We’ve said it before: email marketing is a critical component of any overall digital marketing strategy.
For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42.
Check out these 48 statistics that show the value of email marketing for your small business.
Strategies for how to collect email addresses without a website
But what if you don’t have a website? How do you collect email addresses?
You don’t need to worry about the casing of an email address. Email addresses are not case sensitive.
First, you can use a marketing automation platform like DailyStory to host a landing page with a web form to collect email addresses, but to also develop campaigns to message those email addresses.
The following are six ways you can feed email addresses into your database to then market to later on.
Capture leads using Facebook ads
Facebook features a multitude of different ad campaign types, depending on your goal with any given ad campaign.
Facebook includes lead capture forms
As far as capturing leads, Facebook offers lead generation ads, where email addresses can be captured within a form hosted on Facebook itself. You also can use a Facebook ad to drive traffic to a landing page (if you have one) with a web form to capture those email addresses.
Facebook offers superior audience targeting
Facebook ads can target your ideal audience. Just remember to offer a reason enticing enough for users to give you their email addresses. It could be a discount offer or a piece of premium content, so on.
Check out these seven tips to better target your Facebook ads.
Host contests and capture submissions
Even with a website, social media is often the best place to promote contests and giveaways.
Of course, we recommend reviewing required terms and conditions you need to provide in any contest, and it’s especially helpful to have a web form to capture email addresses and add them to your database.
Example of self hosted web form
A landing page (available through DailyStory) is the perfect solution to show the parameters and rules of your contest, as well as collect email addresses for entries.
Keep in mind that you don’t have to give away your own products or services. It can easily be something else that appeals to your target audience if you want. You also could partner with another company for a contest as well.
Content marketing with posts on social media
It’s the idea of not necessarily feeding all your content to a website blog but publishing it where your audience is. Potential social media platforms include (but are not limited to):
- YouTube
In addition, Medium.com could be an option for content publishing. The key is to decide who you’re trying to reach and what platform(s) you’re mostly like to find them.
You can include email newsletter sign-up call-to-actions within your content mix, giving those you are reaching an opportunity to get more from you.
Guest blog posts or articles
Whether this is guest blogging for a popular website among your target audience or guest appearing on a podcast, the power of this approach resides in the fact that you’re getting in front of an audience you don’t normally connect with.
Be ready with both your call-to-action and an offer that makes people want to act.
Again, having an easy-to-find web form (via a link or other means) is imperative.
Speaking of guest blogging, see our seven tips to grow quality backlinks and improve your SEO.
Content upgrades
No matter where you’re publishing (social media, Medium.com, elsewhere), you could always deliver a little bit more in a nicer package.
That’s where content upgrades (or premium content) comes into play.
Developing a PDF version of a guide, a deeper dive into a topic or something else that addresses a pain point of your target audience is a great way to collect email addresses.
Ideally, this is evergreen content that’s consistently relevant and designed in a visually engaging way.
All you have to do is offer it for free and use a web form to collect a user’s information. Then, have that content automatically sent to that user.
Users get the content upgrade. You get their email addresses. Win-win.
Dive deeper into what premium content is and how you can leverage it in your digital marketing.
Webinar hosting
As an expert in your industry, consider what topic you might be able to educate others on via a webinar.
Sign-ups can be promoted through your social media and other channels (and email addresses collected).
Even if you don’t get a lot of sign-ups (or any), the session can be recorded and repurposed for later and alternate uses.
See our 12 expert tips to help you host your first webinar.
In conclusion
Obviously, there are ways to collect email addresses and use email marketing to grow your business without a website.
However, we definitely recommend creating a website as soon as possible since it offers a consistent home for your promotions, lends credibility to your brand in the eyes of your customers and can help drive search engine rankings, among other reasons.
Check out our guide for choosing and acquiring the perfect domain name for your business.
