Email capture is the process of capturing a user’s email address from your web page. Email capture is important because email is the best way to build and maintain your connection with your audience. It gives you the ability to directly reach out to your customers, and you can use software to tailor your messaging into nuanced segments.
If that wasn’t enough, 80% of small business owners say that email marketing improves customer retention and, with its low marketing expenses, the return on investment for email campaigns can be exponential. In the UK, the reported ROI for email campaigns was £38 for every £1 spent, in the United States it’s $44 to every marketing dollar.
Email marketing is an important facet for any marketing strategy but what are the best ways to build your marketing lists?
How do I increase email capture on my website?
Landing pages – Create landing pages specifically for email capture with enticing offers to await them in their inbox. Requiring an email address to receive more content, such as reports, white pages, articles, early access to features or products.
Pop-ups – Anecdotally, people have great success with using lightbox pop-ups to capture emails such as this blogger who had 1,375% more sign-ups from the pop-up than the sidebar.
How do I make pop-ups that work?
People hate pop-ups, so if you’re going to use pop-ups to build your email list it’s important your users trust the pop-up and are encouraged to take action. Make sure your pop-ups:
- Match the style and design of your website
- Have a clear and concise call to action
- Make contextual sense to the user
When to trigger a pop-up for email capture?
- At the end of your content, so you’re not interrupting their experience on your webpage
- When the user signals intent to leave your website, capture their email before they go
- Use page scrolling as an indication to display a pop up
- Use floating pop-ups in the corner of your content so that it doesn’t block content
- Stick your pop-up to the top of your content so that that it doesn’t interfere with the content and so that it remains on the page as the user scrolls
Does capturing email with a discount work?
Email capture is a transaction – it says that the person values what you are offering so much that they are willing to give you their email for it. Offering quality content direct to their mailbox is worthy – I mean, just check out our awesome Culture Roundup Newsletter for yourself – but sometimes you have to whet their appetite with a deal.
Deals and discounts can significantly boost pop-up Clickthrough rates. They can be used to promote the idea of exclusivity and encourage loyalty by rewarding it, “sign up to be the first to hear about our upcoming concerts,” or “10% off to our first 100 sign-ups.”
To encourage action:
- Combine offers – including free shipping and a percentage discount of the customers total
- Display a countdown timer that will take away the coupon after a set amount of time to increase the sense of urgency
- Make your offer unique, exclusive – access to a product or service that only email subscribers can receive
- Gamify the submission, “you could get any one of these things…”
- Don’t ask for too much information, if they enter an email you can follow up asking for additional information – but if all you need is the email, don’t complicate it
And the success doesn’t stop at email capture, emails containing coupon codes offer a 48% increase in revenue. You can also make the offers conditional on a minimum order value, requiring people to purchase more than they normally would.
Capturing emails is just the start. But now that you’ve captured all those emails, send them emails they’ll want to open. The average email open rate is between 20 to 25 percent, you can beat that by reading our best practices for increasing email open rates.
