We recently had a customer of ours ask something like this so I thought I would start from the beginning and share the absolute easiest way to build your email mailing list.

Why build a mailing list?

Every business needs to have good marketing to be able to sustain and hopefully grow. That marketing may look very different from business to business depending on your industry but a good rule of thumb is to have a list of people who already know and trust your work to whom you can share new and exciting opportunities.

The most likely candidate to buy your next great product is someone who bought and loved your last one. Building a list with people who want to be on it means you have direct access to people who want to hear what you have to say or see what you have to offer. It’s every businesses dream to have a large pool of people who are asking for what they’re  offering so why not get started in building that list right now.

I’m ashamed to say that we started a little late with the whole mailing list thing. Our marketing has been primarily word of mouth. We create great products, offer stellar support, and hope that our users and customer will share their experiences with everyone they come in contact with. It’s a great method and we stand by it but it is a slow process. And let’s be honest, even our customers can forget about us over time as long as everything is working smoothly, and we always strive to that end. And so out of sight, out of mind.

Strategies for building a mailing list?

The truth is that most of us don’t just sign-up for mailing lists. In fact we try to avoid them because most of the time they end up sending us stuff we don’t even want. That’s not the kind of list we’re building but your visitors don’t know that so we have to help them see the light. Here are a few ways you can do that.

• Just ask – Who knows, you might get lucky and if they like you and your website’s content they just might hand over their email address on a silver platter. You should certainly do this but I wouldn’t rely on this one on it’s own.
• Offer it while already doing business with them – This just so happens to be the method we use. When a visitor is already taking the steps to become a customer by purchasing one of our products we offer our newsletter to them at checkout. Since we use MailChimp and Easy Digital Downloads we are able to use the MailChimp extension and the process is completely seamless. The beauty of this method is they already like us enough to buy our products so why wouldn’t they want to get updates from us. These are the best additions to our mailing list in our opinion.
• Offer a product or your expertise for FREE – Do you have some industry secrets, a top notch tutorial, a video seminar, or any product or information that would be valuable and useful to your website visitors? Consider giving it away for FREE…upon subscription to your mailing list of course. This is a great deal. Give them something they want with the promise of even more things they may want delivered right to they email inbox.  This is the one we will focus on here.

Using Ninja Forms to collect emails

Now that you have your giveaway; a PDF, video, article, or whatever, we’re ready to start collecting emails. Here is how you would set-up Ninja Forms.

• Download and install Ninja Forms.
• Create a new form for your email collection.
• In the success message you can place your giveaway. Whether it a be a link or the entire content, you can place it right in the success message. You don’t have to worry about the contents being seen to early because the success message will only be displayed upon a successful submission at which time you will already have their email address.
• Under the field settings tab be sure to add the email field and make sure it’s set as required. Of course add a submit button and any other fields you want to collect as well.

That’s really all it takes. You don’t actually need anything else to simply collect the email addresses. You can export your collected emails anytime to be imported into your favorite mailing list.

BONUS!

If you want to super charge your email marketing efforts you could use the MailChimp extension for Ninja Forms and have those emails placed directly into the MailChimp mailing list of your choice. It’s the little things like this that will turn your website into a marketing leads generation machine.