12 Great Tactics to Help Grow Your Email List in 2023

I’m sorry to be the one to break this to you, but more than 70% of visitors will abandon your website and will never return.

It's a sad reality, but one faced by most businesses around the world.

Just look into your Google Analytics, and you’ll instantly grasp the percentage of new versus returning website visitors.

That’s why you need to convert every website visitor into an email subscriber before they leave forever. This way, you can stay at the top of their minds and bring them back to your website by sending them relevant emails.

Today, we’ll go over the 12 best ways to grow your email list in 2023.

Having an email list allows you to communicate with your customers, subscribers, and prospects. And since almost every consumer has an email address, you can easily contact billions of potential customers with only a few clicks.

Though it will take time, if you put some or all of the advice provided here into practice, you'll quickly start to see increased open and conversion rates.

Absolutely! It is more important than ever right now.

Despite the rise in popularity of social media, research shows that email is still the most effective way to communicate with your audience.

And in 2023, using this marketing strategy will still be very effective. The problem is that many companies are misusing their email marketing strategies, which could prevent them from reaping the benefits of this brilliant channel.

Below are four main reasons why you shouldn’t overlook building your email list, regardless of the business that you’re in.

1. Email content is personalized

The user has already expressed interest in your service or content by visiting your website and providing you with their email address. With an email newsletter, you may send them relevant offers because you already know what they're interested in.

2. Your email list belongs to you

Google, Twitter, and Facebook are third-party applications. This means they don’t belong to you.

If these platforms modify how they work (or worse, cease to exist), you risk losing all your hard work in the blink of an eye. On the other hand, your email list will always remain your own, unaffected by any unexpected decisions made by these other platforms.

This means that this digital marketing trend isn’t going anywhere.

3. Users are receptive to you

If a user joins your email list to get updates from you, it means they are undoubtedly interested in what you offer. As such, they’ll be more receptive to your emails.

Since these email subscribers have willingly given you their personal emails, these people are also more likely to not only open and read your emails, but also to become paying customers.

4. Consumers use email every day

Everyone who uses the internet has at least one email address. And according to a recent study by Radicati, there are 3.8 billion active email accounts. That equates to almost half of all people on Earth.

Think about it: how many times do you check your email inbox daily? And regardless of social media, the habit of using email isn’t going anywhere.

Seasoned marketers commonly say that their biggest regret is not starting their email list when they first started out.

Still not convinced? Read below what some of the most prominent online marketers say about their newsletters.

• “Out of all the channels I tested as a marketer, email continually outperforms most of them”. — Neil Patel, Founder Crazy Egg and QuickSprout
• “If you’re not building an email list, you’re making a HUGE mistake”. — Derek Halpern, Founder Social Triggers
• “Email is the most predictable driver of growth and sales in our business. I prefer email marketing over all other traffic channels”. — Syed Balkhi, Founder WPBeginner
• “Getting an email address is the first critical step to figuring out who my reader is, and hopefully in the future, my customer of some sort”. — Joe Pulizzi, Founder Content Marketing Institute

What is the best way to grow your email list in 2023?

So, without any further ado, let’s dive right into the reason you clicked this post in the first place.

Find below the 12 best strategies to grow your email list in 2023.

A smart technique to expand your email list is through your very own email – more specifically, your email signature.

Email signatures are widely overlooked by marketers, but they hold immense power. You can boost your email list subscriptions by including a link in all of your company's email signatures.

As a result, any employee's outgoing email can potentially be used to add new targeted subscribers to your company’s newsletter.

Our inboxes are already crammed as it is. This makes users extra careful these days to willingly give their emails to any spammy company.

So be sure to clearly state how many emails your subscribers might expect from you so that they know what they're signing up to. This will help with their willingness to sign up for your newsletter.

Consider this: how would you feel if, after signing up to receive industry news, you instead began receiving company updates and cheeky sales promotions?

So, adding to the above point, it’s important to keep in mind that newsletter subscribers have very little tolerance for unwanted emails (honestly, who has time to read about things they’re not interested in?).

What do you think these people will do? Yep, they’ll unsubscribe faster than you can say “summer offers”.

This just goes to emphasize the importance of keeping your word and delivering what you promised. Not more, not less.

Opt-in forms are a huge benefit for growing an email list.

You can grow your newsletter subscribers by using captivating images and eye-catching CTAs (calls-to-action) to get users via an opt-in form when they first visit your website.

The beauty of these forms is that you can design a unique pop-up for each page and precisely time it to provide visitors with tailored offers based on their actions and behavior (more on this below).

Technology is smart. And when a visitor's cursor heads directly toward the ‘close tab’ this indicates that they are probably thinking about leaving your website (or switching to another tab).

This is a great moment to time a pop-up opt-in form to encourage a user to sign up to your newsletter so that they can stay connected to your brand.

Email service providers offer this function and activating it is as simple as switching on a button (no coding experience needed).

Adding on, mobiles (smartphones) are quickly taking over as the main method for browsing the internet.

But your website behaves differently on desktops and mobile devices. This means that you have to make an active effort to ensure that you have optimized its desktop version for mobile so that your email sign-up pop-up doesn't look out of place (or spammy).

A/B testing enables you to determine which of two (or more) competing techniques is more effective so that you know how to effectively increase newsletter subscribers.

Use A/B testing to:

• Improve lead forms (Which works best? Should you use overlay pop-ups? Offer special offers? Free shipping?)
• Know what type of content visitors to your website are most interested in (this can also help you determine what to send to your email subscribers and even what to create blog posts around).
• Understand the best placement for opt-in forms that render the biggest amount of sign-ups.

Heatmaps are another great way to determine where to place your opt-in forms. You can use heatmaps to identify the areas of web pages that users engage with most frequently.

This allows you to place the CTAs to join your email list in prominent and strategic locations, making the most out of your opt-in forms.

There are several applications that create heat maps for landing pages and blog articles on your website, allowing you to see where visitors concentrate their attention by easily identifying where they hover their mouse.

Bots are a well-known issue in the online world (look at how hard Elon Musk is trying to fight those in his Twitter acquisition). These create spam, which can decrease your email engagement.

There is no point in sending emails to a list filled with bots, as these won’t ever buy anything from you, so you want your email list to grow, but always with real people.

To prevent bots from signing up for your email newsletter, use CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test) to protect your email list.

Webinars are intended to instruct or educate participants on a significant topic and are typically 30 minutes to an hour long. But to be able to join, people must register first in order to attend live or recorded video sessions.

Using webinars not only is a great way to increase your brand awareness and audience trust, but a brilliant way to organically gather more targeted email subscribers.

Many businesses create a page with free resources to give out to their audience. HubSpot, for example, provides free courses, e-books, videos, and templates for its audience.

All they have to do to access it is (you guessed it), to give out their email address.

Free shipping offers are enticing enough for first-time visitors to give you their email, and ideally, make a purchase.

Exclusive discounts are also one of the best ways for eCommerce websites to get more email subscribers.