15 Quick ways to build an email list for marketing (Step by Step guide with images)

Email lists are important for every business. Building an email list for marketing is always tedious, expensive and time consuming. Email lists help companies and businesses get visitors, traffic, sales and profit. Repeated customers as well as new customers are acquired through email list for marketing.

3 Common ways to build an email list for marketing

Buying an email list Renting an email list Building an email list

Companies and individuals use any one of the above four methods to get an email list for their marketing purposes. It depends on their budget, marketing plan and urgency or execution of promotional activities or profit goals.

Let us discuss all the 3 methods in details:

Buying an email list

Buying an email list a quick way to get exposure to your business or service. Most companies, online store owners, businesses and affiliate marketer prefer this method. Though, it has few risks involved.

The risks:

You are emailing to an unknown person, you need to be polite and seek his permission for future emails and ask them to opt-in to your list. Some companies do not allow purchased emails, therefore you need to send emails though software. You should be well aware of can-spam guidelines if you live in the US. You cannot send frequent cold emails to the purchased lists until you make good subscribers list out of those purchased bulk emails list. Most companies sell those email list for huge price, therefore you need to find a cheap and good email list broker. You may need to use a list cleaning service before starting any email campaign.

Here is how you can buy an email list for marketing.



Click here to buy an email list for marketing

Renting an email list

Email lists also can be rented from reputed list vendors and brokers. There are many companies in the US offer their consumer and business email lists for rental. They are charging their list for huge price, though you can expect a quality and targeted list for rental.

InfoUSA is such an email list rental company that offers you some good targeted email list.

Image of infousa:

Building an email list for marketing

This is a common way used by most marketers, companies and businesses. Building an email list takes many months and years. It needs lot of investment, quality traffic to lead capture pages and a good marketing plan. We can discuss here, some of the highly effective list building methods used by pro marketers and huge companies.

Creating a lead capture page or landing page

This is the first and foremost step in building an email list for marketing. A lead capture page or landing page is a page with some interesting content, sales copy and a small form to collects name, email, phone or any other information required for marketing.

Step1. Before creating a lead capture page, you should join email list building or newsletter companies like aweber, mailchimp or constantcontact in order to collect, store and send follow up emails.

Sample: How to join aweber

Some companies offer a free trial so that you can test tweak your email marketing campaigns. All you need to do is join a reputed company like aweber or constant contact so that you get good email delivery and open rate.

Step2. After joining an email marketing and setting up a campaign. Create few optin forms to place it on your lead capture page or landing page.

Here is how an opt-in looks like:

Step 3. Booking a domain and hosting for your landing page. Go to hostgator or A2 hosting and book your domain and web hosting. Both of them provide affordable plans starting from $4 a month.

Step 4. Find a freelancer to build a lead capture page. You can find freelancers in fiverr or freelancer for cheap price. You can build a beautiful lead capture page with your optin form that you created in step 2.

Here is how a lead capture page looks like:

Build email list from facebook

Facebook is one of the well know social media website and used by more than a billion people around the world. It is good place to get your subscribers and customers. There are various methods to promote your landing page in facebok.

Promote directly to your friends and networks. Join facebook groups related to your niche and share your lead capture page there. Create your own group Create a business page and share your link to capture emails there.

Here is how an example facebook page:

Collect emails from your blogs/ websites

Email capture forms cab be placed in your websites and blogs where you get traffic. By placing your form you will get sign ups from people those are interested in your products or services. If you are using a wordpress blog or website, you can follow these steps to insert your optin forms in the site.

Click on appearance in wordpress dashboard

Click on widgets

Drag and drop the html widget in sidebar

Paste the code and save it.

Now your website or blog will show up the optin form in sidebar. Whenever a visitor sees and signs up for your newsletter your emails will be added in your aweber account campaign that you created. You can create and add as many forms as you wish for different campaigns.

Build email list from Linkedin

Linkedin is a professional network with several million professionals and many groups. Join linkedin and relevant groups from where you want to collect email list for marketing. One you joined you can network with like-minded people or people those interested in your products and services. Ask them to join your email list for update and offers.

You can write compelling and interesting articles in linkedin pulse and promote the article in groups and also you can promote your landing page directly in group posts and request people to join your email list.

Run PPC campaigns

If you have a good marketing budget and want things quickly, then you can run a pay per click ad campaign for email list building. By spending some good amount of money on such advertisements, your form and page will get exposure quickly and you will get subscribers fast.

There are many companies like Google ads, Bing, Bidvertiser, Chitika etc that can help bring lot of visitors in no matter of time. You can also run ad campaigns on linkedin, facebook and twitter too.

Sign up with such companies, create an ad campaign, set your budget and upload keywords. Sit back and enjoy plenty of visitors and sign ups within few hours or days. Although it is very expensive, it give quick results.

We recommend this methods only for big companies or marketers with big budget. If you are a start up with low budget or an affiliate marketing newbie, please do not try such expensive methods and burn your finger.

6. Build email list with Guest posts and Blogging

Guest blogging or guest posts in famous blogs like Huffington post, Hubspot, crazyeggs or New York Times will bring plenty of visitors to your lead capture pages. These blogs/websites have huge visitors every day. Most of such blogs monthly traffic crosses over 100 million.

Hire a writer or freelancer to write for you high converting content related to your product and service. Write useful content on any topic that sounds good for you. Top 10 tips, how to articles are mostly viewed and read by many readers. You may choose to write on any topic. Ad images and videos in your post and make more attractive and useful. Most of the blogs allow you to add one or two links to your website or landing page in the article body. Use this option to drive traffic your landing page. Publish your post with a link to your page in hubspot or any high traffic blog and watch your email list grow fast.

Use affiliate marketing to build your email list for marketing.

Affiliate marketing is great way to bring millions of visitors to your website and blogs. Create a killer product and offer 50% to 75% commission to affiliate. Affiliates will go crazy and promote your product. You can put a floating form or pop-up form to capture emails from the visitors. Most of the top marketers use affiliate marketing network to bring traffic and capture emails from their visitors and use it for follow ups for life long and earn huge income through repeat sales from their email list.

Here are few affiliate marketing network where you can list your website:

Clickbank: One of the pioneers in affiliate marketing industry with plenty of vendors and more than a million affiliate eagerly waiting to promote your website for commission. Clickbank has a quick approval process and you can expect launch you campaign quickly. List your website on clickbank and get affiliates to promote your service/product for a good commissions. Clickbank affiliates have various ways to bring traffic to your page. There are many super affiliates that invest thousands of dollars a day to promote and earn commission. This is a win-win situation for both affiliate and vendor. As an advertiser, you can build a huge email list for marketing, if you use this great platform.

Share a sale: This is another good old affiliate marketing network where millions of affiliate roam day and night with plenty of traffic in hand and looking for vendors that offer good commission.

CJ: Know as commission junction and most of the vendors and advertisers use this platform. CJ is known for their huge affiliate base.

Use solo ads to send messages and collect emails

What is solo ad?

Solo ads are advertising emails sent by others to their list with your message. It is good way to get sales as well as email list. Most online marketing companies and marketers have huge email list collected over many months and years for their marketing purpose. Some of them are ready to send emails for you for a small fee. Many solo ad providers can be found through simple Google search. You can expect a good open rate of your emails and sign ups in solo ads since these people send less frequent emails to their list.

Use YouTube videos to build email list for marketing

YouTube is a high traffic video website. Millions of people watch videos on various topic of their interest. You can find videos with millions of views and shares. If you can create a wonderful video then you have more chances of going viral. People have a bad habit of sharing everything they love. More a video is shared, more the visitors and sign ups. Put a link in description on at the end of video to capture emails for your list.

Find a freelancer on fiverr or freelancer. Create content for your videos. Make a good video on your product/service/company or something very interesting. Then you can publish the video on YouTube and market it. If you have a good marketing budget, you can promote your videos on YouTube by paying a little.

Here is an example YouTube Video:

Content marketing for list building

Content marketing is another way to get subscribers to your email lists. Write some useful and good content and then promote it on various websites and blog. You can promote your content with paid content promotion platforms like taboola or revcontent. These kind of content marketing help you syndicate your content on various high traffic websites and blogs. You can target your audience based on your products target market. Content marketing is less expensive than PPC ads.

Campaign in Trade shows

Trade shows and exhibitions are conducted in every city around the country. Thousands and thousands of people attend trade shows. Arrange for a marketing campaign in local trade shows. Put a stall in trade show and promote your website and collect emails through a form. Add all of them in your email database. This job would be very interesting and you can build a good email list for marketing.

Sponsor College meet ups and celebrations

Youths are very internet savvy and they contribute more in online purchase. They are very interested in buying online. They are ready to buy test out new things. Most of the online stores depend on youths.

By sponsoring college celebrations, meet ups and gatherings, you can get exposure your website, product or services and at the same time you can easily collect thousands of emails of young students, teachers and professors.

Run a twitter campaign and contest



Twitter is a micro blogging network and millions of people use twitter every day to know latest news and updates from celebrities. Several millions of tweets and re-tweets are done every single day. Plan for a small campaign with twitter. Contact a marketing agency to arrange a twitter promotion. They will find some influencers with good number of followers and let them tweet your message. Most twitter messages goes viral and bring good number of subscribers. You can build a good email list from twitter.

Use “Mix”(Stumble upon) to build your email list

Mix, previously stumble upon is a good place to bring thousands of visitors to your pages and collect emails. People that use mix are looking for great content, images and videos. Mix users share the content and engage more. You can use paid services of mix to get more exposure and visitors.

Pinterest is a good place

Pinterest is an image sharing website with huge traffic. Pinterest gets over a billion visitors every month. Hire some freelancer and design some beautiful images worth sharing and publish it with you website link. You will get thousands of visitors from pinterest every day. You can use pinterest to build huge email list.

Final note: I hope, you enjoyed this article. If you have any comments or ideas please leave it on comment section. Also, please share this article with your friends and family. Have a good day.