Starting a Small Business Email List

One of the most effective ways to promote your small business is starting an email list and engaging with customers and prospects through an email newsletter or targeted offers.

Maintaining a healthy email list provides a number of benefits for small businesses, starting with the ability to foster relationships and sales. While some e-commerce companies will be able to attract sales directly through email offers, most businesses will have more success using email for lead nurturing and driving engagement with current and potential customers.

Another advantage of an email list is that your company owns it. Social sites come and go, or may change the rules about how you can use your followers’ data. In contrast, you control your email list and how you use it.

Achieving these benefits does not require compiling a massive list. Experts suggest having between 100 and 500 names to start marketing to your list effectively. In broad terms, it’s better to have a small list with engaged users than a large list of people who ignore your emails.

In fact, it’s a good practice to review your list and remove inactive members every six months or so. This helps increase improve your engagement statistics, ensures that you are reaching active users.

It’s also important to resist any offers to purchase email subscribers. Because you don’t have permission to market to those names, your messages are more likely to be marked as spam, which hurts your overall deliverability. In addition, purchased email addresses are often outdated as list brokers sell the same addresses over and over.

Building Your List

One of the most effective techniques for starting an email list is offering a "lead magnet" in exchange for someone’s email address. Common lead magnets include e-books, checklists, product discounts, subscriber exclusive content, or other incentives to sign up.

A fast way to create an e-book is to bundle together several blog posts on a related topic, potentially with updated information and additional how-to details or other information that goes beyond the content in the original posts.

If your business is consumer-focused, holding contests or sending discount offers can be powerful strategies in adding names to your email list.

Once you’ve figured out how you’ll attract customers, create landing pages with registration forms where people will add their name and email address. It’s helpful to create separate landing pages for post on different networks where you promote your lead magnet. For example, sending LinkedIn or Facebook users to separate landing pages to register will help you understand which platforms are more effective in reaching your target audience.

Managing Subscribers

As you develop your list, it’s important to work with an email service provider (ESP) to manage your list, develop your newsletters and offers, and distribute your emails. An ESP offers powerful advantages in improving deliverability, because they work with major email services and recognize potential signals that can get your content marked as spam.

The ESP software will also give you the ability to add the subscriber’s name in the subject line and email text. This type of personalization goes a long way to helping your emails get opened

By following the steps and working to add names on an ongoing basis, you’ll develop an email list that will be a powerful marketing tool for your small business.