5 Ideas to Capture More Emails on Your Website

Email is by far the most popular online communication tool with over 300 billion emails sent each day. So it is no wonder that digital brands spend a lot of time building out their email list with email capture campaigns.

Email marketing, like all owned media, is attractive to brands because of its lower and more predictable costs compared to search engine marketing and other forms of paid media.

But building a successful email marketing strategy is a long-term investment. It critically depends on building a large audience over time. While it may not deliver instant results, it can be a great way to retain customers and drive repeat purchases.

For most websites, building a large email audience means capturing more email addresses. Here are 5 ideas to capture more emails on your website.

1. Gate Content to Capture Emails

The gated content strategy, also known as content upgrade strategy, makes available to visitors a valuable piece of content in exchange for their email address.

For a B2B business, it is a good idea to gate whitepapers for your product or service. This is a great way to capture lead data, including email address and marketing consent. Visitors that have transaction intent are more likely to provide their content details in exchange for a valuable document.

Content upgrades are a great idea for blogs. If you have a popular blog post, consider creating a lengthy ebook PDF or infographic for download. The public blog post acts as an organic referral for your content upgrade, and you can capture more email addresses in the process.

2. Add Capture Forms to Your Blog Posts

Blog posts are a great way to attract traffic to your website. By providing valuable content and leveraging SEO, you can attract many visitors from Google and other search engines.

But most visitors landing on blogs have informational intent. That is, they are looking for content for research or educational purposes. These users are not necessarily looking to make a purchase.

Most brands focus on email capture, rather than sales conversion, when it comes to blog and other content pages. This is because they recognize that it is best to convert users when their transactional intent is high.

Consider adding an email capture form to the bottom of your blog posts, and your blog’s sidebar, depending on its design. It is also a good idea to experiment with in-content capture forms between paragraphs or content sections, or ‘push-down widgets’ that dynamically place capture forms into your pages.

3. Exit Intent Modals

Many visitors, particularly those landing on blog posts, will bounce without finding our more about your company or product. It is not unusual for blogs to have more than 60% bounce rate, for instance.

There is not a huge amount you can do about bouncing visitors. But, if you are able to predict a bouncing visitor, it is an opportunity for email capture.

Exit intent modals work by detecting when a visitor is likely bouncing from a page. For desktop visitors, they work by analyzing a visitor’s mouse movements. And on mobile, they typically use a timeout based on typical visitor behavior.

When these tools detect a ‘bounce’ or ‘exit’, they display a full-page modal on the page. This is your opportunity to offer a compelling discount, ebook or other similar incentive. Lead with an incentive and prompt visitors to provide their email address.

4. Paid Email Capture

First-party email capture is where you capture emails on your own website. It is a great way to grow your email list, if you already have a large amount of traffic to your website.

For smaller brands, or those looking to accelerate growth, first-party email capture may not deliver satisfactory results in the short term.

There is a way to grow an email list without website traffic, but you’ll need to pay. Facebook, Google and LinkedIn all offer lead generation campaigns. You can use these campaigns to capture emails and marketing consents off-site. And you can even retarget visitors that have previously interacted with your website or business.

5. Giveaways and Contests

Giveaways and contests can be a great way to capture more emails. You could giveaway a gift to a randomly selected entrant, and promote this on your website and social media.

Giveaways are a great incentive for visitors to provide their email address. You can use this as an opportunity to capture more emails. And, if you are successful, you can capture a large audience at a relatively low cost.

It’s important to say that, under GDPR regulations, you need informed consent, so you will be unable to force visitors to sign up for marketing emails. But you will typically find that many visitors are happy to subscribe as part of the competition entry process.

Competitions and giveaways are also regulated in most countries, so you will also need to ensure your operation is compliant with the law.