Email list building has changed. It’s no longer effective to opt for quantity, building as big a list as possible through pop-ups and other simple techniques, followed by throwing your email newsletter out there with little care to where it lands. Effective email marketing involves understanding and targeting your audience, and creating content that’s meaningful and relevant. When it comes to your email list, that means quality over quantity.
Email is still the most powerful marketing channel, but as email clients and providers become better at filtering spam, you have to put a little more effort into getting it right. That’s OK, though, as help is here!
Using Qualified Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are still one of the best places to start when building your email lists, but it’s important to make sure they actually attract the right people. It can look great to have a big list of email signups, but if no one is reading the email when it gets there, it’s just misleading inflation.
Make sure your lead magnets are relevant to the modern world. Older techniques that may have done well in the 2010s don’t cut it any more. Consider:
Being Brief
There are far too many 50-page PDFs that present themselves as the ‘ultimate guide’ to whatever, but let’s be honest – no one ever reads them. Short, actionable content is far more effective.
Being Specific
Generic offers just don’t promise value. ‘Subscribe to our newsletter’ says nothing other than ‘we’re going to help fill up your inbox’. Use techniques to determine your reader’s interest and target your offers to match.
Being Interactive
Static content quickly gets stale. Making your content interactive helps keep it current and relevant.
With modern tools that will help you segment your audience effectively, aligning your lead magnets with individual needs is so much easier – and many times more effective. It’s a little more time investment at the development stage, but equally more rewarding.
Give Context to Sign-Up Forms
Smart sign-up forms are far better at getting that all-important engagement. Tailor your sign-up forms to meet the content of the page, rather than relying on a ‘one size fits all’ formula that’s repeated at the bottom of each page.
Consider different types of form placement, such as:
- Opens
- Inline forms
- Slide-in forms
- Exit-trigger forms
Keep the forms short and really easy to fill in, complying with standards to enable swift auto-filling.
Use Interactive Opt-Ins and Quizzes
Almost everyone likes to procrastinate for a minute or two, filling in a quiz. They’re fun and when they’re done well, they generate a sense of pleasure and warmth in the reader – after all, who doesn’t get a buzz finding out what sort of fruit they are, or where the sorting hat would place them?
But the best thing about interactive engaging forms like these is that they provide you, the marketer, with useful segmented data that you can use to properly target future marketing communication.
Well-developed quizzes and other interactive components can do a lot of work for your marketing. There are tools out there (like Interact or Typeform) to help you create quizzes and other survey-based interactive content for your site, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Work With Other Businesses
Don’t do it alone. When you collaborate with other business owners to build a combined list that’s properly segmented and filled with essential data, the costs are shared, and the effectiveness is doubled.
Joint ventures (JVs) allow you to cross the streams, providing combined incentives and promotions. When you partner with another company that has similar values to you and is looking to target the same audience without becoming a competitor, then working together makes the most sense.
Consider a plumbing business that partners with a construction firm to build an email list of homeowners in the region, or a printing company that undertakes a marketing joint venture with a graphic design house. There are plenty of opportunities for cross-business collaboration when it comes to marketing.
Of course, it’s essential that you’re transparent and follow all regulations, such as GDPR, to ensure customer data is treated appropriately.
Promote Your Lead Magnets
Simply having a lead magnet is not enough – you need to actively promote it, or no one is going to find it. And if it’s a lead magnet designed to build your email marketing list, then it can’t be left to your email newsletter to promote it!
Make noise in your social media circles. Create social content that showcases the value of your lead magnet to draw people in, and remember to adjust that content to match the audience, making more efficient use of segmentation to encourage quality leads.
Be Strategic with Paid Ads
Paid ads work hand-in-hand with social platforms to expand your reach, but they have to be used carefully. Once more, it’s important to consider quality rather than quantity. Offering a freebie will get you more clicks, but the low barrier means those leads will be less likely to spend later in the sales funnel. Instead, consider ‘tripwire’ ads, with a low-cost offer that better qualifies the leads.
Building a Good Email List in 2025
When you take the time to build a qualified list of valuable leads, rather than a huge list of disinterested people, you gain in many ways:
- Higher conversion rate = better ROI for your effort
- Better engagement = improved feedback for your business
- Loyal customers = testimonials and reviews for future brand growth
- Cleaner list = less administration
Throw away the decades-old thinking of ‘more is better’ and realign your ideas to become ‘quality over quantity’, and your email marketing will thank you.
