Guide for Online Stores: How to Get Emails for Your Email List
What do the most successful online stores have in common? Email is one of their main revenue channels. Email marketing has many advantages compared to other sales channels. It’s relatively inexpensive, offers a high customer lifetime value, and is less dependent on external factors (e.g., Google algorithm changes, though Gmail changes can be tricky). Essentially, email is the only channel you truly own besides direct traffic.
But first, let’s cover the initial phase: how to get emails on your email marketing list. And no, definitely don’t go and buy an email list—it will end badly.
How to Get Subscribers for Your Email List
- Try Facebook Lead Ads, designed specifically for collecting emails, and experiment with different value propositions. You can target people who have already interacted with your store or social media accounts, or even create a lookalike audience based on these interactions. If you already have a list of email subscribers, create a lookalike audience from this list and target them with ads.
- Collect emails at checkout by adding an email marketing opt-in. The advantage is that many people will opt in if your store looks trustworthy. However, the downside is that not everyone makes it to checkout and completes their purchase, making it challenging to grow your list quickly this way.
- Popups are a good way to collect emails, but only if they display real value for the visitor and are triggered correctly. For example, you shouldn’t display a popup to subscribe to your newsletter within the first second of a user’s visit to your store—it feels like spam. In short, users hate popups if they are triggered too early and provide no proper value. All popup tools allow you to set proper triggers (e.g., if the user has been on your site for 120 seconds or has been browsing for a long time and is about to leave without making a purchase = exit intent popup).
- Ensure that if you display a popup to subscribe to a newsletter, it offers real value, such as at least a 10 or 15% discount, a minimum €5 gift card or coupon (full euros often work better than low percentage discounts), free shipping, a free add-on to a product (e.g., free personalization), or even a free product. Experiment with different value propositions to see what works best.
- Interactive popups, like games, usually work extremely well. For example, some popup tools allow you to display a wheel of fortune and ask for an email. Who wouldn’t like to spin a wheel for a chance to win something or at least get a discount? But again, there should be something valuable as a prize on the wheel. Here’s an example courtesy of Wisepops:
- Mystery boxes also work well; ask for an email to open a mystery box. There’s a great sketch in Family Guy where Peter Griffin chooses a mystery box that might contain a boat instead of just getting a boat: Family Guy Mystery Box.
- Also, instead of offering a general discount, consider offering a discount for a specific brand or category. You can set up triggers like that (e.g., when a user spends 2 minutes on the Montessori toys page, you display a popup that says, “Get €15 off Montessori toys when you subscribe to our newsletter”).
- Product giveaways work well, but the quality of emails might be low if the prize isn’t directly related to your store (e.g., giving away an iPhone might attract many subscribers, but most of them may not be your target audience)—still, it’s worth a try. Essentially, tell visitors that if they leave their email and opt-in, they can win [insert some great prize].
- Some stores have also seen success with multi-step popups. For example, the first step asks if the visitor wants a discount (yes/no), and the next popup collects their details. Here is one example from Optimonster:
- Don’t have multiple popups at the same time and no matter what kind of popup you add, chek how it looks on mobile – we see very often that popup looks nice in desktop, but awful in mobile.
- Subscribe form in the footer. Again you can have in footer there, but without proper value, no one will sign up. So even when you have it footer, give a reward for signing up. Also, you can have embedded signup forms almost anywhere in your web, but for them to convert, there has to be value.
- Its manually and time consuming, but we have seen couple of stores writing to their customers post purcahse asking if they are happy with the product and if they can send them email in the future while promising not to send emails often or spam (basically getting the consent).
- Back in stock notifications – you can enable visitors to sign up with their email to get an email when the item that is out of stock is back in stock, but make sure you have also overall consernt then to use this email.
- If you have a live chat, you can either ask the user to input their email address before starting the chat or create an opt-in CTA at the end of the interaction.
- Account creation: You shouldn’t force customers to create an account (and sign up for a newsletter part of the flow) to make a purchase in your store, but you could offer them the option at checkout to create an account. However, this isn’t something small online stores should prioritize.
- No matter what methods you use to collect emails, ensure that the text and value propositions are clear, short, and easy to understand. Also, emphasize that you don’t spam.
Sorry for the lengthy read, but I hope you found some useful ideas. Email marketing is an excellent source of revenue if done right. Once you get someone to sign up and provide great value, they might stick with you for years and generate hundreds, if not thousands, of euros in revenue.