9 Tactics for Collecting Email Addresses that Will Work in 2023

By the end of reading, you will be armed with 9 actionable strategies to power up lead generation on your website in 2022.

1. Use custom email opt-in popups

Popups are commonly used to collect email addresses and can be extremely effective. Neil Patel, the co-founder of KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg, states that popups improved lead generation conversions by 17% on his website.

However, to ensure popups on your website are effective you need to take your marketing goals into consideration. A well timed, well positioned, and well designed popup will quickly see an increase in subscriptions.

Take Getsitecontrol newsletter popups as an example. They include a range of customization, targeting, and smart trigger options to make your popups more personalized and optimize conversions.

Decide when to start and when to stop displaying a popup

Let’s take a closer look at these features…

• Customization — upload your own images, change the colors, fonts and add animations so the pop-up voice and appearance match your site’s branding.
• Targeting — display popups to your target audience based on various criteria including country, device, traffic source, new or returning visitors, and many more.
• Smart Triggers – set popups to appear after a set time period, the amount of scrolling, or on a set date or day of the week. This will enable you to display popups at the optimal time for collecting emails from your website visitors.

Ideally, you should split test popups to understand what designs and settings work best and increase conversions. If you’ve never run an A/B test before, here is how to do it.

2. Offer an incentive in exchange for the email address

Lead magnet offered by Digital Marketer

Providing an incentive in the form of a lead magnet will sure encourage more visitors to part with their email addresses. When the Digital Marketer team created a lead magnet consisting of a resource of Facebook ad templates for their visitors, they generated 35000+ leads in 60 days. Of course, to make it work, you should make sure a lead magnet provides real value to your audience's experience.

A series of useful video tutorials helping your viewers solve problems relevant to your website’s niche is a great example of a lead magnet.

In fact, in 2017, HubSpot found their most popular lead magnets to be video resources.

Video content is a preferred medium of choice for many, and will grab the attention of your audience more than a PDF doc. To deliver this incentive, place a link to the promised video content in the first email your website visitors receive after subscribing.

Other ideas for a lead magnet can include:

• A List of Resources
• Quick Start Guide
• Free Course
• Templates
• Free Trial

Most lead magnets are offered within an opt-in popup. However, you can also entice email subscriptions by offering a content upgrade. A content upgrade is a piece of extra information valuable to the reader, typically offered at the bottom of a blog post in exchange for an email. Content upgrades are tailored for each post individually as they should contain extra information relevant to the article.

Backlinko implemented content upgrades and found the email opt-in conversion rate jumped from 0.54% to 4.82%.

For content upgrades to work, your article content must be top-notch – while the offered upgrade should be specific, targeted, and irresistible to the readers.

3. Offer coupons to new subscribers

Offering a coupon that gives money off your products or services, will not only help with collecting email addresses, it should also increase sales. Research by Blippr shows that coupon users, on average, spend 37% more at checkout than regular shoppers.

To implement this tactic, you can display a subscription popup announcing the offer and then send a discount coupon code in the welcome email to your new subscribers. You can provide a percentage off a certain product range, a discount within a particular time frame, or simply free shipping on any orders purchased.

4. Create a quiz to collect emails

A quiz by Topshop helping the participants find their style

Everyone loves quizzes and creating one for your website can be rewarding.

The team at LeadQuizzes, software for generating leads with quizzes, have found out that online quizzes can help you increase lead capture by up to 500%. So that’s quite an interesting tactic worth considering for your strategy.

And if you’re looking for inspiration, here are three examples of creative and effective quizzes:

• Topshop Style Quiz — Fill out Topshop’s personal shopper quiz to find new clothing items to match your style. Not only does the Topshop quiz help collect email addresses, it also encourages you to shop!
• Oh My Disney — Run by Disney to engage with fans, promote products, and collect leads, this website provides a range of Disney quizzes. Full of great visuals and well known quotes, the quizzes quickly connect with the Disney fan base.
• Airbnb Trip Matcher — Answer Airbnb’s quiz to find out your travelling personality and the cities you should be visiting this year.

Make sure the quiz you create is relevant to your website’s niche so you collect email addresses from the audience you’re targeting.

5. Host free webinars

Hosting webinars can help you provide valuable information to your audience, collect email addresses and promote products or services at the same time. The best practice is to run your webinars for free to increase attendance and share the link to join the webinar in exchange for an email address.

Now, if you’re looking for a solution to host your first webinar, WebinarJam is an impressive tool that harnesses the power of Google Hangouts, and then adds useful marketing features to it. These include landing pages, registration management, polls, quizzes, and much more.

6. Сollect email addresses of your social media followers

Hootsuite Instagram bio links to their landing page

There are many opportunities on social media to drive traffic to a landing page, where you can then collect email addresses. Let’s take a look at some options…

• Facebook — When you create a Facebook page you can add a Sign Up button to the top of your page. This can link to a landing page where you can collect emails.
• Twitter — Run an ad campaign, directed at your target audience, to drive traffic to your landing page and generate leads.
• Instagram — Within your Instagram bio you can add a website or landing page URL. Then add a call-to-action within your bio, encouraging people to click on the link and sign up to your newsletter subscription list.

You can also link directly to your email subscription form without forcing people to go to your website. For instance, an app called Getform allows you to create pop-up pages to capture emails of your social media followers.

Once you create one, you can link to it directly from your social media or messengers, so that your followers can easily join your mailing list.

Social media campaigns can be tricky to track, so whether you’re using special software or just UTMs, don’t forget to set your analytics before you start. A research by Steelhouse shows that by tracking and testing landing pages, conversions can increase up to 300%.

7. Use exit popups to convert abandoning visitors

When used right, exit popups are capable of converting leaving visitors into lifelong customers. Some marketers believe popups can be disruptive if shown seconds after arriving on a page or halfway through reading a blog post. Exit pop-ups are different. Shown to a visitor who is about to leave your website, they are the last attempt to connect and usually contain an offer visitors can’t resist even thought they were about to close the webpage.

“Grab your 20% discount before you go!” is a typical call to action for an exit popup.

If you’re looking to add it to your website, there is an exit intent opt-in popup feature available in Getsitecontrol. The app tracks user’s mouse movements and then displays a popup just before they close the page. Once they subscribe — and if your email newsletter is engaging enough — you can encourage those people to come back to your site.

8. Run competitions to collect the participants’ emails

Gleam is a software to help you collect emails with competitions

Running a competition is another way to generate leads and create a community around your website. There are a few competition types to choose from: sweepstakes, photo and video contests, giveaways. All you need is to select the one that would resonate with your audience. And once you have the idea, consider using a software tailored for your goals. Gleam is a great example. It allows you to add a form for collecting participants’ email addresses, and then — pick up the winners randomly.

Choose your prize carefully and select something that will appeal to your target audience. That way you will ensure that those entering have an interest in your niche, and would be responsive to future emails received from you.

9. Display opt-in forms on your website

Displaying opt-in forms on your website is another useful approach to collecting email addresses. Consider adding top bars and bottom bars, showing opt-in forms underneath blog posts, and if appropriate – on your About, Portfolio, and Testimonial pages.

Getsitecontrol enables you to create various opt-in forms on your website and integrate them with email marketing solutions including MailChimp, AWeber, and Infusionsoft.

Such opt-in forms may not be the main source of email subscriptions, but they’ll become a great addition to your lead generation effort. Take a floating bar as an example. Its key advantage is that the bar – placed at the top or the bottom of the page – is constantly being in your visitor’s sight.

And if you want to know how effective such an opt-in form can be, Buffer team claims that a floating bar generates 33.5% of all email signups on their website, which is typically more than 350 email sign ups a week.

You can quickly create a floating opt-in bar in Getsitecontrol, add an attention grabbing call-to-action and encourage site visitors to subscribe to your mailing list. The continual visibility, as well as the ease of a sign-up should help increase the number of emails you collect.

Final thoughts on collecting email addresses in 2022

There are numerous options for lead generation in 2022. And once you start to accumulate emails, your mailing resource can be used to keep in contact with your audience. Send out newsletters, share new content, and promote special offers and discounts. Given that email marketing continuously shows the highest ROI of all channels, you should probably start thinking of your email list building strategy today.