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How to Collect Emails for a Newsletter: The Ultimate Guide
Everything you need to know to build an email list
Elna Cain
June 28th, 2024
Table of Contents
Building an email list is like dating – without the sweaty palms or awkward silences.
Make a great first impression – your email opt-in form – get them to swipe right – enter their email address – and keep them coming back – via a welcome series.
And like dating, collecting emails for a newsletter is about sparking that initial interest and nurturing it into a lasting relationship.
But if you're not channeling Cassanova and still want to slay all day in your business, how do you turn a would-be into an email newsletter yes-be.
Understanding the Importance of Email Lists in Digital Marketing
Instead of spraying and praying every time you post on social media, email lists offer a direct line to your audience, allowing for tailored communications sent directly to their inboxes.
It's the personalization in those emails that makes email marketing the most effective marketing channel for growth and sales.
Email creates several touchpoints in the customer journey
Having an email list overcomes the challenges of finding your brand with paid social by 13% or organically by 11%
Email is more trustworthy in maintaining relationships than other marketing channels like social media
And like with dating, email marketing all starts with that profile picture – a.k.a the email capture form.
Setting Up Your Email Collection System
Back in 2015, webinars were the popular way entrepreneurs used to grow their email lists. I learned many were using email capture tools to create click-worthy forms. The thing is, they were expensive at the time.
Choosing the Right Tools for Email Capture
Nowadays, many email service providers have email capture capabilities, giving creators and business owners more budget-friendly options to use.
beehiiv recently rolled out its website builder feature making it easier for non-technical people to create a stylized landing page to collect emails.
In the backend of your beehiiv account, go to website builder on the sidebar and drag-and-drop your graphics and title, then set your brand colors and customize the padding and footer section.
Other email list building tools like Convertkit, Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Moosend, and creator platforms like Substack and Ghost all provide email collection forms and customized landing pages.
But for better functionality and a higher level of customizable features, go with an email capture tool.
Popular stand-alone tools are Optinmonster and Leadpages.
Optinmonster has incredible optin-forms for small and medium-sized businesses.
Animated popup forms
Exit-intent forms
Floating bars
Slide-ins
Inline forms
With page-level targeting, built-in conversion optimization analytics, and hundreds of templates, Optinmonster makes it a cinch to boost your lead generation efforts.
Leadpages comes with an intuitive platform and real-time conversion analytics to guide you every step of the way.
Inside Leadpages, you'll find over 250 templates, an interactive drag-and-drop builder, and their built-in Leadmeter that analyzes your page and predicts its performance before publishing.
Other email collection tools include Sumo Me, Bloom, Gravity Forms, and OptiMonk.
The best method of building an email list will depend on price, ease of use, and intuitiveness. Fortunately, many of these tools offer a freemium trial to see if this is a good relationship for you.
Creating Compelling Sign-up Incentives
For your first date, you might spend extra time styling your hair, finding the perfect outfit, and accessorizing with a few pieces of jewelry.
The same goes for creating scroll-stopping signup incentives.
The Role of Visual Content in Email Signups
With the right visual elements, email forms instantly capture scrollers' attention, increase engagement, and add personalization.
Adding a video – or using 'video' in your copy – boosts click-through-rates by 65%
Using a contrasting button color – specifically green – will boost engagement on signup forms
Using faces increased Basecamps signups by 102%
Utilizing A/B Testing to Improve Sign-Up Rates
If you're suffering from low signup rates, A/B testing can help speed up your results by 28% or more.
When Basecamp saw an increase in signups, they were A/B testing copy length vs. faces.
Popular A/B tests to run include offering different incentives, changing up form field placement, and button copy.
Marketing Agency Brighttail recommends having different incentive offers for each service or product you offer.
For example, I offer a free affiliate marketing guide to support my Ultimate Affiliate Post Workflow masterclass.
This can help you figure out which email incentive converts the most based on your offers.
If you only have one service or product, you can A/B different formats.
Instead of a 20-page eBook, turn it into an email course or a 30-minute video training. You can also tap into popular email incentives for A/B testing.
Checklists
Toolkits
Webinars
Templates
Quizzes
Looking at your form field placement and design for A/B testing can significantly impact your overall signup rates.
For example, Kommunicate ditched the email field and only presented the button on their email collection page.
The result? A 25.5% lift in clicks with the button only.
You can also try experimenting with removing as many barriers as possible for a user to click on your button. One barrier is fear. Will this work? Is this website secure?
You can remove the fear like Corgi Socks does in their optin-form. They let visitors know they won't share their information with anyone and that they can unsubscribe anytime.
Another A/B test to try is using different button copy to increase your email collection rates.
Be directive: Use "buy now" instead of "get" to nudge your visitor to click
Use pronouns: Using "my" or "I" makes it personal, helping visitors envision the result
Try the unexpected: CrazyEgg claims most CTA copy is boring and to jazz it up with something unique. Try intimate copy as personal stylist Niki Whittle does
Optimizing Your Website for Email Capture
When you're knee-deep into the dating game, you'll need to have a process – like a pros and cons list – to sift through potential partners.
This is no different with your email collection strategy.
You need a strategic process for email list building to ensure website visitors become subscribers who genuinely benefit from your content.
Designing High-Converting Sign-Up Forms
For many visitors, a sign-up form may be their first point of contact with your brand or content.
Having a well-designed email form reduces friction – like having a simplistic design, avoiding asking for personal information, and showing social proof. This increases sign-ups.
It's always best to be simplistic with your email list for marketing purposes. For best results, place your opt-in-form in an obvious place and avoid hiding it on your landing page.
AI social media tool Dupdub has a "Sign-Up It's Free" blue button on their menu.
When you click on it, you're taken to a clean and simple landing page with the opt-in form front and center.
This email signup form also reduces friction by avoiding frustrating actions like using CAPTCHAs, which can result in a 40% decrease in conversions.
While Dupdub offers three ways to sign up for a free trial – Google, Facebook, and email – you may think this clutters the design. Still, it increases the chances of signing up since billions have a Google or Facebook account.
You can sign up quickly without typing anything just by connecting to your social account.
Even though Dupdub doesn't use social proof for its email signup forms, making the signup quick and easy for users increases conversions and sales by 91%.
Often, we look to others when buying new things, whether that’s a new AI tool or a guy your co-worker told you would be a perfect match for your next date.
Types of social proof to add to your email signup forms include:
How many subscribers or users tried your tool or service
Having a subject matter expert or influencer vouch for your offer
Sharing the percentage of results from using your offer
Course platform Kajabi shows powerful social proof by sharing real creators who made a profitable business.
Best Practices for User-friendly Form Fields
Other ways to increase signups are to use the correct number of form fields and know where to place them on your landing page.
Your email-signup form shouldn't have more than three fields. This gives a baseline conversion rate of 25%.
When a signup form has too many form fields to fill out, it becomes discouraging and creates friction.
For example, Pinterest, a community-based company, only has three form fields for people to use, making it quick and easy to sign up, as proven by its 518 million user base.
Knowing where to place your form fields – above or below the fold when scrolling on your computer – is also important and can significantly increase engagement, since it's the first thing visitors will see when they visit your website.
Alicia Powell, a photographer for content creators, places her Pixistock signup form above the fold, making it the first thing you see, and a no-brainer to grab her free content plan.
Dating apps like Tinder or Bumble make it easy to find a date since you're accessing a specific pool of people. You can look at building your email list this way by leveraging social media.
If most of your audience is on social media, alert them of your new newsletter to help grow your email list.
Dive deep into a topic to promote your newsletter
Create a cohesive brand (Social media, landing page, website, etc. should all follow the same brand guidelines)
Use the social media features on the platform to market your newsletter
A strategic method for collecting emails on Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, or LinkedIn is to dive deep into the topic by sharing free content.
Entrepreneur Matt Gray shares on X how he makes $730,000/month, working only 4 hours a day, and ends with a call to action to sign up for his newsletter. He creates a thread and shares insights like finding your Ikigai, the five pillars to leverage, and the 4 W's in life.
Similarly, the founder of Very Good Copy, Eddie Shleyner, shares helpful copywriting tips on LinkedIn with a CTA to join his newsletter. He also shows viewers precisely what they will receive once they sign up at the end of his content.
Another way to integrate social media into your CTAs is to have a cohesive brand.
People scroll through social media; what they see next should resonate with them if they click over.
This means the colors, topic, and brand or person behind it are the same on social media as they are on their landing page to grow their email list.
Monica Froese of Empowered Shop does an excellent job incorporating the same color scheme, font choice, and showcasing herself – down to the same lipstick color – on her Facebook ad and landing page.
Remember to use each social media platform's features to encourage people to sign up for your newsletter.
The Enjoy Basketball beehiiv newsletter grew to 45,000 subscribers and over 50,000 Instagram followers in a short time.
To capitalize on its social media audience and help rapidly grow its newsletter, Enjoy Basketball used several Instagram features on its account to collect emails.
The first area is their Instagram bio. They added social proof – Join 55k+ basketball fans – and capitalized on the word FREE to market their newsletter.
They also linked to their newsletter, podcast, shop page, and watch party in their bio.
Finally, Enjoy Basketball created an Instagram highlight to share its newsletter with their followers.
For each story in their newsletter highlight, the link sticker was large, and they used a GIPHY hand to bring attention to click on the subscribe button.
Crafting the Perfect Email Sign-Up Call-to-Action
On X, you have 280 characters – or 25,000 characters if you have a premium account – for a post.
On Facebook, it's over 63,000 characters.
Instagram and TikTok give you 2,200 characters to use for posting.
For LinkedIn, it's 3,000 characters.
Most of this equates to a few hundred words whenever you post on social media. While using more characters is seen as better, when crafting an email sign-up call-to-action, less is more.
Use a social hook as your first sentence – and before the "see more" link or button
Use a tried-and-true copywriting formula
Rely on specific post types for better engagement
You can immediately stop a user from scrolling by having an effective social hook. This is a piece of copy that grabs a user's attention and makes them want to keep on reading.
Erica Schneider, the head of content at Grizzle, provides tips on crafting social hooks. Her top hooks include:
Poke the pain: "Most people struggle with [thing]"
Show credibility with social proof: "I've spent 1500 hours learning about pricing psychology"
Share a specific outcome: "Use these 9 questions to save thousands"
Leave a cliffhanger to open the loop: "2x conversions in 30 days"
Make sure these social hooks relate to your newsletter so that the result is to subscribe.
While social hooks stem from copywriting principles, your entire post can use a copywriting formula.
Copywriting is meant to persuade and convert, and since 86% of marketers use social media to boost sales and traffic, it's clear that targeted copy is essential.
Popular copywriting formulas include:
AIDA (Attention/Interest/Desire/Action)
PAS (Problem/Agitate/Solution)
BAB (Before/After/Bridge)
Four Us (Urgent/Unique/Useful/Ultra-Specific)
For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger uses the AIDA copywriting formula when sharing his beehiiv newsletter on Facebook.
Let's break this down:
Attention: Arnold shares a personal story, grabbing attention, about his experience with training and the impact of having coaches and a mentor
Interest: He highlights his extensive experience helping millions find their path to health and fitness and piques curiosity
Desire: Arnold sparks desire by offering a substantial free resource – a 115-page workout guide
Action: His call to action is clear and direct, guiding users to click the link in his bio
If you don't want to rely on a copywriting formula, try using a specific post type to show credibility in your industry.
Popular types of posts I've seen on social media include:
Sharing your experience
Diving into your journey
Helpful step-by-step instructions on a specific topic
Sharing results or successes
Pet brand Little Chonk engages its growing Instagram audience with User Generated Content (UGC), posts on giving thanks, and successes it has had along its journey.
This brings trust to the brand, helping Little Chonk bring users to its product and sign-up pages.
Why Trust Me: I have several email lists – free and paid – and have grown one list to over 20,000 subscribers, with a 40% open rate and 2.35% CTR
Crafting Email Content That Keeps Subscribers Engaged
Congrats! You asked for date #2, and they said, 'Yes.' Now, it's time to get to know your new partner better.
It can be hard to develop that personal relationship with the hundreds of subscribers on your list.
But, there’s a solution to this.
You can nurture and segment your list to show a deeper level of connection.
Personalization Techniques for Email Engagement
When nurturing your email list, focus on adding personalization, providing value, and click-through rates to create a raving fan base for your brand.
A simple method to personalize your beehiiv newsletter is to use custom fields.
You can choose which custom fields to add from your CSV if you import your email list.
Otherwise, go to Audience > Subscriber data. From there, click on ‘Create a Form’. Add a name and select the data type.
Now, when you post, you can add these custom fields using this template so that your email is personalized with your subscriber's name. fallback value
For example, if subscribers provide their names when signing up for your newsletter, you can personalize each newsletter using the template in your post.
Aside from using a name to personalize your newsletter, you can also personalize the content.
Make your copy less formal and friendly by using a first or second-person point of view
Try adding a joke, humorous stories, or GIFs and Memes
While scheduling and automating your newsletter will save time, be sure to add current information in your newsletter to remain relevant and up-to-date with your industry
Once you personalize your newsletter, provide valuable content that begs to be read.
You can create value by focusing on a challenge your audience has. For example, my audience struggles with using LinkedIn to find clients.
I can direct my value by giving them one proven tactic to help them gain dozens of clients.
Another way to add value to your newsletter is to provide information that makes your subscriber's lives easier.
This can look like:
Breaking down a complex topic into digestible content. Milk Road dishes out daily cryptocurrency information that's short, concise, and immensely valuable
Sharing industry news in an easy to read format. Superpower Daily provides top AI and ChatGPT stories to keep his subscribers informed of what's currently happening
Creating a commitment. The Pivot by Robin Arzon is a newsletter that asks new subscribers to join her 31-day challenge. This helps build trust with her new subscribers
Finally, always check your subscriber data, like click-through-rates, to help you with what to send.
The standard click-through rate across industries is 2.1%.
Compare your average click-through rate to see where your newsletter rates sit.
If it's below industry averages, it could be because your list isn't large enough.
My new beehiiv newsletter has ten subscribers and I've sent two newsletters. My click-through rate is 0%.
For my other newsletter of over 20,000 subscribers, my click-through rate is 2.34%.
While growing my beehiiv email list will probably increase open rates and, subsequently, my click-through rates, there are a few ways to condition my subscribers to click and engage with my newsletter in the interim.
Share links to free resources like helpful guides, YouTube videos, or webinar trainings
Share part of a juicy story and provide a link to continue reading it
Add a CTA button to make my newsletter interactive and prompt a specific action
Segmenting Your Email List for Targeted Campaigns
A proven method to grow engagement with your email list is to segment your list.
This means creating separate groups or segments based on certain criteria – tags – within your email list.
Typical segments include tags around behavioral, purchase history, demographic, geographical, and sales funnel position criteria.
This ensures that the emails you send out go to the right people. For example, with my email list, I have a segment for people who clicked on my promotional links but didn't purchase.
I can share special deals or give them a one-time offer deal to help boost sales and conversions.
To create a segment with beehiiv, go to ‘Audience’ > ‘Create Segment’.
Once you fill in the information to create and choose a segment type, click ‘Define Conditions’ to set the segment.
Using Automation to Streamline Email List Segmentation
Automate your process to streamline your email marketing and free up your time to work on more important things.
There are dozens of ways to automate your email list segments, but if you're new to all this, the top two to focus on are creating a welcome email and a re-engagement email.
A step up from using a subscriber's first name in every newsletter is to welcome them with a proper email or series of emails.
When you welcome them to your email list, it helps build a connection, trust, and loyalty.
We suggest including:
A personal greeting about who you are and what you do
What a subscriber will expect from your newsletter
A quick win or free download or discount
Actionable advice
Instructions to safelist your email
Encouragement for your subscribers to follow you on social media
Sign off
The other automation to set up is a re-engagement email. Based on the time permeameter you set for your trigger, you can send a re-engagement email to pique the interest of a cold subscriber.
Go to ‘Audience’ > ‘Automations’ > ‘New Automation’ > ‘Set Trigger’ to set this automation.
From here, set the criteria for unengaged – days without clicks, days without opens, or days without opens or clicks.
Once set, toggle your automation on, hit confirm, and save. Next, set up the email that is sent after the automation has been triggered.
In your email, you want to create a message to elicit engagement.
This might look like a subscriber opening your email or clicking on a link or button.
Analyzing and Refining Your Email Collection Strategy
When dating, you might wonder if the person you're seeing is the one or just the one right now.
And with email, instead of thinking if you're doing the right thing like you would with dating, it's best to drill down and analyze your email collection strategy to ensure this is long-lasting.
Adjusting Your Strategy Based on Subscriber Feedback
When I started my newsletter, I was fortunate enough to have subscribers reply and tell me how much they enjoyed my emails.
But I didn't blindly write newsletters, hoping they resonated with them.
I gathered subscriber feedback early on, helping me create the content they wanted and needed.
I used a survey, but polls can also help adjust your email strategy.
Surveys are a quick, easy, and non-intrusive way to gather data from your subscribers.
In your beehiiv account, go to ‘Audience’ > ‘Surveys’ > ‘Create Survey’.
Check your settings before designing your email survey.
From there, go to ‘Form Builder’ to begin your first question.
Choose from questions like short response, multiple choice, drop-down, or long response.
In the backend, add your responses to the multiple-choice and drop-down questions.
You can preview it, and once you're satisfied with your survey, click on ‘Publish’.
Make sure to have a variety of open-ended and closed-ended questions to better understand what your subscribers need from you.
Surveys come in handy when you start selling products.
For example, you can tap into subscribers who clicked your product link but didn't buy. You can ask them:
What stopped you from signing up/purchasing today?
What would help you start using/enrolling in [product]?
Was the price clear? If not, what could I do to change it?
When looking at the results, see if you can find emerging patterns to take action with.
Another non-threatening way to gather subscriber feedback is with polls. Matt Gray used gamification and polls to help grow his newsletter to over 100,000 subscribers.
The polls he used helped him save time when creating his eBook for his audience.
He would poll his audience on what chapters and topics to discuss in his eBook, which helped him avoid wasting time writing about topics his audience didn't care about.
In your beehiiv account, go to ‘Audience’ > ‘Polls’ > ‘New Poll.'
Add a title, your question and the poll answers.
You can also make your poll interactive by enabling Live Results.
When you write your newsletter, you can access your poll in the editor.
Click on ‘Poll’ and choose the poll you want to share with your subscribers.
If subscribers participate in your business, they're more likely to buy from you when you release that sweatshirt or membership because they helped you create it.
Polls are also entertaining because people like to see the results and how your opinion compares to others. Your subscribers' choices may align with those of the broader group, or they may discover surprising insights.
Key Metrics to Track for Email List Growth
Monitoring the right email marketing metrics can help you understand what’s working and what isn’t.
Open rate
Conversion rate
List growth rate
Unsubscribe rate
Open rates measure the number of subscribers who opened your email, which helps gauge the appeal of your email, subject line, and sender name.
A high open rate tells you that your newsletter resonates with your subscribers, while a low open rate could indicate a deliverability or content issue.
To determine whether it's a deliverability issue, send a test email and see how recipients would respond to it in their inbox.
You can also proactively strengthen your IP and domain reputation, as this can affect deliverability and, eventually, open rates.
You can strengthen your IP and domain reputation by:
Avoiding spammy words like using all caps, using a lot of exclamation marks, or certain phrases like “free gifts”
Encouraging replies from subscribers
Adding clickable links for subscribers to interact with
Telling your subscribers to move your emails from the Promo tab to their Primary tab in Gmail
Does it mean doing one of these things will affect deliverability? No, spam filters have become more sophisticated, but if you constantly use spammy words and are overly promising, those emails could count against you.
If it's a content issue, poll your audience or jazz up your email subject line by adding curiosity, like FOMO, humor, or a relatable statement.
One of my emails shared a relatable topic – AI – and because it had a high open rate and click-through rate, I added new course lessons about this topic.
Conversion rates are one of the most important metrics to monitor. They measure the percentage of subscribers who took a specific action, such as clicking on a link, filling out a form, or purchasing a product.
In the above example, I had a 2% click rate (926 clicks) on a blog post I shared. If you have low conversion rates, work to segment your list and add more conditions, like subscriber interests to better target your message.
List growth rate is how fast or slow your email list grows.
If you find slow email growth even after implementing the tactics I shared, you could try marketing your newsletter in these ways:
Recommend newsletters to help others find yours to recommend in the hiiv network through cross-promotion.
Use boosts in beehiiv to grow your audience quicker
Prominently place share buttons on your email collection landing page
Add a call-to-action sign up button on your Facebook page
Tease out your next newsletter on social media to get a boost of subscribers
Upon teasing my beehiiv newsletter on LinkedIn, I picked up 30 more subscribers.
Another important metric to look at is the number of unsubscribes. It's usual to have people unsubscribe from your newsletter. For most industries, the unsubscribe rate falls between 0.2% and 0.5%.
While you want people to want to stay on your email list, it's best to make it easy for them to unsubscribe.
Why?
For me, I end up paying for cold subscribers. Sure, I scrub my list by trying to re-engage and remove them altogether, but that only happens every few months.
But maybe you noticed a particularly high unsubscribe rate after sending an email. Go and look at the content you sent.
Maybe it ruffled some feathers, was overly promotional, or showed that your subscribers didn't care about you and only wanted your incentive or offer.
Take the time to review your analytics to get a clear picture of your metrics and make adjustments if necessary.
How to Build an Email List: The All-in-One Email System
The goal of dating – for most people – is to find a life-long partner.
And the goal of collecting emails? For some, it's to establish credibility; for others, it's to grow their customer base; and still, for others, it's to create a community of like-minded people.
No matter the reason, using an all-in-one email system like beehiiv makes it instantly doable. In a matter of hours, I set up my email collection form, shared it on social media, and started growing my list.
So, give beehiiv a try and see where it will take you.
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