating a landing page is dead simple using Unbounce. (You don’t even have to get your hands dirty with HTML or CSS—which is super helpful if you’re not a developer.) Get started with one of our lead-generation templates and customize it using the drag-and-drop builder to match your brand and offer.

You’ll want to connect the form on your landing page to your email marketing tool, and then test it out to make sure everything is hunky dory. Hit publish when it’s ready to go, and you’ll be ready to start building your list.

In Unbounce, it’s easy to set up your landing pages, popups, and sticky bars so all new leads get routed directly into your email marketing platform.

Recommended resource: How to get more email and newsletter signups with your landing page

Step 4: Use popups and sticky bars to gather email addresses

Using popups and sticky bars is a great way to quickly gather email addresses without creating a bunch of new assets. If you’re pressed for time, these features are a great low-effort way to get sign-ups fast. 

Popups are perfect for short and to-the-point offers (like discounts or coupons).

We all know about popups—they quite literally pop up on a website or page when a user lands, scrolls to a certain depth, or sticks around for a certain amount of time.

Contrary to popular belief, popups do work, but you need to make sure you’re following a few best practices when you use them:

• Use a strong headline—grab attention right away!
• Be clear, relevant, and concise—don’t overstay your welcome, and make your pitch quickly. 
• Prioritize user experience and be respectful—don’t make it hard to close out, and don’t shame your users for not engaging. 
• Test your popups and refine your results—no matter how they perform, track popup performance and keep refining their performance.

Sticky bars, meanwhile, are elements that appear at the top or bottom of your existing storefront or website to offer quick offers (again, think discounts, coupons, and newsletters).

Step 5: Create CTAs on webpages to promote your email list

Have you ever scrolled around a website’s blog and spotted those little CTAs sprinkled in amongst the content? 

Chances are, most of the sites you’ve perused have had some sort of CTA tucked away in the blog—there’s a great reason for that!

Embedding CTAs in a blog is an amazing way to generate email sign-ups for one simple reason:

Organic traffic is free. 

Now, this means you’ll need to do a few things on your end:

• Identify high-traffic, high-ranking blogs
• Build compelling CTAs
• Put your CTAs in the right spot

The first two steps are relatively straightforward. It’s easy enough to dig into your analytics tools and figure out what your high-performance pages are, and building a strong CTA can be as easy as digging into what works elsewhere and testing out your ideas.

(Not that there isn’t an art to creating good CTAs—more on that here.)

But there’s a weird little science behind where those CTAs should go. 

Remember that where the CTA will sit depends very much on what you’re trying to promote. If you’re trying to promote other assets or materials on your blog, you’ll want to place your CTA higher up on the page, with greater prominence. 

Traditionally, newsletter signups have been placed at the bottom of blog articles or webpage footers—but if you’re trying to build an email list, there’s nothing stopping you from placing that CTA up top where more eyes will see it.

Step 6: Advertise your email-gated offer

Now it’s just a matter of directing visitors towards your offer. There are a few different ways you can do this, depending on what type of offer you’ve previously set up.

Already have an online audience through your social media channels or blog? Great! As we mentioned in the last section, these are great ways to get the word out about your offer. You’re able to connect directly with your existing audience and convert these followers into email subscribers to reach them right in their inboxes. 

“But wait, why do I need the emails of people who already follow me on social media?”

Good question! The sad truth is you only reach a small portion of your audience with organic posts on most social media platforms—think about how many posts you scroll past in your own feed every day without interacting or engaging. 

For example, according to recent research by Socialinsider, the average reach of a Facebook page sits at 5.9%. That number has increased over the years, but it pales in comparison to email open rates, which are typically over 20%. In short, direct email is far more valuable than relying on organic social impressions.

If you don’t already have an online audience and you’re truly starting from scratch, you may want to try investing in some online ads.

Lots of brands use ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram to promote their free resources or discounts that get customers in the door. Think of this as an investment—once you have a list of emails, you’ll be able to reach out to these customers directly (for free).

Recommended resources: See how this SaaS collected 100k+ leads using gated content & landing pages

Step 7: Introduce mailing list opt-ins on other communications

Do you have existing customers you’re already communicating with via the services you provide them? Then you should consider including a subtle CTA to sign up for a newsletter or mailing list. 

It’s important to remember that this doesn’t mean you can just send out an email blast to every single person you’ve ever sold a product to. That’s a great way to drive people away from your brand. 

But that doesn’t mean you can’t politely suggest your customers sign up for a newsletter or mailing list. 

What’s this look like, though?

Let’s use shipping updates as an example. 

Say you’re offering your customers shipping updates on the product they’ve just purchased. At key stages of the shipping process, you’re able to send them quick notifications—”Your product has been inspected and is being packaged,” “Your package is in our delivery truck and ready to ship through our shipping partner.” 

Pretty standard messages and a welcome follow-up on the purchase experience, right?

But there’s nothing stopping you from including an opt-in CTA for these users to stay in touch and get updates on new offers, new products, or new services by signing up for your mailing list. 

Remember, this won’t be the main message in any of these updates—think of it as a secondary CTA. You don’t want to spam your customers, after all. 

You never want to annoy anyone or drive them away, but you can always include these little messages in your standard communications in the hopes of getting your customers to stay in touch.

Step 8: Start sending emails

Once the ball starts rolling, you should start seeing the email addresses come in from your offer. 

An example of an automated welcome email from HubSpot.

Don’t worry about waiting until you cross a certain threshold of subscribers before you start sending emails to your list—there’s no magic number you need to hit before you can press go, after all.

Even if you only have a few subscribers to start, you’ve got a great opportunity to build a personal relationship with them and get valuable feedback as to the sort of emails they’d want to see from your brand. 

All that information is massively valuable, and it’ll help you create an email strategy that resonates with your audience as it continues to grow.

It’s also a good idea to set up automatic email nurtures that go out to new subscribers and to begin scheduling promotional emails on a regular basis. If you’re consistent, your list is much more likely to be active and engaged.

Making great nurture email sequences is equal parts an art and a science. You don’t want to push too hard on your offers and CTAs, but simultaneously, you don’t want to undersell it either. 

If you’re not sure where to start with nurture emails, remember:

• Focus on content that adds value for your audience
• Stick to a single topic per email
• Keep ‘em short and sweet
• Make sure the sequence flows naturally
• Track, test, and refine your emails
• Stay true to your brand

Step 9: Create a referral program

We know what you’re thinking:

“But the final step to building an email list from scratch must be sending your emails, right?”

To paraphrase a famous wise mentor, you’ve taken your first steps into a larger world. 

Sending your first emails isn’t the final step. Remember how we mentioned growing your list? Well, these next two steps are focused on exactly that. 

Once your emails are out in the wild, it’s time to start thinking of ways to grow your list even further. 

One of the best ways to do that? Create a referral program.

Direct recommendations and referrals from friends tend to speak louder than any marketing efforts ever can. Creating a referral program follows a lot of the same principles and tactics we’ve outlined elsewhere here—your focus is still on incentivizing your subscribers—but requires a bit more consideration on your end. 

For example, you could offer a discount for every friend one of your subscribers signs up for the mailing list. 

There are plenty of tools that can help streamline this process (more on that later), but the long and short of it is that you want to leverage your existing list’s networks as best you can—so add value and make it worth their while to refer a friend!

Step 10: Set up a giveaway

We’ve already touched on giveaways, but they bear repeating as a post-launch tactic. Running giveaways is an amazing way to grow your email list while continuing to engage with your existing subscribers. 

The principles for an email giveaway will always be focused around one element:

Whatever prize you’re giving away needs to be relevant to your target audience. 

(Yeah, we’re a bit of a broken record on this note, but it’s always worth repeating—add value while staying true to your brand!)

The best tools for building an email list

We’ve covered ten steps for building your email list from scratch, but we also wanted to make sure we’re setting you up for success by recommending the types of tools that’ll make it a breeze. 

Email marketing tools

This one’s a no-brainer. To build an effective email list, you’re going to need an email marketing tool. There are plenty to choose from, and we’ve already recommended a few in this post (ActiveCampaign, Campaign Monitor, and Mailchimp) if you need a place to get started. 

Regardless of what specific one you pick, email marketing tools are designed to be easy to use and get started with.

SEO and advertising tools

You need to reach people if you’re going to build a good mailing list. Advertising tools help you promote your offers and landing pages, getting your brand and your incentives in front of more eyes. Common advertising tools include the platforms Google and Facebook have built for advertisers, but you’ll also get a lot of use out of search engine optimization (SEO) research and analytics tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and other platforms that help you drill down on keywords and topics. 

Landing page tools

Your ads need to drive users to something. In most cases, that’ll be a landing page, a unique webpage with information and a call to action around a single specific outcome. 

Building landing pages is incredibly easy with Unbounce, thanks to its drag-and-drop builder, not to mention the landing page templates we’ve put together to help you get started fast.