How to build your email database to market effectively

Email marketing is a powerful way to reach large audiences, which can be difficult to reach via social media or other forms of online advertising. Your email database is a list of email addresses that send individual messages to your contacts. The more email addresses you get, the larger your database grows and the more people you can reach. Knowing how to build your email database is an excellent way to advertise your products or services, drive traffic, and generate a profit.

How to build your email database

Build it yourself

Build your own subscriber database as it is more valuable. Embed subscription forms in your blog or website which allow your users to sign up. Further, you can place them on printed materials, at events and with any affiliate or co-marketing campaigns. Marketers call this the “foot in the door” technique. You can give out a small gift to gain entry to someone’s attention and then follow up further with continued marketing messages. Options for this include giving out free ebooks, online courses, resource portals.

Don’t start too big or wide when you first start building your subscriber database. Choose one marketing channel and focus on a specific segment of customers before moving onto other one. Once you have built up an audience on one platform then use that as a warm list. This list can help to grow your subscriber base across all other mediums too.

The downside to building it yourself, is the time it may take. However, the quality of recipients will be higher than purchasing.

Purchase email lists

You can purchase email lists, which will give you a list of emails to market to. If you were to purchase an email list, the chances are it would be filled with spammers and bots which would significantly lower your open rate. Thus, it is important to run them through a verification tool, such as Neverbounce, to verify them. Verified emails will prompt more user engagement. Further, this will make sure you are not facing high bounce or low click through rates. Start off with a small email database first, so you can manage any issues.

You need to be careful when using external email lists because many of them have people on them who are not happy to be sent a lots of emails. So, there is a much higher chance that they will mark your email as spam or unsubscribe from you if you don’t interact with them.

Tools?

There are many tools out there that assist in this process. Triggr’s lookalike and lead finder tool can help you to build strong and verified email databases.