Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing means, especially when we speak about Ecommerce.

Every dollar spent on your promotional email brings $40 in return. 

However, for such a great ROI, you need a long and healthy list of your website visitors’ and customers’ email addresses. 

No email marketing strategy is possible without that data. And the following paragraphs of this article reveal the highway to doing Ecommerce email marketing right.

The Way NOT to Get Email Addresses 

Some shady people can say that the best and the fastest way to build your list is to buy a ready-made one. And that is absolutely NOT true.

These are a few reasons why:

1. You will never buy a healthy email list that would contain the actual email addresses of real people that are engaged with your brand.
2. A stale email list with inactive emails and full of spam traps will ruin your sender reputation. On top of that, your emails will end up in the spam folder and your IP address will be blacklisted.
3. With a great number of spam complaints, your email service provider will terminate your account.
4. You will spend your money on the crappy list, also, on sending your promotional campaign to that list. 
5. Plus, you are at risk of facing heavy penalties according to GDPR.

So, if you want to ruin your email marketing strategy before you’ve even started, go ahead and buy an email list.

Read also: How to Build an eCommerce Website: 4 Options for Beginners

The Best Way to Collect Emails for Ecommerce Email Marketing

For the last four years, I’ve been working with ecommerce startups helping them to set up their email campaigns. 

I’ve learned that there is no common way to build the list rapidly. The success lies in good website traffic and the right combination of a few different signup forms. 

Your signup forms can vary in copywriting, offering, the moment when appear, etc. Different buying personas react positively to different forms.

In the realm of e-commerce email marketing, building an effective subscriber list is crucial for fostering customer engagement and driving sales. Utilizing tools like Findymail can significantly enhance the process by verifying emails, ensuring that the communication reaches authentic and interested prospects. By incorporating Findymail into their strategy, e-commerce businesses can maintain a high-quality email list, optimizing their marketing campaigns for greater impact and success.

So these are the signup forms to build your healthy email list from scratch.

#1. Take Advantage of the Standard Signup Form

One of the easiest ways for you to start collecting subscribers is by having a default signup form on your site. Normally, you can find it at the bottom of the screen. 

The default Shopify signup form looks like this:

If this form doesn’t meet your website design, you can disable it.

But make sure that you use an alternative of a passive signup form – the one that can always be found at the bottom or at the top of the page. 

This form won’t beat the records of emails collected but will get ones from visitors that don’t like popups and proactive marketing means.

#2. Empower Popups

Nowadays, popups are little yet powerful beasts.

They are dynamic by nature and easily editable. That’s why you can set them to pop up at certain times, for certain events.

They can be either appealing, or funny, or even sexy. You can play around with them and see the results shortly.

I would recommend starting with these popups to level up your Ecommerce email marketing game:

• The popup that appears after three clicks on your page. Three clicks indicate that the visitor is already engaged with your store. Ask him/her to signup for your special offers, to be the first to know about new arrivals or the discount for the first purchase.
• The popup that appears on the most popular website page. Offer even more great deals or free shipping, etc.
• The popup that occurs before the visitor exits your page. Offer a discount for the first order, free shipping or something in return for the email. Exit-intent popups perform really well. 

Usually, email service providers also host the popup creating studios.

For example, on Omnisend platform, it takes up to 5 minutes to launch the new popup. You can easily modify its place and time within the seconds. 

With an awesome email marketing tool, launching signup forms on your store won’t take you ages. Just don’t be afraid to experiment and find the best performing popup for you.

#3 Entertain Your Visitors with Interactive Experience

Interactive signup forms can be your trump card and you should definitely have them in your list-building toolkit.

In this case, I’m speaking about the interactive signup form like Wheel of Fortune. 

It’s a fun wheel that the visitor can spin and get a prize, but he/she has to sign up first. You can customize and determine which prizes the customer can win. 

These forms are fun for visitors and highly effective for ecommerce store owners. You can combine them with other forms or launch them based on time elapsed on the site.

Additional Ideas on How to Build Your Email List

You may also collect email addresses outside your home page for best Ecommerce email marketing results.

These are the several ideas for that:

1. For advertising campaigns on social media, you can use a separate dedicated landing page with a special offer only for that campaign as well as signup form to get the promotion code.
2. Create a lead magnet and offer it in separate popup or landing page. It can be a gift guide, 10 tips, stock images, – something that your visitors would find valuable to download from you.
3. Launch a referral program and encourage your current subscribers to share your newsletters with their friends for points or discount coupons at your store. 

Takeaways:

Ecommerce email marketing isn’t a one-day activity.

An email list with engaged subscribers should be constantly updated. Only this kind of list can generate sales and great ROI.

To build an amazing email list, you need good website traffic and several types of signup forms. Try to use a mix of passive forms and more aggressive popups.

Also, don’t forget about interactive signup forms, which have higher engagement and higher sign up rates. 

Finally, take the opportunity to collect emails outside your website. Just make sure that the subscribers find the value in giving their emails to you.

When you follow the tips from this article, you’ll be building a quality email list in no time! Good luck with Ecommerce email marketing.