How to Build an Email List

Beth Gramling Sanders
6 min readDec 18, 2020

Why You Need to Build an Email List

Add build an email list to your to-do items for customer retention. If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you know it’s not enough to get customers, you have to keep them coming back. Loyalty programs, special discounts, and impeccable customer service all contribute to customer retention.

According to Invesp, it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain one. Litmus estimates email marketing return on investment (ROI) at 38:1. It’s hard to imagine a better return than that.

Once you build an email list, you have a built-in group of customers and prospects who want to hear from you. You’ve been invited into their inbox, which gives you their full attention as they peruse email.

It reminds me of the days of door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesmen (they were always men when I was growing up). Once the man was in your home, it was much easier for him to get you to buy the expensive vacuum cleaner. I watched my mother buy this huge, bulky, awful vacuum from such a man, which I’m not sure she would have done had it simply been on display in a store.

As you build an email list, you get welcomed in to more inboxes, and if your emails are effective, you build loyalty and sales and retain customers much more easily.

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