How to Build an Email List: The 2024 Guide for Amplifying Sales Outreach

59% of people say that marketing emails influence their purchases.

You’re probably reading this blog post right now because you know how effective email is in attracting qualified leads and maximizing ROI. 

You’ve seen tons of blog posts about segmenting email lists, re-engaging cold subscribers, and maintaining list hygiene.

But what if you’re just starting out? What if you don’t have an email list yet?

Then, this blog is for you. We’ll talk about five proven strategies for attracting new email subscribers.

We’ll also cover the major challenges sales professionals and marketers encounter when building an email list and how to overcome them. 

What Is an Email List?

An email list is a list of people who subscribe to your email newsletter. Building an email list involves collecting the email addresses of people who may be interested in what your business has to offer. 

Email list building is a valuable strategy for sales outreach because it taps into a segment of customers who might already be interested in your business.

As a result, they’re more likely to open your sales emails, engage with your content, and even make a purchase. 

Of course, it’s not that simple. 

But suppose you already have an ideal customer profile in mind and reel in those potential customers with exclusive offers, helpful content, and topics they’re interested in. In that case, you’ll likely keep them engaged throughout the customer lifecycle. 

Another important thing to consider is email list verification, which ensures you’re sending emails to email addresses that belong to real people.

You can check your mailing list for invalid email addresses with an email verifier. This step is crucial to maintaining list hygiene and driving revenue in your sales outreach efforts. 

The Role of Email Lists in Sales Outreach

A well-built email list can be a powerful tool for sales outreach and cold email. Sales ‌and marketing teams can reach a targeted audience, nurture leads, and convert prospects into customers. 

80% of people prefer sales reps to contact them via email. And nearly half of smartphone users want to receive communications from businesses via email.

Sales phone calls are still effective, but receiving cold emails allows customers to respond on their own time.

They have more flexibility and control compared to a phone call that could interrupt their day. And because emails allow people to reply when convenient, they tend to open and answer them more often than cold calls.

The best part? Prospects are less likely to feel pressured, like during a phone call. Perhaps this is why 43% of salespeople say email is the most effective sales channel. 

Of course, there’s a time and a place for both cold emails and cold calls. But if you want to scale more easily, include more details, track key metrics, and reach more people, cold emailing is likely the best channel for your outbound sales outreach strategy. 

5 Proven Strategies for Building an Email List

Now, we get into the effective strategies that can help you build an awesome email list. 

But first, let’s talk about some of the most common challenges sales teams and marketers face when growing their email lists:

• Maintaining list hygiene: Many businesses build large email lists. But this isn’t enough. It’s important to keep your email list tidy, so you only send emails to active subscribers. The key is using email marketing software with a built-in email verification tool. Another important strategy is to clean out inactive or disengaged subscribers. 
• Low conversion rates: It can be difficult to convince website visitors and social media followers to sign up for your email list. Why? Because many people don’t want to go through the process of filling out a form. The number of fields or types of fields on your opt-in forms can make a huge difference in conversions. Consider asking prospects for just their name and email address in your forms. Making the sign-up process easier increases the chances of leads completing your opt-in forms.
• Generating targeted leads: The key to an effective email list is finding people who are interested or have the potential to be interested in your product or service. You may not know where to look. Or, you might still need to refine your ideal customer profile. But once you identify your target audience, you can determine their pain points, interests, preferences, and goals. It’ll allow you to craft irresistible offers that attract them to your business and drive them to subscribe to your mailing list.
• Deliverability and avoiding spam filters: Email deliverability is one of the biggest obstacles marketers face when building an email list. The key is to craft email content that doesn’t trigger spam filters. 

1. Identify your target audience

Knowing the people you want to target is the first step to building a great email list. Who’s your ideal customer? What problem are they currently facing? What outcome do they want to achieve? 

These are some questions to ask yourself when building your list. Creating a buyer persona can help you visualize your customer’s wants, needs, and goals. A buyer persona is a fictional description of someone who represents your target audience.

Your customer persona should include the person’s name, demographic information, interests, and traits. You can even give them a face using stock photography or an illustration. Why? It can spark your imagination and get you to think about who your target customer really is. 

If you offer multiple products and solutions, you may need to create more than one buyer persona.

That way, you can segment your customers based on their interests and needs. From there, you’ll create different messaging and offers that appeal to their unique needs.

This extra step is key in email marketing tips because sending the same types of emails to everyone on your email list will likely alienate some of your subscribers. 

Don’t know where to start? Doing thorough audience research can help you uncover key insights about your target customer. Look at your existing customers, social media followers, and competitors.

Use data from your sales analytics, social media analytics, and/or Google Analytics to help you learn more about your customers. 

Look for details like:

• Shopping habits
• Online behavior
• Pain points
• Location
• Interests
• Industry
• Age

2. Build personalized landing pages

After identifying your target audience, start building personalized landing pages.

As we talked about, a common challenge sellers and marketers face is low email sign-up rates. Part of this is because they create one-size-fits-all landing pages that aren’t tailored to different customer segments. 

People will discover your online business in different ways. Some might see an ad. Others might discover your business in an organic search and land on your website. Many of them will be in different phases of the buyer’s journey.

That said, different prospects will respond to different landing pages and CTAs. So, it may be helpful to create multiple landing pages with opt-in forms and messaging tailored to different audience segments.

3. Use an opt-in form 

The key to getting people interested in your business is to offer something they can benefit from. That applies to email marketing, too. 

This phenomenon sparked the idea of lead magnets‌— incentives or valuable pieces of content‌— that you offer in exchange for a prospect’s email address. 

For example, let’s say your business offers virtual business cards, targeting a B2B audience that wants to streamline the sharing and storage of individual contact details. 

In that case, you might provide resources relevant to your industry and your customer’s pain points, such as an e-book or whitepaper on contact management best practices or a webinar on efficient networking strategies.

Prospects must share their email address for future marketing communications to access these resources. Creating an opt-in form can help you capture these emails.

Check out this example by LeatherCult, a brand that sells leather pants for men. It’s a simple form with fewer form fields to avoid overwhelming potential customers. Make it as seamless as possible for your potential customers to sign up. 

Pop-up offers are also effective in building email lists. You can grab your prospects’ attention by implementing these on key pages of your website. You can offer something valuable, like a discount code, coupon, free trial or demo, contest, or event registration. 

4. Start a referral program

Word of mouth can work wonders for expanding your email list. You can achieve this with a referral program.

Get your subscribers to share your offers with people they know and provide them with something valuable in exchange. 

Incentives might include free shipping, a coupon, a discount, or even a gift. Need inspiration? 

Dropbox is well-known for its referral program, where you can earn up to 16 GB of extra storage through referrals. It’s a simple yet effective incentive that lets customers invite their friends and family. 

5. Use an email marketing automation tool

A cold email automation tool can help you streamline your sales outreach process. This will allow you to reach as many potential clients as possible with minimal effort. 

It’s why 87% of B2C marketers use automation in their email marketing strategy. Whether you’re a marketing professional or sales rep, a tool like Breadcrumbs can help you take your email marketing to the next level.

With advanced A/B testing capabilities and analytics (i.e., open rates, response rates, etc.), you can continuously improve your email outreach strategy and amplify your sales process.

Start building your email list today

Building an engaged, active email list is no small feat. But with the right strategies, like segmentation and irresistible offers, it can be easier than you think. 

Before starting your next email campaign, make sure you’ve built an effective sales outreach strategy that’ll guide leads down the sales funnel. 

The first step to email list building? Make it difficult for prospective customers to resist your offers and deliver personalized messages.