Is It Beneficial To Have An Email List On Your Webpage?

So you decided to make your own website and your trying to figure out what to include in it? What is an email list? If it helpful to you and your potential customers? If you don’t include one will you regret it and come back later and add one? Today we will go over the positive impact a possible email list could have on your websites traffic and revenue. We will also look over real world case studies to illustrate the top reasons adding an email list to your website is important. We will also show you how to build an email list so you can add one to your website after reading this article.

* If you have already read this article or you’re familiar with the topic feel free to click on the links below to skip to a certain section.

What Is an Email List?

Most likey you have seen some verion of this form on a webpage during your travels across the internet. They are used on many sites. It allows the user to enter their email address and name into this short form to get information about something that they are interested in at a future date. This is an email list plugin. It allows the website owner to create a list of names and email addresses of people who might be potential customers in the future. The people who are not interested in this thing can just click the x in the upper right hand corner and continue on with their day.

Why Building an Email List is Important?

One of the things that makes email lits so useful is that they contain contact information for people who have already visited your website and gotten a feel for your company or organzation. They were so interested in your product or service that they filled out a form so you could easily contact them again in the future when certain events or information was updated.
According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing on average sees a 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the USA.
- Some companies have seen 10 times higher conversions from customers contact on their email list vs. costomers contacted through social media campaigns.

Here are some advantages of Email Lists.

Email is Personal
- It allows you to send a personal message to your potential customer about something you know they care about. There is no outside forces keeping you from contacting your potential customer. Such as search ranking on Google, or competitors buying ad space.
Email is Purposeful
- Because potential clients have to complete several steps before their added to the email list you know their receptive to your product and ideas.
Email is Targeted
- A website can run several email lists on their website at the same time. So if the customer filled out a form saying they wanted more information on Men's running shoes, you would know to only send them information dealing with that type of footwear. Instead of sending them information on every shoe sale you had.
You Own Your Email List
- You have complete control over what your client sees and when they see it. Social Media companies can negatively effect your company or organizations marketing or comunication with clients if they choose to. Which saddly is a biggger and bigger issue in todays cancel culter enviroment.
Email is One-on-One
- People read email in the privacy of their inbox. The message is not on a public timeline or newsfeed. They can ask you questions directly in private with confidence. This helps build trust and connection.
More People Use Email Several Times a Day
- You may have heard that Facebook has 1.4 billion and Twitter has 100 million daily active users. What you have may not have heard, is the number of people using Email every day.
Every internet user has at least one email account.
- A recent research conducted by Radicati found out that there 3.8 billion active email accounts. That’s half the population of Earth.

This is precisely why every smart business in the world has an email list. Big name brands learned this lesson a long time ago, and that’s why they spend thousands of dollars on social media campaigns to get people to sign up for their email lists. They understand that email marketing is the best long-term investment with a much higher return because people will continue to get their message at a very low cost for a longer period of time.

Social Media vs Email Marketing

Allot of people do have social media accounts and advertising on social media can be incredibly productive. The thing is not everyone has a social media account, but most people do have an email. Also advertising on social media costs money, while sending out an email flyer is completely free, or the costs are very minimal at the very least. Overall email is just a very direct and reliable way to get into contact with your potential customer, that is one reason why all social media companies ask for your email address when you sign up. At the end of the day it’s best to cover your bases and not to not put all your eggs in just the social media basket.

One issue my clients in the past have noticed is that there are so many different social media platforms. There is Facebook, twitter, instagram, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Snapchat, TikTok and Linkedln. Some people have accounts on one social media platform and not another. So keeping in touch with your potential customers can be a nightmare. Also Social Media companies have a life, that might be huge one day and gone the next, such as MySpace. Other platforms never take off such as Google’s failed attempt at a social media platform. Trying to form a long term relationship with a customer over this strange non connected and constantly moving network of different platforms can be hard to do. But different studies have shown that 91% of people have a long term email address that they check every day.

What Experts Are Saying About Building An Email List?

Don’t take just our word for it, listen to what all top marketing experts are saying about email marketing:

The biggest experts in marketing usually agree that you should start an email list list from the beginning and that if you don’t you will regret it. So now that we have briefly touched on why email lists are important. We should talk about how you go about making one.

You need three things to make an Email List.

We will assume for the purposes of this video that you already have a website to put your Opt-In Form on. Because building a website is such a large topic by itself.

Choosing The Best Email Marketing Services.

When choosing how to use your new email list it is good to understand what companies or apps are truly giving you. Some services just send your customers an email letting them know that you have posted a new Blog Post on your website. Which may be what you want or that might not bring you enough new leads. It all just depends on your budget and what you want from your website. Here are some of the options available to you with a fancier professional email marking service

But that’s not true email marketing. Here are some of the downsides of using a free blog notification service:

You can’t send out private email newsletters. To send an email, you will have to publish a new blog post, which means that the information you want to share will have to be publicly available first.
You can’t personalize the email message. It will be delivered in the same format often with no branding or personalization.
You can’t categorize subscribers by interests, demographics, or content type.
There is no reporting. You don’t know how many people got the email, what percentage of users opened it, and how many of them clicked on your links.
If you later tried to move to a paid service, your users will have to re-confirm their subscription. Many of them will not do it, and you will end up losing subscribers.

This is why we ALWAYS recommend using a professional email marketing service right from the beginning. Yes, they cost a little bit of money, but they are an investment in your business which pays huge returns.

The benefit of professional email marketing services are:

You can send private mass emails to your subscribers.
You can see subscriber activity and group your subscribers based on actions they take.
You can run A/B split tests to see which email subject line, content, and offers work best with your subscribers.
With reporting tools, you can see which country you have the most subscribers from. You can adjust your time zone preferences, and send emails at the right time.
Last, but definitely the most important, you can see the email addresses of all your subscribers.

Here is a list of the top Professional Email Marketing Services.

Omnisend

Omnisend is a powerful SMS & email marketing service for eCommerce businesses who are looking for an omni-channel marketing automation solution.

They offer one of the most generous free email marketing plans because it includes all the powerful features like pre-built automation workflows, subscriber segmentation, A/B testing, performance reports, and even SMS + web push notification.

Most other free email marketing plans are restricted, but Omnisend is confident in their value proposition, so they offer most everything in their free plan. As your contact list grows, you will need to upgrade to their paid plans.

Omnisend seamlessly integrates with all the popular website builder and eCommerce platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and more. They also have integration with hundreds of other business tools like live chat software, help desk service, and more.

The best thing that we liked about Omnisend is their pre-built eCommerce marketing automation workflows that are designed to help you drive more revenue. This includes emails like welcome email series, cart abandonment emails, cross-sell emails, and more.

Their email builder is very easy to use and comes with a large selection of email templates, so you can create beautiful, on-brand campaigns. Once it’s set up, you can personalize the email using their powerful targeting and segmentation features.

What a lot of users love about Omnisend is that they offer SMS built-in, so you don’t have to pay for a separate software, and their SMS feature allows you to send messages in 209 regions across the world.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is one of the largest and fastest growing email marketing service in the world. It is also the most easy to use and beginner friendly email marketing service.

You can easily manage your email lists, contacts, email templates, marketing calendar, and more.

Each account gives you access to unlimited emails, easy tracking and reporting, built-in social media sharing tools, free image library, list segmentation, Facebook ads integration, and a powerful eCommerce integration for Shopify stores. Their Email Plus accounts also come with powerful features like email automation, drip campaigns, surveys & polls, coupons, online donations, and subject line A/B testing which helps you send targeted emails to maximize your open rate. Constant Contact offers unmatched customer support with live chat, phone calls, email, community support, and a vast library of helpful resources. Aside from online training, they also offer in-person live seminars across the United States. This allow small business owners to quickly learn the basics of email marketing and start using it to grow their business like a pro. For all the reasons above, we rate Constant Contact the best email marketing service for small businesses and startups.

HubSpot

HubSpot is one of the most well-known softwares in the CRM and email marketing space.

Their email marketing service is free to start, and it comes with a lot of powerful automation features designed to grow your business.

You can use their easy drag-and-drop email builder and a selection of templates to create a completely custom newsletter that matches your brand’s personality and colors.

Because of the native integration with the HubSpot CRM, you can personalize your emails for each subscriber based on things like device type, country, list membership, or any other custom information you might have on the individual subscriber.

HubSpot comes with all the powerful feature you’d expect from an enterprise level email marketing software such as send time optimization, high email deliverability, A/B testing, detailed performance analytics, marketing automation, drip campaigns, and more.

One of the main reasons why small, medium, and enterprise customers choose HubSpot is because they offer an all-in-one marketing platform that includes email marketing, CRM, automation workflows, sales tools, website builder, operation hub, and more.

Hubspot Email Marketing has a free plan, which includes the CRM and all of HubSpot’s free marketing, sales, service, and operations tools.

The free version allows you to send 2,000 emails and store an unlimited number of subscribers. You can create custom signup and popup forms, build landing pages, manage and track your online ads, and more. It has all the tools you need to get started.

Drip

Drip is a powerful enterprise email marketing platform for eCommerce, bloggers, and digital marketers. They offer a wide range of tools to make marketing automation, sales funnels, and personalization easy.

Their email software offer seamless integration for all popular website builders including WordPress and WooCommerce. This allows you to easily add pop-ups / opt-in sign up forms to your website and capture more leads.

What sets Drip apart from the competition like Campaign Monitor is their intelligent marketing automation tools, smarter email segmenting, split testing features, list groups, and a visual drag and drop builder for automation workflows. These features allow you to reach targeted customers in your email list to get more sales.

Support options at Drip include live chat support, webinars, automation training, detailed courses, free guides and excellent documentation.

We use Drip for several of our businesses because it allows us to send bulk emails while connecting and engaging with every customer on a personal level using their smart eCommerce marketing automation.

Their eCommerce revenue attribution feature shows us exactly how much revenue we generate from each email marketing campaign.

Even though it’s a bit pricey, we believe Drip is the best email marketing software for eCommerce websites and business owners who want more advanced features to maximize their marketing efforts.

Recently, they’ve added SMS notification as a feature to all plans which allows you to connect with your users on both email and SMS marketing channel. This makes them a true all-in-one email marketing platform for store owners.

AWeber

AWeber is one of oldest and most popular email marketing service providers in the world. They offer a wide-range of tools for small and medium sized businesses to manage their email marketing.

Getting started with AWeber is easy. It connects seamlessly to most platforms including WordPress. For detailed instructions, see our ultimate guide on how to connect AWeber to WordPress.

You get access to ready to use html email templates, list management, autoresponders, a/b testing, and email tracking with detailed insights.

AWeber also has other powerful email marketing features such as AMP emails, automatic RSS-to-email for bloggers, and tag based subscriber segmentation.

Support options include live chat, phone support, email support, live webinars, and a vast library of how-tos and tutorials.

Moosend

Moosend is an affordable email marketing service for small businesses. It comes with a suite of powerful marketing automation features, email list building tools, landing pages, and more.

You can quickly create an email newsletter and customize the email design to match your brand within minutes by either choosing from their dozens of pre-made email templates or by creating a completely custom template.

The nice part about Moosend is that they offer marketing automation features to all plans. You can use their automation workflow designer to offer a personalized subscriber journey for your newsletter subscribers.

Moosend offer detailed email analytics that shows you important metrics such as email opens, clicks, bounces, product views, purchases, custom event tracking, and even predicted demographics data.

All plans come with powerful conversion optimization features such as A/B testing, email heatmap analytics, countdown timers, conditional content, AI-engine for product recommendations, popup forms, floating bars, newsletter signup subscription forms, and more.

ConvertKit

ConvertKit is a robust email marketing platform for professional bloggers, authors, and marketers. It is extremely easy to use and incredibly powerful. ConvertKit’s unique feature is that allows you to easily offer content upgrades and incentives with email signup forms. It also comes with easy to manage auto-responders allowing you to send drip emails from their emailing service. With ConvertKit, you can easily segment subscribers into those who are interested and those who have already purchased. This helps you increase conversions with automated emails that feel more personal. In marketing terms, this is called targeted email marketing. They have all the powerful features you’d expect from a top-notch email marketing service such as a/b testing, beautiful email templates, landing page builder, smart workflows, and more. ConvertKit offers email based support and have extensive knowledge base with great learning material. A lot of ConvertKit features such as paid newsletters are specifically designed for creators and professional bloggers that’s why we rate them the best email marketing service for professional bloggers. They even added the ability for you to sell digital products & subscriptions from the same platform. Their Creator Pro plan also includes advanced functionality like newsletter referral system, subscriber scoring, advanced reporting, and Facebook custom audiences.

MailChimp

Mailchimp is one of the most popular email marketing service providers in the world primarily because they offer a forever free email marketing service plan.

Although we don’t recommend it anymore since there are better solutions available in the market, the sad reality is that we cannot create a best email marketing software list without including Mailchimp due to their shear popularity.

Mailchimp comes with an easy drag-and-drop email builder, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, and simple tracking for analytics. It also allows you to setup delivery times based on user’s timezones, and you can setup segmenting based on geolocation.

You can easily integrate MailChimp with WordPress, Magento, Shopify, and many other platforms.

When it comes to marketing automation features, Mailchimp platform is quite limited when compared to other providers in our list such as HubSpot, Drip or ConvertKit.

In the recent years, Mailchimp has attempted to add many of the “advanced” features, but having tested many of these, they’re not truly advanced.

Mailchimp support is offered by email, live chat, and a large tutorials knowledge-base. However their support is often slow and no match to the quality of service that you get from Constant Contact.

Mailchimp offers a forever free plan which allows you to send 12,000 emails for up to 2,000 subscribers. This plan is fairly limited because you don’t get features like send-time optimization, advanced segmentation, multi-variate testing, etc. You are also required to display their branding in your email. Last but not least, support is restricted to email only which is fine if you’re a hobbyist but as a serious business, you need reliable support that you can count on.

Sendin Blue

SendinBlue is a complete SMS and email marketing software for businesses. They are one of the fastest growing email marketing platforms in Europe.

It is an extremely easy to use platform with excellent tools to create beautiful and highly engaging emails. Their simple drag and drop email editor is perfect for beginners with no experience in email marketing.

SendinBlue includes user-friendly marketing automation tools that allow you to send transactional emails, create workflows for automatic follow-up emails, and segment users. It can also select the best time to send bulk emails using their AI algorithms to ensure the best email deliverability.

SendinBlue offer a completely free email marketing plan unlimited contacts. Their free plan lets you send up to 300 emails per day, but all your emails will have their branding.

They have improved their premium plan recently to include more advanced features like landing page builder, live chat, sales CRM, and Facebook ads integration. This means users now get more value for the same price.

SendinBlue also offers a separate SMTP bulk email marketing service which you can use to power automated or transactional emails from your WordPress site. You do not need this for email marketing campaigns, but it’s a nice functionality to have if you have a large website, and you want automatic real-time content based emails.

Once you have signed up with an email marketing service, the next step is to add opt-in forms to your website to allow your users to subscribe.

Growing Your Email List and Getting More Subscribers

According to Google Analytics 70% of the people that visit any particular will only visit it once. That means with those 70% you have to engage them with your content and get their contact information in just a few short minutes or they will leave your website and be gone forever. Only 30% will naturally come back on their own according to Google Analytics. So you need to make sure that the content they’re looking for is front and center and pleasing to look at. Also your contact form must be easy to use and front and center around the content they care about. Also you need to make sure that your sign up form helps to determine what they are interested in. Because if you are just spamming people with things they don’t care about they will just block your email.

The biggest mistake that we see beginners make is not strategically placing high-converting opt-in forms. Some WordPress themes come with built-in sidebar widgets, but they don’t convert as well. Your email marketing service may also provide you with codes to embed in your theme, but that requires you to know how to code. This is why we recommend our users to use OptinMonster. It is the most powerful conversion optimization software that helps you convert abandoning website visitors into subscribers and customers. Instead of adding boring sign up forms to your sidebar, you can easily create high-converting opt-in forms like lightbox popups, floating header and footer bars, slide-in scroll boxes, fullscreen welcome mat, inline forms, and more.

But what makes OptinMonster really powerful is the behavior automation and personalization features. OptinMonster allows you to automatically show different opt-in forms based on where the user is coming from, which page they are visiting, and what they are doing on your website.

For example, the Exit-Intent® feature track your users mouse behavior and show them a targeted opt-in form at the precise moment they are about to leave. This helps you convert abandoning visitors into subscribers.

That’s why influencers like Michael Hyatt, Neil Patel, and Social Media Examiner use exit-intent on their websites. It helped Social Media Examiner add over 95,000 new subscribers in 7 months.

Nicolas Gagne, a small business owner, combined Constant Contact with a single exit-intent optin to grow his email list by 500%. This helped him triple his revenue from his online store (see the full case study).

There are tons more case studies and OptinMonster reviews that you can read as well.

Note: OptinMonster was started by WPBeginner’s founder, Syed Balkhi, because he wanted to get more email subscribers, faster. It helped us increase our email signups by 600%. Due to popular request, we released this tool for public, and currently, it’s the most recommended lead generation software in the market.

List Building Strategies and Resources

Having the right tools is crucial, but knowing how to use them properly is what makes the most difference. In your email marketing strategy, the most important thing you should plan out is segmentation.

What is email list segmentation?

Email list segmentation is the process of grouping your subscribers, so you can better personalize your emails based on interest. It helps you get higher open rates and click-through rates. This definitive guide to email marketing has all the information you need to segment your email list like a pro. If you want to start growing your email list quickly, then see our tested and easy tricks to grow your email list faster. If you’re not sure how to create an opt-in form, then see this 63-point checklist for creating a high-converting optin form. Content Upgrades are the highest converting opt-in forms. It’s a technique where you offer bonus content at the end of your popular blog posts. These usually convert 5 times higher than a regular opt-in. Here are some content upgrade ideas that you should check out. We have a complete guide on how to effectively use content upgrades in WordPress.

Conclusion

It does not matter what kind of business you run, what kind of website you have, or what industry you are in. If you have a website, and you want to turn your visitors into returning customers, then you need to get them in your email list. We hope this article helped you understand why building an email list is important and helped you get started on the right foot.

McLaskey Designs