Managing your database is an extremely important action in order to keep in touch with your customers and prospects. It is also an essential element to increase your sales. Among other things, proceeding to the collect of new email addresses allows you to send a newsletter that shows your promotions or put forward new products. All this in order to gradually convince your contacts to buy your products or services.
Capturing an email address gives you great latitude in how to use it. On the other hand, it is not always easy to know where to gather this information. Whether it’s new prospects or just individuals who want to hear from you, this article introduces you to the best places to grow your database.
1. Your corporate website
Your company’s website is the heart of your business. It is the central place where every person who wants to have information about your products and services or simply find your site by accident. This is the first platform you should use to collect e-mail addresses and it is also one of the simplest methods to achieve this. Each page of your site can become an email capture page. The best way to do this is to integrate online forms.
Those forms can be placed where it makes the most sense, such as where the traffic is the most important or the pages with the most relevant content. Here are some examples of online form applications:
The information request forms
Make it so that your clients or prospects can ask you any questions, be it for an appointment with an expert, or simply to fill out a contact form. You can also use a quotation or demonstration request form of your product.
These forms can be found in every page of your website (in the Contact Us tab or Ask a Quote, for example). You can also use your website sidebar that will be displayed when a visitor reads one of your blog posts, for example.
The newsletter subscription
Incorporating a newsletter registration form on your website is the best way to manage a contact’s consent. Indeed, the visitor has specifically registered to receive your newsletter so do everything you can to keep his consent. So, be clear about the sending frequency and the type of communications you will send. Ask them what they would like to receive and how often. Then, you send emails to each individual rhythm so that they don’t feel harassed.
You can include newsletter registration almost anywhere on your website.
What we see most often is in the site header or footer. In these places, the form is fixed and the visitor will be exposed no matter what page he is on your site. You can also add a checkbox in your other forms that offers subscription to the newsletter. If you are doing e-commerce, you can also add this same checkbox at the end of the purchase process.
The offers
Before asking a prospect to give you anything (his credit card number or simply his email address), start by giving him something yourself. For example, if you offer free informative content such as blog posts every week, your reader will already have some confidence in your business. So, the day you need his email address to give him a white paper or a webinar, it will be easy for him to give it to you. A little further down the funnel, if you already have offered your prospects blog posts, white papers, webinars, a free trial or even a free consultation, it will be much easier for them to release their credit card to officially become your customer.
You can offer free complementary content at the end of your blog posts. For example, a checklist, an article summary, a list of resources and tools in exchange for their email address. So, the visitor who liked your article will certainly give you his email to have more content.
Another good way to communicate your offers to your website visitors is to use a pop-up. Well, I know, pop-ups are intrusive and annoying. But the truth is, it’s a strategy that works. You just need to know how to properly do your pop-up and you will certainly have some surprising results.
Creating an account for additional information
Another strategy you can use is to block some content that goes further on a topic. Thus, if a reader wants to have access to this content, he will have to create an account. Some companies present it as a subscription, others as a community membership.
This strategy is often used and it works very well. One example is Protégez-vous magazine, which offers limited access to its content. Indeed, some articles are available to everyone, but for most articles (and often the most interesting), their content is blocked. You must become a member to have the access.
For some, free items are enough, but most will want to go further and have unlimited access to their articles. It’s well known, we all want what we can’t have! This is why this strategy works so much.
Landing pages
Creating landing pages on your website is a great way to capture your prospect information. Just like pop-ups, it must be well done to have a maximum conversion rate. It is recommended to create as many landing pages as you can because the more your site contains landing pages, the more your conversion rate increases. To support this, sites with more than 40 capture pages can have up to 12x more conversions than sites with less than 5 landing pages. So, make landing pages to sell your products or services, make them for your webinars too, for your contests, make one for everything! If you use the Dialog Insight platform, you can create as many landing pages as you want for maximum conversion.
2. Contests
Whether it’s by email, on your social networks or directly on your website, online contests are a great way to collect e-mail addresses. Because there is a reward attached to the action, people are more likely to provide you with personal information.
The risk
Of course, there is a risk of attracting contacts who only want the price and who are not really interested in your business. Here is an example, you are a company that sells pet supplies and you are doing a contest to win tickets for the next Montreal Canadians hockey game. It’s a very interesting price, maybe even too interesting… Indeed, the emails you will collect with this contest will probably not be quality ones because having a pet and loving the Montreal Canadians are not two directly related elements. So, you will send emails to everyone who has registered for your contest to promote your products. The result: many will not even open your emails, others will unsubscribe for lack of interest and others will report you as spam. And these are all actions that directly harm your reputation as an emailer towards spam filters as we have seen in .
The solutions
To ensure you get quality email addresses with a contest, you have two solutions. The first one is to choose a price that may interest only your market segment. For example, save one year of free dog kibble. This way, you make sure the people who participate in your contest have animals and have the characteristics to eventually become your customer.
The second solution is to choose a means of registration that is limited to your potential customers. For example, entering a Facebook contest for a chance to win Montreal Canadians tickets by posting a photo of your pet. Instantly, you will only get participants who are potential customers.
Finally, in order to get more registrations, you can include a contest sharing option by offering one more chance of winning for each invitation sent.
In the Dialog Insight platform you can find the activity, contest and other forms tabs. If you have these options, you can create as many contests or polls as you want, very easily.
3. Corporate activities and trade fairs
Does your company organize activities offered to the public or participate in trade shows? If the answer is yes, these events are a great way to generate new leads or update existing information. There is nothing better to establish a first contact in person.
Prepare a system that lets you take quick notes on new leads, and write comments on each one. You can better classify them later. Consider the possibility of offering an incentive such as a free subscription to your publications or the chance to win a prize related to your business or service.
Also, if you often give lectures, there is a way to capture the email addresses of your audience. Think about it: You pay a certain amount to address an audience only once … use it! What you can do is create a bank of shortened URLs using Bit.ly or UTM and ask people to take their phone (because yes, everyone or almost has a phone in the audience) and go to an URL which happens to be a lead capture page. Ask them to register if they want to win something or to get a free white paper, etc. By doing that, you keep their information and they fall into your prospecting funnel.
4. Webinars and videos
If your company does not offer an informational webinar yet, you should consider this solution. Start by offering a short learning capsule on an important subject that you are familiar with. Another option would be to offer, in conjunction with a partner, a multi-part webinar, in case you do not have enough content to support an entire session.
Serial or single videos are also an interesting option. Ask people to complete a short form with their name and email address to participate in the session. You will then be able to send a confirmation email that provides an excellent opportunity to obtain consent to communicate with them afterwards.
5. Collecting in store
If you have a physical store, consider asking your customers to provide an email address at checkout. You could also do a store satisfaction survey, asking for an email address as an identifier.
Many outlets use their paper bill to collect email addresses through a contest, mostly. You will be able to combine several methods like the poll and the contest at the same time. Basically, on your bill is a unique code. The customer must go to your website to register, fill out a satisfaction survey and have the chance to win a prize. Of course, the survey is not mandatory but it is a good way to gather the opinion of your customers at the same time.
6. Social medias
Your social media platforms are part of the contact environment you maintain with your customers and prospects. Different solutions exist to increase your list of contacts. Social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram are a great way to share your landing pages, contests, surveys, webinars and events that we have discussed above. Thus, you will certainly increase the range and increase your database at the same time.
I will only address the network that offers the best return on advertising investment. I named: Facebook.
The first way to get your visitors’ email addresses from your Facebook page is of course to advertise. As you already know, for some time now, organic reach from business pages has dropped dramatically. That’s why it is essential to advertise … so you can reach more people. On the other hand, the best Facebook advertising to collect subscriber information is called Funnel Sales Advertising. This type of advertising allows you to embed a form in your ad that appears when the person clicks the call-to-action button. This form is pre-filled with Facebook account information and the person only has to confirm it before sending it. And there you go! You will find all the visitors personal information in an excel file that can be downloaded from the Facebook advertising manager.
Then, another advertising strategy that allows you to get email addresses from your subscribers is to remarket. This is a very effective method of targeting people who have already shown an interest in your business. This method therefore directly increases the conversion rate since the person seeing the advertisement instinctively recognizes the name of your company. Having already shown some interest, this visitor will be more likely to convert than another who has never heard of you.
To wrap up
In short, every time you make contact with someone on any of your platform, your goal should always be to convert that person into a lead. So, use all the means you dispose to capture the email addresses of your visitors. Thus, you can send them convincing communications and possibly have them converted. Make sure you use them in accordance with the law.
However, the email address is only the gateway. Of course, you need to do more work to segment your contacts by collecting much more information to send ever more personalized communications.