Building up your contact list

Posted: March 1, 2021

With marketing and sales permanently altered due to the effects of the COVID pandemic, the value of digital marketing has skyrocketed. As people have sheltered-in-place and worked-from-home for nearly a year at this point, digital spaces remain one of the few surefire ways to get your product/service in front of potential leads.

Enter: the contact list. Why else would every website offer a 10% off coupon on your first purchase in exchange for your email address? Because the ROI in email marketing is so high, it is worth 10% off to convert a lead into a customer, and a past customer into a repeat buyer and evangelist.

If you are new to building a contact list, are working with a new CRM that needs data, or simply want to put in the necessary effort to build a robust contact list, today we’re discussing the various ways that you can collect consumer contact information and begin building up a strong database of contacts. Because in digital marketing, data is the most important piece of the puzzle. We can’t do effective digital marketing without it!

Pop-Up Forms

These are what offer you coupons and free shipping when you land on a business’s home page or start to navigate away from a site. Using pop-up forms to create easy sign-up opportunities in the most popular places that leads are visiting is a very fast and frictionless way to get contacts to share their email addresses.

While you don’t necessarily have to offer a coupon in exchange, you may find more success in offering a discount or free shipping. You can also offer access to newsletters, early sale notifications, or ebooks and white pages.

Sign-Up Forms

While pop-up forms can be closed out by the user, having designated spaces across your website to have customers input their email address is another important step in building a contact list. Depending on your site, here are a few places that you can consider adding an email address form:

  • Header
  • Footer
  • Side bar
  • Contact page
  • Home page
  • About us page

Again, use a small bit of text space to explain the value-add of having a customer share their email address. Will they get spammed by sharing their email address? Calm down any fears by taking a sentence or two to explain what a contact can expect from your communications with them.

Social Media Opportunities

If you are having success with your social media campaigns, leverage that outreach to create a campaign for gathering contact information. By directing social media posts to a landing page associated with your campaign, you can create a streamlined path for contacts to sign up for coupons/newsletters/lessons/etc. by submitting their email address. ​

You can always ask for more information as well, like name and company. But keep the exchange of information equal to the value of what you're offering. If a landing page form is too long, a contact might not feel like the effort in filling out the form is equal to the value in what they receive.

Buildout Workflows

It isn’t enough just to collect email addresses and build out a contact database. To avoid contact churn, or the year over year loss of contacts in your database, you’ll need to remind your contacts of the value that you’re providing.

A great starter workflow is to have an automated email send shortly after a contact submits their email address. Give that contact what they signed up for, and fast! Whether it’s an ebook, a giveaway entry, or a coupon code, give the contact that information in an email so that they know their information was properly submitted.

Another workflow idea that you may have experienced yourself as a consumer is an abandoned shopping cart workflow. Did a lead leave a purchase in their online shopping cart but not pull the trigger? After a few hours, send an automated follow-up email offering a cart reminder, or even a time-based discount. Converting leads into customers through email marketing has never been easier!

I have contacts! Now what?

Once these tactics start generating new contacts in your database, it’s time to start converting them from leads to customers and then into evangelists. You’ll also want to maintain your database so that you don’t have contact signups and then unsubscribes. You always want to avoid graymail contacts as much as possible as well. Luckily for you, we have an entire blog post about maintaining a CRM database.

Don’t want to put in the effort but need more contacts sooner rather than later? Why not outsource your digital marketing to an agency like ourselves?​ We offer “easy button” approaches to digital marketing from solopreneurs to larger corporate entities. Learn more on our digital marketing page!

Want to read more? Here are a few of our recent blog posts...

© 2022 ​ ​ Four tens digital

Tampa, FL

+ 1 813 510 5770