How to Build Your Email List Organically (and for Free!)

Saphyte Team

3 min read

Updated: May 18th, 2022

Stop buying email lists! Building an email list is actually easy and you can do it for free. Here’s how.

Emailing potential and actual customers remains an effective marketing strategy to get people’s attention. It quickly lets people know what you offer and how it can benefit them. That’s why, to many companies, buying email lists seems such a convenient and easy option to get leads and customers at the end of the day.

Many companies, however, have pointed out that this doesn’t really work and can even be detrimental to the success of the company. How so? Not only are you going to pay for a list that may not even give you potential customers, but you may also violate laws (such as EU’s GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation) and even damage your brand.

So how can you build your email list organically? Check out these tips:

Tips to Build an Email List Organically

Make your website work for you

If you don’t have a company website yet, this is a sign to get one now.

Having a company website not only makes your business look more professional, it can also make it earn higher.

By using landing page builders, websites can prompt visitors to fill out a form to get updated with your company’s marketing offers.

In the forms, website visitors type in their contact information and other relevant details which will all be migrated into a CRM database. The CRM’s sales and marketing features then allow users to quickly launch a campaign (such as an email marketing campaign) to engage these visitors and turn them into customers in no time.

Use lead magnets

Lead magnets are free items or services given away in exchange for leads’ contact details. Popular examples include PDFs, free trial subscriptions, e-newsletters, and free consultations.

Around 50% of marketers that used lead magnets report higher conversion rates and they are a free and easy way to get leads to give their contact details to you.

Just make sure that the content you’re providing via the lead magnets are valuable and can make them hooked with your brand and check what else you have to offer.

Provide tools for your target audience to use

Here, instead of getting content (as explained in #2), your target audience gets to use tools to get things done.

This is typical in B2B software companies’ websites. The tools that they provide on their websites serve as a sneek peak of their products and services. A free demo which can nudge leads into buying the actual product after realizing its value.

Examples of these are invoice generators, receipt makers, interactive quizzes that let customers know their design preference, interactive infographics, and interactive calculators.

Promote your tools and content across your marketing channels

Wherever your marketing channel is— online or offline— you can engage leads and customers by encouraging them to use your tools or read your content by promoting them across all your marketing channels.

For examples, a business that sells paints can have their social media page promote a content with a copy that says “Wanna know what kind of designer you are?” and put in the link for an interactive quiz. 

After clicking the link, the potential customer can then answer the quiz and know what kind of “designer” he is. The quiz can then provide links to actual products (such as colors or types of paints used by that kind of designer) and give customers a discount if they type in their email address upon checking out.

That email address can then be used for future marketing campaigns. And it ensures that they’re informed about your business updates and marketing offers (which will encourage them to buy again and become repeat customers).

Use a CRM to keep track of your leads and customers

There’s no better way to record and sort out your leads and customers than to use a CRM. Tools like these are built to let you launch sales and marketing campaigns with ease. 

And you can also use them to do things for you automatically— such as recording customer information from websites (as explained earlier), launch email campaigns based on schedule (configured using the CRM), or even score leads (assess leads’ potential to become customers based on fulfilled conditions).

They can also generate analytics automatically in real-time which helps companies a lot in making data-driven decisions. Plus, they’re also known to give an average ROI of $8.71 for every dollar spent. Totally worth it!

Turn your website into your lead generator

Check out how you can empower your website to pull in your leads for you. Get started here.