Email Capture

Email capture refers to the process of collecting email addresses to add to your mailing list. It’s an integral part of developing an audience and communicating with prospective customers interested in the products and/or services you provide.

Why is Email Capture Important?

With an email list at your disposal, you can target your marketing campaigns at warm leads rather than at random and uninterested parties.

How Email Capture Works

You can capture the email addresses of your leads using several methods. But most typically, the process starts with a call-to-action on a business’ website asking viewers to subscribe to a newsletter. This will attract existing readers to engage with your content again in the future. Nowadays, more and more entrepreneurs take this one step further by giving away freebies in the form of ebooks and training series (or other lead magnets). This works wonders for enticing people to give away their name and email address in exchange for the free giveaway.

There are a few email capture forms you can use on your website:

• Popup boxes
• Landing pages with signs up forms
• Fade in bars

You get the idea.

Within seconds these can be installed with some programming know-how. Alternatively, you can utilize one of the many website plugins that provide this sort of email capture functionality.

You need to carefully consider the kind of email opt-in form you provide subscribers. Some popup variations can cause viewers to click away from the site. To avoid this, focus on asking for email signup at the end of your transactional emails, in blog posts, or video content. Or place the form somewhere on the side of your website where it doesn’t annoy your visitors. You want to create a careful balance between letting your audience know your email list exists while not being too pushy.

A relatively new approach to email capture is exit-intent popups. These appear when the user signals their intention to leave the site by hovering over the back button or the address bar of their browser window. The popup will then appear, asking them whether they want to sign up to your email list. This helps catch visitors who are about to click away, while not annoying them too much with popups while they’re browsing your website.

In short, getting creative with email capture can lead to a growing email list, which in the long run, will boost the success of your marketing campaigns.