Email marketing is one of the core pillars of digital marketing and is one of the best methods to communicate directly with your target audience. Many businesses leverage their website to host an email sign up form, allowing viewers to sign up for regular updates and newsletters. Is email marketing still possible without that website?
Yes. Email marketing can be done without a website by using other marketing strategies. While a website may be one of the best methods to grow an emailing list, other strategies can be used to a similar effect if you need to hold off on your site for now.
A website will provide you with much more than a means to grow your email list. Yet, many business owners have multiple tasks in the pipeline, and sometimes, a well-received product or service launch takes precedence over building a new website.
If you plan on doing something similar, you’ll need to look at alternative ways to capture your audiences’ attention and email.
How Is Email Marketing Possible Without a Website?
A website acts as a core location to capture emails. By using clever form placement, customer journey routes and more, you can increase the chances of your website viewers interacting with this form, increasing the growth of your email list.
Capturing these emails without a website is possible, but there needs to be some device to capture them. Without a website, there is a lack of a centralised location point for new viewers to gather.
Instead, we can look towards other tactics such as giveaways, landing pages, Social media via lead magnets, etc. To successfully build an email list, we will need to optimise and use our other channels smartly.
Build an Email List With Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are an excellent way to gain new subscribers to your email as the user is obtaining something tangible in return. Many users will be hesitant to give you their email on your website unless you have shown clear value through your mission, blogs or resources.
A lead magnet can be a downloadable PDF, a video, access to something exclusive or anything else you can imagine that you think your audience would value.
If you’re looking to go down the downloadable PDF route, you can make something quick and easy using Canva and their templates, making this process substantially more manageable and, more importantly, free. Remember that you want this lead magnet to shine. That means spending a bit of time on its appearance and thinking about how you want to market it.
Once you have your lead magnet, you need to start promoting it. Since we can’t use a website, our next best bet to capture our audiences attention is to turn to social media.
But how do you showcase it to your audience?
- Create a post detailing what is inside the PDF and how your audience can gain value from it – make sure to draw on the benefits
- Ask your audience to contact you or comment a particular word in the comments section if they want access to the PDF
- Reach out to those that comment the word, or that message you asking for their email so you can send it over to them
- Once you have the email, add it to your email list and send the first email to them with the PDF attached (or a link to view it)
You can also have step 4 automated if you’ve set up your system to automatically send out emails once a new user has been added to a list.
This is a great strategy to implement when you need a fool proof option to capture emails. You can also do this completely free if you work on the document yourself.
Build an Email List With Giveaways
Giveaways are similar to lead magnets because you are providing your users with something tangible in exchange for their email. In this case, though, it’s a chance to win something, so the exact steps don’t apply as if you were creating an opt-in.
You can do this manually; however, consider how big you expect the reception to be. If you already have a reasonably substantial following on other channels, it would be safe to assume that you would receive more than 100 sign-ups.
Handling these manually would be a nightmare, even for the most astute virtual assistant.
Instead, you can leverage a lead page to market to and capture your viewer’s emails. These pages needn’t be complex. Viewers only need to know the rules of the giveaway – i.e. how many people win, when, and how is it chosen, and then be able to enter their email to secure their place in the giveaway.
Consider what you want the giveaway to be in great detail before starting. The product/service in question doesn’t need to be your own. You could work in collaboration with another company or have just purchased something random that your viewers would love to get their hands on.
Remember to create a separate list or tag these subscribers separately. That way, you know exactly who has signed up via your giveaway, and you won’t lose them in your master list.
Here’s a list of Giveaway tools you can use:
- Outgrow
- Vyper
- Woobox
- Viralsweep
Build an Email List With Landing Pages
A landing page, contrary to popular belief, can be built without using a main website. Many services allow users to craft templated or detailed landing pages. You can use landing pages in multiple ways – even in conjunction with the other ways to build an email list we’ve already mentioned.
A one page “coming soon” landing page can be a great starting point to include information about your business or product/service. Your call to action should then be an email sign up that viewers can use to sign up for more information or keep up to date on how the business is growing. A landing page can also be used as a placeholder for that website you want to build in the future.
Landing pages that act as a coming soon page can be used as a passive – in the background – piece of marketing that allows you to capture emails without worrying about upkeep. However, to see the most significant growth, you want to be marketing these pages on your socials and other locations online.
Putting them in front of your target audience will increase the excitement surrounding the page (for a giveaway, coming soon, or free downloadable) and increase the chances that you’ll bolster your email list.
Here are some tools you can use to make landing pages for your business:
- Leadpages
- Convertkit
- Kajabi
- Unbounce
Build an email list by leveraging other people’s audiences
There are many pros and cons to building a list solely on your own, but when you’re working your way up to a launch, it can feel disheartening if you don’t already have a big following on other platforms to leverage.
Instead, you can look at people within your network that do have those audiences and begin to work out ways that you can collaborate. Similarly, the same notion can be applied to showing up in other forms of content, such as a blog post or a podcast.
Here are some ideas to get your mind racing:
Guest post: This typically relates to writing a guest blog post on another person’s website. Their regular readers will be introduced to you, and you may have an opportunity to include a lead magnet as part of the post – incentivising the audience to join your mail list.
Be a podcast guest: Everyone loves a good podcast. Many podcast hosts will have a small snippet to inform their audience who their guest is and what they’re currently working on. This is a chance for you to plug your list or landing page to secure some email sign-ups.
Run a joint giveaway: A joint giveaway allows both parties to benefit from each other’s audiences and softens the blow (financially) on securing the item for the giveaway. While the subscribers might be less relevant, it is sure to fill your list with people that want to hear from you in the future.
Collaborate with another creator: An excellent way to get in front of the eyes of newer viewers is to collaborate with other creators. You can do this via a collaborative video, Instagram story take over, or simply appearing in one of their posts. This gets people talking and may lead them to your landing page.
Invest in influencer marketing: If you have a bit of money, you can try securing an influencer. These creators on social media already have a thriving audience that you can get your idea, product/service in front of. If they push your email list, their viewers are sure to sign up.
Can You Use Convertkit & Mailchimp Without a Website?
Yes. You can use both ConvertKit & Mailchimp without a website. Convert kit allows you to build landing pages that can act as a website for you, while MailChimp can be used to create your mail list, regardless of where that opt-in is located.
Mailchimp will allow you to send newsletters to your subscriber lists without a website. You can do this by using their template builder and in-built email functionality. ConvertKit can also be used as an effective tool for any of the other strategies we’ve listed above.
