What Is A Mailing List?
A mailing list is a collection of email addresses from people who have consented to be contacted by your business. They may have signed up to receive emails because they are interested in your products or they may have purchased from you before and want to stay updated on new products or deals.
Since 2018, GDPR has taken effect and customers must have given their permission to be contacted by you. Failure to comply with these regulations may mean that your account could be suspended or banned.
By following our top tips below, you can grow your mailing list and ensure that you are safely capturing the right data. Discover our six easy ways to grow your email list below.
Six Easy Ways to Grow Your Mailing List
1. Add a Sign-Up Form
One of the very first steps to start building up your mailing list is to ensure that you have a sign-up form on your website.
Once the form has been embedded, it will capture the email address that has been entered and be added directly into your audience list. This can usually be created directly within your email marketing platform where it will generate the code for you. It’s a very direct and straightforward way to collect new subscribers.
Offering an incentive alongside this encourages more sign-ups as most people can’t resist a freebie or a discount. For example, get 10% off your first order when you sign up for our email newsletter.

2. Introduce A Pop-Up Form
Similarly, you could introduce a pop-up on the website featuring an exclusive offer or discount to those who enter their email address. A pop-up is very direct and is more likely to catch the user’s attention than a form in the footer of your website, for example.
There are various different plugins that can help execute this strategy, many of which allow images to be added to make the form as eye-catching and interesting as possible. If executed correctly, this feature could massively increase sign-ups to your email list and offering an incentive will further increase this.
3. Offer A Discount Code Or Exclusive Deal
As mentioned briefly above, offering a discount code or exclusive deal is a fantastic way to encourage people to join your mailing list. The majority of people will jump at the chance to get themselves a great deal, therefore, you should use this to your advantage. This is a win-win situation, the customer will receive a fantastic deal and you will receive an email sign-up, increasing the contacts within your email list.
This could be taken one step further by offering customers additional offers and deals throughout their journey, such as providing a further discount once a purchase has been made to ensure the customer stays as engaged as possible.
4. Offer Tips Or Advice
People are much more likely to share their email address if they know they will receive something valuable in return, whether this is a discount or some free tips and advice.
Do you have any valuable information or advice could you offer to your audience? Could you offer helpful tips to your audience in the form of a downloadable PDF? For example, enter your email address today to receive our exclusive top ten travel tips.
Some other ideas include a PDF guide, printables, an online webinar, among many others. Think about which product or service would be the most relevant for your business and ensure that this will also be valuable for the customer.

5. Add A Sign-Up Checkbox To The Checkout
If you have an e-commerce store, a very clever way of collecting the customer’s data is to place a sign-up checkbox in the checkout. As the customer navigates through the checkout, you can capture and use the information they have provided, as long as they have consented to this.
By including a tick box in the checkout, you can ensure the customer has consented to be contacted via email and depending on the volume of people using your checkout, this should massively increase the number of email addresses in your audience.
A plugin can be set up, depending on the platform of your website and linking it to your email marketing provider. It may require some website development, so ensure that you have the resources on hand to complete this before you get started.
6. Online Competitions
Another fantastic way to increase the contacts in your mailing list is to run an online competition. This is usually done through a social media channel, such as Facebook or Instagram ensuring that the post reaches the highest possible number of people.
Requesting their email address as an entry requirement will mean that you can use their email address and can add this to your email list. The customer has a chance to win something amazing and you have collected their data to add to your audience to target in the future.
It is important to carefully consider what you will be giving away. It needs to be something relevant to your business but also something desirable that your audience isn’t going to want to miss.
Need Any Help?
We have a very talented team here at Pod Digital to help your business execute your strategy. Our team can help you to set up and kickstart your email marketing, as well as assist with any of the more technical website development tasks.
Find out more about email marketing at Pod Digital and get in touch with the team today to get started.