What is an email list?

An email list is a collection of email addresses from people who gave their explicit consent to receive promotions, newsletters, updates, and other content from a brand. 

Email lists let you reach a large audience quickly. You can also segment your email list based on your audience’s interests, shopping behaviour, or other criteria to deliver hyper-personalised and relevant content. Through email lists, you can forge long-term business relationships with your existing customers and win over new ones.

How to build and manage an email list

If you’d like to build an email list from scratch, here’s what you need to do:

1. Choose the right email marketing platform

You’ll need an email marketing platform to efficiently grow and manage your email lists. Email marketing platforms house subscriber and customer data, making it easy to segment your audience, create content, and keep track of performance so you can improve it. Here’s what to look for in a platform:

  • Sign-up forms: Collect email addresses and potentially phone numbers with a wide variety of form types.
  • Segmentation: Create audience lists based on behavioural, psychographic, or demographic data so you can send relevant content.
  • Templates: Write emails that resonate with your audience using pre-made templates.
  • Integrations: Choose between hundreds of ecommerce software integrations to make your emails that much more personalised and relevant.

2. Create sign-up forms

One of the easiest ways to collect email addresses is to create sign-up forms and add them to your website homepage and product pages. 

Here are some types of sign-up forms you can use:

  • Embedded forms: These are static forms that collect email addresses, phone numbers, or other subscriber data.
  • Pop-up forms: These forms pop up after someone has spent a certain amount of time on the site, scrolled down a certain amount, or tried to exit the website. They should be easy to dismiss.
  • Fly-out forms: An alternative to the pop-up, these forms slide into view after someone spends a certain amount of time on a page.
  • Overlay pop-up forms: To be used sparingly, overlay pop-ups take over the entirety of the screen.

Regardless of the form you go for, you can encourage your audience to sign up by offering different incentives and special offers, but not before obtaining consent.

3. Use other methods

There are other ways you can build an email list, including:

  1. Creating a referral program: Encourage existing customers to share your business with friends for rewards. Offer incentives based on the number of referrals for maximum impact.
  2. Running a giveaway on social media: Attract new subscribers by offering a prize in exchange for email sign-ups.  Promote the giveaway across all your marketing channels to maximise reach.
  3. Asking for sign-ups at check-out in physical stores: Capture customer emails at the point of sale. Offer exclusive discounts or your loyalty program benefits to encourage sign-ups.

4. Set up criteria to segment your subscribers

As your email list grows, you’ll want to find ways to personalise your content—one of the best ways to do that is through segmentation.

Segmentation is when you split your audience into smaller lists so you’re not blasting your entire list with the same messages. You can segment your lists by:

  • Online behaviour: Purchase history, website browsing, marketing engagement
  • Psychographics: Interests, values, lifestyle
  • Demographics: Age, gender, location

5. Monitor and clean your email lists

Clean your email lists every 3–6 months so you’re not emailing inactive subscribers. Emailing inactive subscribers can hurt your email deliverability by decreasing engagement and increasing the chances that your emails will get marked as spam.

To avoid this issue, create a separate segment for your inactive audience—subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails within a certain amount of time. This is when you can send win-back campaigns in an attempt to move them out of the inactive segment.

Build comprehensive email lists with Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform that can help you create, grow, and manage email lists through:

  • Forms: Create different types of forms to collect email addresses and optimise their performance through A/B testing.
  • Segmentation: Group subscribers based on their behaviour, preferences, or location.
  • Reporting: Manage your list performance and make adjustments to campaigns by segment.
  • Integrations: Centralise and manage data from a single location thanks to Klaviyo’s 350+ integrations.

Are you ready to build your email lists? Sign up for Klaviyo to get subscribers, segment your audience, and send relevant and personalised emails.

Additional resources