How to Create an Email List in 2022

The email list or mailing list, is a very effective online marketing tool if it’s well managed. A mailing list can be used to send mass emails to targeted groups of people.

Used well, this formidable tool can allow you to increase your turnover tenfold. So, its importance is undeniable.

Let's see together how to create an email list and how to get the most out of them.

What is an Email List?

An email list is a list that consists of our contact's full name, first name, last name, their email address and some other information like gender, age or their social media names. So, it's like our address book. 

As its name suggests, an email list is a list of emails that you can use for promotional purposes. This mailing list is created for people who are interested in the area you cover and ideally enjoy what you do. You will send this email list newsletters, information about your products, online training, special offers and other promotions.

Some mailing lists may have thousands or hundreds of people. When they are well targeted and well identified (by tastes and affinities, but also by age, habits, etc.), these lists are worth gold for a company.

Why Should We Create Email Lists?

We are in 2022 and we have a lot of contact lists. We have a lot of social media accounts; we have Instagram, we have Facebook, we have Linkedin and many more… We are already connected with a lot of people so why should we care about any other list? The answer to this question is; the email lists that we have are under our control. On any social media account, we have limited ability to communicate. 

The main power in this kind of environment is in the hands of social media owners. If you want to communicate with your contacts outside of these networks, you may not get their email addresses etc. There are really very limited ways to do that. Social media companies don't give this kind of information because they don't want you to communicate anywhere else but their app. So, having an email list means that we have the full power of our own communication. If we have a list, we have control. 

Think it this way; we have our own social media channel for ourselves and we have subscribers for instance. We can send newsletters to our audience whenever we want and whatever we want. We can send it one newsletter per week or month. We can also just send them without any limitation, too; it's in our control. 

An email list is not just an email list.

With an email list, we can actually reach our audience! Also, we can segment our audiences into their interests. Some of our audience may receive some informational emails and others may receive newsletters for instance. 

Let's say that we are a photographer and we are taking a lot of good photographs. We want to share these pictures to some of our audiences. Of course we can use Instagram for that but we also want to add some story behind the picture. We need to have a subscribers list and we need to segment our contact lists according to their interests. We can use this to manage our relationship with our audience effectively by segmenting our audiences according to their different kinds of features or different kinds of properties. 

Individuals may create their own emails but if you're a company you have to create an email list. It's not a nice-to-have, it's a must-have! As a company, we need to sell our services or products, so we need active and effective communication channel. One of the best communication channels in 2022 is still email. Email is the main communication channel and it looks like it's going to be like that for another decade. When you have a mass communication channel you don’t do email work just one by one. We're talking about a whole list of potential and existing customers. You need to have their data in your hand.

Of course, every company has sort of lists but they don't see this as important as the other   marketing activities. They may be only using Google Adwords in order to promote their product and services. But you also promote your services with emails, too! 

Effective Ways and Tips to Create Email Lists

Email lists are not just first name, last name and email. That’s not enough information, we need more! We need to consider our email list as a centralized list so we should gather all distributed data in one centralized database. 

Let's assume you have zero contacts right now. When you individually want to send an email to your friend or to your client you can just enter his or her email address and it just pops up there. But we are talking about a whole list of your customers. So, how can you get these infos into one database? 

1- You can just start from your service provider. If you are using Gmail or Yahoo or whatever account you are using, you can just go to your email settings and you can just see your contacts there. Some of the email service providers are directly saving your contacts information. Whenever you send an email to anyone of your contacts it automatically saves them as your contact. list especially the emails are there so you can just export this address book. You can export all of this data to Mailsoftly. There may be informations that are missing. First name, last name and email are basic infos but we need more. We wouldn’t want to send spam emails to irrevelant people. We need to have meaningful communication with our potential or existing customers, clients or audiences. So, the first thing is; you go to your address book to your email service provider and you just download your information. 

2- We are using smartphones. You can synchronize your phone’s contact lists, too. And there you go, now you have their number! 

3- If you're a company you can also get your client information again from company emails. For instance, you may be using Outlook. Many companies use the Outlook mail system. So, they can get their customer list company-wide.   

4- If you are using any kind of CRM system or you may have some other information collecting system you may be using a subscriber list or you may be using some email sending programs like Sendgrid, Mailchimp, Mailsoftly, whatever you're using. So, you can get that information again into one database or you can just export or download.

5- Another tip is using social media! 2 years ago, you could download default data and create your own date on Linkedin. For instance, you have 1000 connections. When you request a download for your personal information this also consists of your connections, too. With these connections they were just giving their first name, last name or connections first name, last name, email, job title, company, etc. The default system was “okay, you can just give my email address if i'm connected with X”. The default setting was “okay, you can share”. But now, we just have checked it, now they just turn it to the default “no”! So, downloading information may not work to get your connections' email addresses but that's one another reason why you should just create your own email lists. Because these social media giants are monopolies. If you're connected with someone why wouldn't you just share their email addresses with you, too?. They don't because they just want you to communicate in their channel which makes sense. But for users, it can be a little bit frustrating. 

If your contact lists are distributed all over the place, you can just get all this information to your computer first and then you can just import it to a CRM system or any kind of mail system. You can use Mailsoftly for this. You can import any kind of contact list information directly to Mailsoftly and you can just manage your whole data. You can also use whatever email sending program you're using but it's very important that you have this one centralized list so that you can just control who you are sending your emails to and which email. Because we don’t want to frustrate people, we don't want to send a lot of emails that they don't want. We want them, we want to give what our audience wants. 

Sending emails three times a week is not a good way and it's wrong because we need a reputation. You need to have your reputation whenever you send an email. The receiver should also be willing to receive your email, so this is very important. 

So, you made the first jump start! So, what are the other ways that will take a long time? There are some ways that you should employ your contact list strategy. First of all, if you have a website (which of course you need to have) you need to put an opt-in form, a “subscribe my newsletter” form for your visitors. If someone visits your website they're probably interested in your services or products. So you must take this opportunity to convert your visitors into your subscribers. 

Another tip to get a good subscriber email contact list is to again write good content. So, if you write good content you'll probably get more visitors, maybe returning visitors! You can also convert visitors to your subscribers easily. It's hard to turn visitors them into subscribers, you have to have returning visitors. In order to do that you need to provide useful information for those visitors. That's why they will be willing to come back. Good content creation is very very important.

Let's say that you just did some research or you just wrote a product paper detailing about something that your visitors may like. You can create that and you can just give this as a pdf file so that they can download it. It could consist of screen shots and everything, maybe some tips, tools and lists, too. They can just download this as a guide to use in their daily life. Before the download, you can let them know that you need their information like first name, last name and email address. You can just give a check button so that they can opt in to get more useful information about this kind of studies in the future. Maybe you will be lucky to get answers like “Okay, include me to your email list”! 

In brief, social media is another platform that you can use. Forms are important, too. You can just implement some forms about prices or more detailed information for your services. Lastly, you can also use that form data again to get more subscribers for your contact lists.

What Are the Some Tools to Create Email Lists?

We suggest a white hat tool, not a black hat tool. This term is usually used for search engine optimization but it’s also important when it comes to the email lists. 

Emails are under attack by scammers, spoofers and any other kind of bad guys. With email, you're just reaching out to people's inboxes directly. So, if you are a bad guy and find some ways to do that you can scam emails. There are web scrapers that travel through websites and get email addresses from those websites and download this or put this information wherever they want. They're just hunters. But, this is not ethically right. 

There are some white hat tools that you can implement to your social media and download data (if your connections allow). You can get this information in a white hat style and it's a good way.   

You can also use newsletter forms. You can create your own forms and you can just embed these forms into your websites. You can create subscriber tools, subscribe forms or more…You can get information from these forms. So, if they are on your website, you need to have these forms, if you are using WordPress for your website you can use other forms from tools. Maybe some pop-up forms! You can just implement when your website opens you can just use a pop-up. 

So, you can use that and if your visitors are on your social media platform you can also use their social media platform tools, too.