When it comes to online marketing, it is well known that without a set of nice tools and resources, your work can be pretty hard. Or, to be honest, pretty impossible to be done. Nowadays, all the focus seems to be on social media, but, believe it or not, the most valuable digital channel is email.

According to Crazy Egg, multiple studies have shown that email is able to beat any other form of email marketing in terms of ROI, being even better than social media marketing, content marketing, SEO or any other type of online marketing tactic you can think of.

Considering this, it’s obvious that you should exploit email marketing to the max, but how should you start? By building an email list, of course! And since you’re reading this, you must be interested in how to actually create one. And if you can do it without investing any money, that would be great, right? We’ll get to that in a jiffy, since there are a few requirements you need to fulfill before doing this. To be more specific, we’re talking about the following:

1. You need to know who the people you are targeting are – Since you can’t just send emails to random people, from an email list you bought online, right?
2. You must have a website – Pretty logical, we’d say.
3. You need to decide upon an email marketing client – There are plenty of options you can choose from, available at affordable rates.
4. You need a killer offer – That’s right, you need that one big reason that makes people decide to join your list, otherwise, contacting the right people can be in vain

Ok, if you checked all these conditions, you’re ready to go. As promised, below you can find some tips on how to create your first email list from scratch, for free. Here it goes…

1. Use social media – A business that’s not active on social media is pretty much invisible, so we’re presuming that you’re present on the most important networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram or LinkedIn, where you already have a decent fanbase. Simply post a link to your landing page and your followers can see what’s up with that email list. Also, let’s not forget that this can create you a huge exposure, if you offer the right incentive, like a free e-book for subscribers.

2. Use a pop-up on your website – Yeah, we know, these things are in the ‘hate it or love it’ category, but what if we told you that a couple of studies have shown that pop-ups actually manage to attract tons of email subscribers, especially if you offer them something, like access to some special resources? There are a lot of free pop-up plugins you can use, give them a try!

3. Create great content – This might seem as a no-brainer, but believe us, killer content will make people want to subscribe, in order to receive your latest articles. And in order to make them do it, you need at least a few articles which can go viral. Focus on the hottest topics of the moment and try to add a personal touch, in order to be different from everybody else. People will love to read a different approach and you will be able to convince them about your ability to always deliver solid content.

4. Offer a free resource list –There are a lot of websites which offer free stuff in exchange for email addresses. You’ve probably seen a lot of examples, giving subscribers access to a free trial for something or who knows what else. Still, let’s not forget that we’re talking about building an email list for free here, so the best solution is a resource list. That’s right, gather a list with links to various websites from your niche, which your subscribers will consider useful and offer it in exchange for their address. If it’s very detailed and well-documented, the results will never cease to appear.

As you can see, you can easily start building your email list without investing a penny. Also, we’re convinced that there are way more free methods of doing this, but we’re looking forward to hearing from you guys! Which ones worked for you? Let us know, using the comments section below!

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Sources: 

http://blog.crazyegg.com/2016/01/19/killer-email-list/

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/quick-email-marketing-lists/