1. Email them. 

Yes. Starting at the very beginning here. Might think it goes without saying, but we’ve seen 10,000 person email lists sit dormant for years.

Email them what you said you were going to email them when they signed up. Delight them with exclusive content, previews and behind the scenes of the operation.

2. Lookalike Audience: 

Meta, Reddit, Spotify, YouTube, Google Search, TikTok, Snapchat, Connected TV (MNTN, VIBE etc): they all make it possible to jump in, add your credit card, upload your email list and they do the hard work of matching your email subscribers with lookalike (demographics, psychographics, buying intent and more). 

3. Retargeting List: 

Retargeting in the digital marketing landscape is certainly not new. But it’s gotten lazy.

With email, your customers have already raised their hand. Add your emails to (see list of platforms directly above). The platforms take your existing emails and match them to users. Now the 10,000 email subscribers you have are also seeing messages about events, programs and videos from your brand. If you’re looking to advertise efficiently, this is the purest center of the bullseye you can get. For bonus points: segment your retargeting lists. Show ads to the students interested in health sciences different from those that have landed on specific pages of your website related to the Forestry program. 

4. Tag + Sort: Find the Top 10%

You can likely do this manually by just looking at lifetime earnings. There are tools you can pay money to that also support this (Enrich Labs being One). This is such an important piece of the email puzzle because as we’ve mentioned, not all emails are created equal. 

5. See If You Have Any Celebrities / Influencers In The Mix: 

You have thousands of emails. There’s a high likelihood someone’s purchased from you, walked through your door (brick and mortar) or is just a fan. Using a tool like influencers.club you can upload your list and they’ll match against a database of influencers (340M profiles) to see if any of your subscribers have a few million Instagram followers. Send ‘em a kickback. This is certainly a more affordable option than trying to partner with them! SparkToro from Rand Fishkin is a solid too to help provide some clarity here.

6. Survey Them: Ask Your Customers What They Want

You’ve got a (somewhat) captive audience. Have questions about your product? A conference room dispute to settle? Umm … has anyone thought to ask the customer?! Survey the customers or just manually email the top 3% of spenders or power users. 

7. Surprise The Power Users: 

Non profit: your highest donors. 

E-Commerce: Your highest revenue customers. 

B2B: Your longest tenured subscribers and customers. 

Higher Ed: The ones that would register for classes in 2028 if given the chance!

Send them something meaningful. Something fun. Something of value. But anything that shows you value them. Make their brand affinity to you stronger than ever. 

8. Traffic On Demand: 

Leverage your email list to launch a blog. Start a YouTube series or podcast and Instantly get listens. This is the power an email list delivers. You instantly have a built in megaphone for your next project. 

9. Test Language and Offers: 

With enough emails, you can AB test different offers to see which one has the higher response rate. For example, want to test out tiered pricing and your audiences receptiveness: send one email to 50% of your list and another to the other 50%: which one had more purchases? 

10. Personalize: 

Personalize the list based on location (for higher ed this would be sending different emails to out of staters than in-staters). Personalize based on interest (whattup tags and personalizing websites based on location!)

11. Tag Users as they Enter The List: 

This is a big on … and often overlooked. When we run Meta lead ads, we tag users based on their interest category. If we’re targeting healthcare with our ads, any lead through that ad-set is tagged as healthcare. Same applies to higher ed marketing and small business. 

12. Simple “Reply to This Email” Language: 

Sure, it’s tempting to hire a design team and build a beautiful email marketing template. But resist the urge. Plain text email can outperform highly designed, and just feel more human in a world where AI generated email templates can be, well, AI generated. At the end of the email, simply say “reply here, I respond to every email!” and you’ll be surprised how many replies you get. 

13. Having Options is a Superpower: You Could Just Wait (While Your List Grows)

One thing you can do with your email is just let it cook. I know, if you made it this far and aren’t excited about leveraging the power of this incredible marketing asset, I’m not sure how good of a persuader we are: but having a robust email list that sits dormant is a billion times better than not having one at all. Transparently, there have been long stretches in Pintler Group’s tenure where our own email goes unused. But it is always growing. Having the option to turn the faucet on is extremely helpful. 

Below: we made this video in 2022: and it’s still highly relevant today. Another example of how durable email marketing truly is.

14. Set up Automations (Responsibly)

We’ve seen the flood gates open on HubSpot workflows, Mailchimp sequences, Salesforce comm-flows and whatever else CRM + email marketing software is calling sending email time released. This could and should be a separate article entirely, but for now, we’ll say this is a great strategy to keep your users engaged and reminded of your brand, so long as the content you’re sending is of value. 

15. Get Users To Your Website: 

Sure, a 4-5% click rate is considered good. Which sounds bad. BUT, compare that to tiny percentages of click-through-rates for display ads, programmatic ads (like .01% CTR) it’s pretty good. Our team recently has been putting together sample reporting templates, and including them (free of charge) to share with our email list. Click rates have been reaching double digits easily. 

There you have it. We’ve included our custom Executive Marketing dashboard below and made it incredibly simple to duplicate and add your own data sources! Try it out below.

First a couple ground rules: 

1. Rule Number One: Tell people why they’re giving you their email. I’m not opting in (and I’m sure you’re not either) to an email list if I’m not sure it’s valuable to me, if I’m not sure the frequency, and if I’m not sure the purpose.

2. Rule Number Two: Don’t use email scrapers. There’s spam in your inbox. And then there’s human spam. Don’t be both. Growing email lists require real effort.

3. Rule Number Three: keep the contact form simple. If you truly need first name and phone number, ask for it. But have a really compelling reason on ask for it. Otherwise, start with top of the funnel (email) and put in the hard work to gather more info. 

4. Tools > Content > Generic Offers. For example.
   1.  Gated Mortgage Calculator > Buying a House Guide > Sign up for Our  Newsletter.

Great, you’re a believer in the lasting power and value of acquiring, nurturing and building an email list: so how the heck do you get started? 

Here are some ways: organized by 100 level, 200 level and 300 level degrees of difficulty. 

100 Level Email Marketing Growth

Collect Emails at Live (free) Events: 

Point of Sale: The email list building strategy equivalent to opting in to your company’s 401k match: the no-est of no brainers. Square, Toast, Strip: whatever it is: make sure your customer emails are getting stored somewhere you have access. Our Montana based digital marketing firm, Pintler Group, is gleefully shocked when we hear a new client has thousands of emails from their point of sale but hasn’t ever sent an email. This is the lowest of low hanging fruit.

Collect Emails at Live (ticketed) Events: 

People took time out of their busy lives to attend your free event. Maybe it’s because there’s pizza, or maybe it’s because they’re down with our cause. Whatever the reason: manually walk around and collect emails. In our experience, these are the emails with the highest open rates, click-rates, sales: everything. 

Yes, you’ll have the emails from your ticketing software, but not all. Someone buys five tickets, you have one email. During the event, run a quick give-away or have a place for folks to add their email (maybe through an i-pad). These folks paid money (Venmoed their friend whose email you have) to attend. If you deliver on a great experience, they’ll attend the next one too. 

Ask Contacts: 

Having great conversations with folks in your network, in your vertical, in your line of work? Let them know you’ve got an email list you’re curating, it’s a monthly send including company updates, things we’re learning and ways to get involved. Sure, this is manual and doesn’t scale across website visitors: BUT, these are likely going to be connectors in your industry, and perhaps not all email addresses are created equal!

Generate Leads In Video:

Using video lead gen software, you can actually generate a lead directly in the video by asking for email. In addition, you can ask multiple choice questions, open ended questions and even show different video based on the viewer’s answer. Here’s a look at how video lead-gen software works. It’s easy (hence why it’s in the 100 level breakdown!)

Don’t use “Sign up for our Newsletter.”

This worked in 2015. It does not work today. Users need more. Clear value proposition as to why they should sign up. I don’t need another newsletter and neither do you or your website visitors. I do need a reporting template, a free consult or a demo of how the product can help grow my business.

200 Level Course (Slightly More Resources + Expertise to Execute)

Run a Contest: 

But not just any contest. For example, something we did recently was give away “date-night” packages including dinner + movie gift cards. We photographed the bundle, used the photos in Meta targeting (in a relationship, geographically located within a 20 mile radius of Missoula, foodies). Users entered through Meta (more on that soon) and we linked the contest submission directly to Mailchimp tagged “relationship” for future date-night events, restaurant announcements and more. 

Facebook Lead Ads: 

Related to running contests (since it’s the mechanism for doing so in a large-scale way). FB Lead Ads have been kind of a roller coaster ride of impactfulness over the years, but recently we’ve noticed positive results (and by positive, we mean for every five emails there’s one qualified). Without going too much into the weeds of the set-up, this involves building an ad account in Meta. These ads appear on newsfeeds (IG + FB) mobile and desktop. When you click “learn more” or “sign up” it opens a lead-gen form. 

Use “Email Us” as a CTA (And make sure to Reply!)

We could talk at length about the decaying conversion rates of simple form fields on websites, but one thing we’ve also noticed is companies and brands hiding behind “contact us” forms at prime decision points in the custom journey. On your website, make it really easy to email a question. And most importantly: be sure to actually reply. User clicks “contact” and it opens their email browser. You can even decide what the first couple lines of the email can be! 

Give-To-Get: 

An oldie but a goodie. Modified for the year we’re living in: this used to be white-papers (email to get a PDF). Now it can be any number of awesome bounties. Some of our favorite include interactive Figma Boards like this one showcasing the “top 50 college website” and “75 Campus Visit Pages” 

Make Something (not a PDF) Your Audience Wants. Give it to them for (their email) free!

I’ll throw the dart at the wall. It lands on “Private Soccer Coaching Industry.” Great! You run a private soccer coaching business. Put together a three part video course designed for 6-8 year olds. Almost as a primer to your more in depth private coaching. They meet you, they see your coaching and training style, and you get their email to hopefully continue to provide value and one day earn a client. Let’s Goooooal!

Exit Intent (Used in an Elegant Way)

This one can be controversial for the general public, and for the evergreen-ness of this article. Personally, it’s not a favorite, but decided to put it on the list because after running tests and talking with my conversion rate optimization (CRO) savvy  friends, this tactic works. 

On-Page Chat (Prompt for Email)

Of course, our top recommendation would be to staff the chat with a real person: someone that can chime in and respond to questions and route users to the right place. When that person is away, we recommend keeping the chat up. AI chats are powerful, and can be coached to make sure and collect email of the person asking the questions. We do this on our software sites and while we don’t get flooded with chat notifications, we do increase our email list by a few each and every month. Month after month after month. 

Pop Up (At the Right Time … With the Right Message)

Whether it’s scroll depth or our personal favorite, showing a personalized message on the right page at the right time (like a “campus visit” page on a higher ed website) we’re bullish on pop-ups done well. You can also time trigger the pop ups to send after a user has been on the site for a certain amount of time (say 10+ seconds).

300 Level: Next Level Email Growth Tactics

Engineering As Marketing: 

What the heck is this? Think mortgage calculators or any type of quiz that delivers a value to the end user … in exchange for their email. One of our personal favorites is Coldwell Bank “Move Meter. 

Here, users enter two zip codes, and the “Move-meter” delivers custom curated scores based on key consideration factors like education, weather, culture and transportation. You can talk to an agent (corresponding and geotargeted by zip code of course).

Host a Webinar: 

Hey! We practice what we preach. We hosted two webinars in the last three months and grew our email list. Most importantly, we met with about 20 prospective interns through the University of Montana (who we partnered with on the webinar) and introduced them to the world of digital marketing agency work. 

Personalize Your Email Newsletter Based on Location: 

Using geopersonalization software like GeoFli, you can have the “ask” on your website personalized: something along the lines of: “Colorado’s favorite email newsletter!” or “Find shows within a 50 mile radius of Boston!” These subtle changes to headers and calls-to-action can mean percentage point jumps in email sign-up conversion. Try it out here. 

Product Led Growth: 

We’re just getting to rock all the hits today! Product led growth, another one of our favorites makes it possible for users, if they’re in your app or engaging with  your product do recommend to a friend or add users in a highly simple way. Using your product to lead growth: product led. Hotmail may not be the timeless example here, but early on when they were the kings of email, they used a simple “

Below: Calendly when you log-in promotes some of their enterprise features.

If you liked this article: check out our Figma board with other resources, design inspiration and a link to our executive marketing dashboard.

In this article, the Pintler Group Digital Marketing team argues for building a foundation or anchoring your marketing strategy around email lists. The marketing asset that keeps on giving.

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