Email list building is a common marketing practice these days. There are very few businesses that you can go into these days that don’t ask for your email address or ask if you want to sign up for special offers or updates through your email. This is the first step you should take, as well, when building your email list. Start by asking your customers to fill out a short piece of paper containing their name and email address. This will give you the opportunity to keep in some sort of contact and communication with your customers.

Email list building sounds easy, right? Well, it can be if you go about it the right way. These days, with everyone asking for email addresses with the amount of spam on the internet, it is getting harder and harder for you to be able to get a person’s email address from them for your email list building database. So you’ll have to find some way to encourage them. If you are an in-store individual requesting an email address for building your email list, try pointing out the benefits, like newsletters, promotions or other benefits they might receive by having their email address on your email list. This is called direct contact collection. You are collecting the email address for the email list directly from face-to-face customers. For those of us with websites, adding a simple form for email collection is usually the best way to go about email list building. Simply write a short paragraph about why your customer should be giving their email address to you and then request the email by putting in a submission form.

If you already have an email list, try this email list building option. Ask your customers for referrals. If they like your site and what you have to offer, request the email address of friends and family so you can send an invitation to those people to take a look at your site. Or, depending on the site, offer a referral program where customers can earn something for every so many people they get to sign up and give you their email addresses. A third option in the email list building process is telemarketing. In this process, you build your email list by contacting customers over the phone and letting them know they could perhaps avoid the call if they signed up for the email service.

Try to use as many of these as you can when attempting to do email list building. This will help you to create a large email address base.