Collect Email Addresses: 35+ Best Ways

Once you know how much email marketing can give to your business in terms of lead generation, customer engagement, and, more importantly, sales, there’s no going back.

Then, you only focus on collecting as many email addresses as you can from your website and other platforms to build your email list.

Building an email list is the first and most important step of email marketing, to begin with.

But when you start it, it will come across as the most challenging part of starting an email marketing campaign.

So how do you collect email addresses from your prospective customers?

Not just that, you have to ensure that you continue to get a consistent influx of email addresses regularly to maintain and grow your email list.

Well, you don’t need to worry, as here we are enlisting every possible way in the book to collect email addresses in 2022.

Contents

Have something valuable to offer

You have to make sure that there is something in it for them in exchange for the email address they are sharing.

Without providing value, you cannot ask prospects or website visitors for their email addresses.

You have to think about the emails you open on a regular basis and also those that you delete very often.

This will tell you what kind of emails you open and what kind you don’t. What’s one thing you look for in anything, not just email, to dedicate your time or effort?

That’s the value! So you have to make sure you are offering them something valuable enough so, in exchange for it, they can put effort into giving you their email address.

It is also important for brands to understand why giving an email address is a big deal for them. It is not just the email address they are giving you but the access to reach out to you.

They are giving you the key to their common room, where you will inevitably ask them to give their valuable time as well.

So make sure the lead magnet you choose can really help them, whether it is an ebook, cheat sheet, or anything.

Put A Pop-up At End The Of Your Content

This is one of the highly effective methods to collect email addresses from your subscriber.

In fact, if you are not placing sign-up forms at the end of your content, you are leaving an opportunity right there.

Most visitors to your website or blog decide whether to sign up for your newsletter after reading your content.

Also, the fact that if they really like your content, they will be highly motivated to sign-up and receive more content like that, as they do not want to miss out on them.

So when you trigger a pop-up once the reader reaches the bottom of the content and has finished reading, there are high chance they will make the decision.

And the fact is, if they are not signing up at that spot, they are probably not going to.

This pop-up feels even more natural as it acts as a CTA for the readers as they are directed toward what they should do if they like what they are reading.

Use Valuable Resources As Lead Magnet To Draw People In

Knowledge-based products are always effective as a lead magnet, provided they should be something high-quality and not generic.

You cannot just put a few blogs together to say it is a guide. It needs to be resources and have some angle through which it will be helpful.

So how you present your information and the pitch as to how it can be very helpful for them at this stage matters a lot.

Focus on providing free resources crafted by industry leaders. Provide resources that are hard to get hold of. Using that as a lead magnet, you will be bound to get tons and tons of email addresses.

Utilizing Facebook Ads To Get Email Addresses

One of the well-known methods to reach out to the maximum targeted people is using paid ads. The same can be used to retain the people who are reached once through the ads.

However, you have to create compelling ads to click on the CTA and get contact information with your prospects whether they buy the product or not.

It is also one of the most cost-effective methods of growing your email list since this works for lead generation, which is pretty much the data required for building an email list as well.

Facebook Ads allow you to opt for the targeted audience you’re looking for extensively. The best part is that you can repeatedly change and experiment with your campaign to get better results.

Since the leads or the email addresses you are getting through Facebook Ads are already disposed to what you’re selling, they can be highly convertible people.

These will be high-quality leads to nurture over time and turn into customers through email marketing.

Provide Free Tutorial Videos

People are learning on the internet every day. They are keen to learn more and get their hands on video-based content.

If you say that you are offering tutorial videos, perhaps in the form of a course or a series of videos on a particular topic, and that too for free, they will be highly interested.

Free content always gets people on board with most things, marketing practices, to be precise.

All you have to say is that each of these videos will be sent one by one to your email address, and they will be ready to give you theirs.

Using Sidebar Forms

One of the most common navigational features of websites is the sidebar. It appears adjacent to the primary content or page on the website.

This space has plenty of room to add more content for visitors to give a look at without hindering them from consuming the primary content.

You can use this spot to put a subscription box or form here. Since this spot has high visibility and also doesn’t distract your visitors, this is one of the best spots for asking for sign-ups.

Make sure you use the sidebar, as this is an effective spot to get more email addresses from your website visitors.

Especially if you are struggling to get email addresses, trying this spot can be really helpful.

Leveraging Customization For Email Pop-ups

Pop-ups are one of highly effective tools for collecting email addresses. According to Neil Patel, pop-ups improved their lead generation conversion by 17%

But that’s not it. The real power is how strategically you are using your pop-ups and whether you are utilizing them to their full potential or not.

To make the most of it, you need to first aim for your marketing goals as what you want to achieve.

Then customization is required to make your pop-up appear only when it can be most effective and not abruptly at any time.

There is a wide range of customization you can do to the pop-ups provided you are using a good email marketing tool.

Customization

You have to first customize it according to your brand, and this step is essential. You must use your own images, brand colors, custom fonts, and animations to put your voice on it.

It needs to match the identification of your website and its branding of it as well.

Targeting

Then, you need to decide its targeting, an option that allows you to control which audience the popup will show up to.

So you can set up criteria such as traffic source, returning visitor or a new country, etc., according to which it will appear.

Smart Triggers

Another essential factor in customizing your pop-ups is to apply smart triggers to them. You need to ensure that it shows up after a set time period.

It shouldn’t show up too early or too late because neither of them will give you the maximum email collection.

Smart triggers also allow you to trigger it on the basis of scrolling or depending upon a particular date or weekday.

For example, you might want a specific sign-up form to show up only on weekends.

Offer Them An Email Course

This works as well as the free tutorial videos in exchanging their emails.

Email courses are more extensive, sequence-based, and ordered to clarify a particular topic or question.

You can craft high-quality content on a particular topic; it should be a pain point for your targeted audience, something they can relate to or get hooked on.

Then you make sure to generate high-quality content on the topic only to break it down into different chapters, steps, or modules.

Once you have the content, you can ask website visitors to share their email addresses so you can send the email course bit by bit on a regular basis.

Promoting & Integrating Your Newsletter Throughout Your Blog/Site

Sign-up forms for newsletters don’t necessarily stick only to the placements such as header, popup, or other spots on your website.

First, you have to be assured that you’re providing great valuable email content through your newsletter to your subscribers.

Once you have this confidence, you can integrate it in the midst of blogs and content on your website.

Make sure you plug it in smartly and places where it actually means something.

Create multiple campaigns dedicated to different topics on your website to plug it in at different blogs.

For example, if you run a pet blog and pet shop, create a guide on dog shedding for a particular breed and place the signup landing page link in those blogs to which it is related.

The idea is to get email addresses for which you can have as many lead magnets and signup forms as required.

You can put your newsletter signup on the about us page, resources page, and web pages.

Utilizing Exit Intent Popups

Exit-intent Popups have always been an effective email marketing strategy, something very basic yet highly effective.

It is one of the proven methods to collect email addresses from your visitors. This one specifically targets the website visitors that are leaving your website or going to leave your website.

Exit-intent popups are triggered when the website visitor tries to leave your webpage. More upgrades happened, which made this even better.

Now it relies on the people’s mouse tracking and detecting their movements, so when the cursor seems to move towards the cross button, an exit-intent popup appears.

Why Use Exit-Intent Pop-ups?

These exit-intent popups are great for two primary reasons –

First, they do not disturb the reader or visitor while they are on the page since it only appears when they try to leave.

Secondly, since it is a popup, it becomes almost impossible to ignore it.

Just make sure you also use some kind of lead magnet along with convincing lines to get their email address.

Since you know that this appears when they are trying to leave, it means they are leaving for some reason, so here you are more personalized with your offer.

Maybe give them more incentive to invest more time on your website and share their email address.

Make It Personal

The more you connect through your blog, the sign-up form content, or the lead magnet to the reader, the more chances you have of getting their email address.

Addressing them on a more personal note increases your chances of making them subscribers and eventual potential buyers as well.

So, how can you personalize at this level? Well, you basically try to relate to the targeted audience.

Focus on knowing more about your targeted audience, their pain points, their challenges, their desires, and their demographic details as well.

Focus your aim on what can hook these target audiences. Put up the content that relates to them on your sign-up form, promising them a solution as their lead magnet.

Directing Them To A Dedicated Landing Page

The other popular method through which many brands collect email addresses from their potential subscribers is creating a dedicated landing page.

This landing page aimed to boost your email marketing can also lift up your conversion rate.

You have to make sure to use an interesting and compelling copy to pull the audience to give in their email address.

Make sure to add images, insights, and infographics to attract them. You can also include social proof to gain their trust.

Give them the benefits of joining your newsletter and what & when they can expect from you in their inbox.

Using Popups To Promote Your Best Offers

One of the highly effective ways to get the eyeballs of the audience, especially for eCommerce stores and brands, is pop-up forms.

These pop-up forms work effectively when you have a special discount to provide, which acts as a lead magnet to get the email address of your prospective buyer.

Lightbox popups need to be very effective and smooth and also very well planned in terms of their approach, placement, and timing.

Many brands have seen tremendous results in collecting hundreds and hundreds of emails from visitors while good traffic is coming the website’s way.

In this way, you won’t use your website traffic completely even if they do not engage or buy products from you.

In fact, if you successfully get a good percentage of email addresses from your website visitors, you are generating good leads for potential sales.

Make sure you also try advanced segmentation and personalization methods to provide relevant offers to returning visitors as well.

Hosting Contest

This is one of the highly effective ways to collect email addresses, and that too in a very short time.

Hosting contests means you are providing prizes to the audience for completing some task given by you.

Since the visitors are motivated to get prizes through these contests, sharing their email addresses becomes the easiest part of it.

Even though you don’t get much engagement, if you get the email address of participants, then you still have leads that can be nurtured to a potential buyer.

Also, people are given tasks such as interacting with your brand’s social accounts, which boosts your engagement and brand awareness as well.

Using Delayed Popups

There is one problem with using popups that hinders the usability or the convenience of your website visitors.

You wouldn’t want to ruin the user’s website experience to get an email address.

However, one of the other highly effective methods to use popups but still not annoy your website visitors is to have them appear after a certain time or when visitors meet certain criteria.

For example, these pop-ups can appear if your visitor has spent a particular amount of time on your websites, like visiting two pages or a longer session.

There is a major disadvantage to using the delayed pop-ups as only a particular set of visitors who stayed long enough or met the criteria will be able to see it.

But then the chances of getting emails from these visitors are high. Make sure you put a good lead magnet with these pop-ups.

Make The Process Easy For Them

The harder it will be for the visitors to enter their email addresses, the fewer chances you are going to get it.

It is pretty basic to know that visitors will not put extra effort into signing your newsletter.

In fact, they are mostly passive about these things, instinctive and rushed-in. And you can use it either against you or for you.

When you make signing up for the newsletter extremely easy and quick for them, this instinctive behavior to enter their email address works for you.

Otherwise, if it is too complicated, they just leave it. You must make sure of all the contact points; you are integrating the sign-up form.

You have to understand that these are just people and not only email addresses at the end of the day, so make sure you treat them respectfully and make it easy for them.

Gating Your Content

This is another smart way to collect email addresses from curiosity-driven readers or visitors to your blog or website.

Gating content here means that you have to restrict them from reading further on or at all unless the reader provides their email address.

Don’t hesitate to do this but make sure you’re providing world-class, highly researched, and valuable content, good enough that it must hook them.

It has to be so good that sharing their email address feels like the least they can do is read the further content.

You should not use this gated content strategy on your blogs or website content.

The ones which are mostly research-based, such as Guides or whitepapers and reports, on those you can restrict them only to open with their email address.

You can also use content upgrades such as blogpost PDFs, infographics, cheat sheets, etc, as gated content as well.

Putting Subscription Forms In Footer

The website’s footer is another static opportunity for you to integrate another sign-up form.

You have to make sure to put a compact sign-up form only asking for an email address, not a name or anything more.

The footer is actually the most obvious location for the sign-up. This also means anyone who is actually looking forward to receiving your newsletter will straightly go to the footer.

Make sure you have the bottom reserved for the quick newsletter sign-up. The design should make it pop up visually, setting it apart from the rest of the design.

If you are worried about creating these sign-up forms multiple times for different spots on your website, don’t.

As you only have to design the newsletter sign-up form once and embed it in different navigational spots on your website.

This is about putting a creative effort towards getting more email addresses from your website visitors.

Use Surveys To Get Email Addresses

Surveys are found to be one of the most effective ways to get email addresses from website visitors.

Many brands run surveys targeting prospective buyers, audiences, or content consumers across the platform.

The best part of the survey is you can share it not just on your blog but also on your social media platforms.

The main purpose of taking surveys is to craft the content pieces for the audience in a much better way. Also, it helps in the marketing approach and even the product upgrading as well.

The key to success with surveys for getting more and more email addresses is its distribution. You have to distribute it as much as possible to bring in more people.

Utilizing Quiz For Getting Email Addressing

Quizzes are quite powerful and engaging tools to get audiences across the platforms on the web for a particular niche or industry.

Everyone loves quizzes and wants to give one if you make it interesting and exciting enough. Quizzes need to go full in, as much more relatable and detailed for the targeted users.

For example, if you run a blog about losing weight, you can run a quiz about BMI index or anything that resembles the problems and is relatable to them.

The quiz is compelling as people want to participate in it to know its result especially if your quiz is somehow ego-boosting or helping people cope with their current stage at a particular niche.

So it is obvious that people will be thrilled to take part in, and using this opportunity, you can ask for their email addresses to send the results.

Make sure you ask for the email address after they take the quiz to boost their curiosity, and ask them to give their email address so you can send them the results right to their inbox.

Simply Ask

Sometimes things can be simpler than it seems, so one way to get email addresses from prospective buyers or users is simply to ask.

This becomes specifically true for brick-and-mortar businesses or retail stores. It can also be true for all those businesses with corporate bases on the grounds.

And businesses interact with their customers through seminars or traditional marketing as well.

In these cases, you just need to ask the prospective buyers or the audiences you interact with to share their email addresses with you.

You can also ask them to give their business card, which has the person’s email address.

Another way to physically get email addresses from the audience has a pamphlet or marketing material with a scan code or link URL that takes them to the sign-up form.

You can put these marketing materials posters or banners in your stores, offices, and all the contact points where customers interact with the business.

Putting A Stick Top Bar

Another smart move to retrieve an email address from your website visitor is putting it in plain sight at the stick-top bar.

This means even if your visitor scrolls the page down or up, they still will be able to see the stick-top bar featuring a sign-up form asking for an email address.

It is a thin bar, takes very little space, and also is not very suggestive or hinders the customer experience of going through the website.

Usually, you would see these top stick bars are used to notify the visitors regarding an update or a particular announcement from the brand.

But you can definitely use the space for even better, just asking the users to put their email addresses here to sign-up for more updates.

Make sure to change the color of these bars to something vibrant and different from the rest of the website, so it pops up visually as well.

One of the successful case studies has to be the DIYThemes who used this top bar on their website, and they gained an additional 1180 email subscribers in just 30 days.

Creating A Sense Of Urgency

This is a psychological tactic to utilize one of the basic human tendencies where they act out on the scarcity due to evolution programming.

You need to infuse a sense of urgency with your offers or the sign-up form, adding a scarcity of the products or offers.

You need to create an illusion that if the prospective buyer or the visitors doesn’t act upon this, they will miss out on the chance due to limited availability.

This works even better by using the fear-of-missing-out psychological sales trick integrated with this one.

You must make the visitor impulsive to hop on the offer you’re providing. And since it works so great with purchases, that definitely works for getting email addresses.

Asking For Email Address Through The Welcome Gate

Have you ever opened a website where first a full-length window gains your attention featuring a sign-up form?

Well, that’s the welcome gate. It appears right after visitors land on your website.

You also have to understand that if a popup isn’t large enough or capable enough to grab the visitor’s attention, then it wouldn’t work.

So if you face this problem where even with a lot of sign-up forms across the pages, you are yet not receiving email addresses or getting sign-ups, then the welcome gate is the choice to go.

Welcome Gates appears on your website as soon as the visitor lands on the site. However, you can change that setting.

But most importantly, it covers up the entire webpage making it impossible to ignore, and chances are people will enter their email address to sign-up.

The welcome gate still gives a few seconds to the website visitor to see a glimpse of the actual website they are visiting, so they don’t think that they mistakenly clicked on the wrong site.

Welcome gates are quite like their own landing page but it is important how and when you use it.

Also, you have to ensure that you’re not showing it multiple times to the same user under a session, in fact, not even the repeated visitor, because that can annoy them.