7 Creative email capture strategies that go beyond newsletter sign-up forms

Lead generation - all businesses crave it, but only a handful actually succeed at it. And when it comes to email marketing, success can be even more challenging. 

Do you have enough (good) leads in your email lists? And are you making the most out of them? Are people constantly unsubscribing from your newsletters?

As much as your clients might like your products or services, subscribing to a newsletter often sounds a bit too vague and abstract. What, exactly, are those newsletters going to be about? Are they going to provide any real value?

If you want your email marketing strategy to deliver the results you need and expect, you have to get back to basics and start with your email contacts.

In this comprehensive guide, we will show you how you can get more email addresses to add to your lists without the need for a dull, time-consuming, and potentially off-putting, sign-up form.

Sound good? Let’s jump right in!

<a href="#the-importance-of-email-capture" class="anchor-link">The Importance of Email Capture</a>
<a href="#provide-value-with-a-free-guide-or-template" class="anchor-link">Provide value with a free guide or template</a>
<a href="#incorporate-a-chat-or-chatbot" class="anchor-link">Incorporate a chat or chatbot</a>
<a href="#offer-a-free-demo-or-trial" class="anchor-link">Offer a free demo or trial</a>
<a href="#add-popups" class="anchor-link">Add popups</a>
<a href="#get-blogging" class="anchor-link">Get blogging!</a>
<a href="#leverage-the-power-of-gamification" class="anchor-link">Leverage the power of gamification</a>
<a href="#organize-a-live-event" class="anchor-link">Organize a live event</a>
<a href="#the-bottom-line" class="anchor-link">The Bottom Line</a>

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The Importance of Email Capture

Let’s first clarify why email capture is so crucial in email marketing. Research keeps confirming that, despite being one of the oldest digital marketing techniques, email marketing is still one of the most affordable, popular, and effective.

Email marketing is also incredibly versatile. It doesn’t matter if you sell healthy dog food in Japan, industrial machines in Germany, or Dialpad hosted PBX in Canada. Whatever your sector, size, and location, your business will benefit from a solid email marketing strategy.

One of the most difficult – and, incidentally, most crucial – aspects of email marketing is the capacity to collect as many email addresses as possible. This, in fact, helps you to segment your audience, craft customized messages, and target the right people with the right content at the right time.

Email capture, therefore, is one of the pillars of any exceptional email marketing strategy – and here are seven strategies to use if you want to boost your email capture without having to rely on newsletter sign-ups.

7 strategies to get more email leads without a newsletter sign-up form

There are countless ways to get more email leads. We’ve rounded up seven great strategies that you can start applying right away.

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1. Provide value with a free guide or template

A guide or template is a much more tangible, practical, and enticing way to get your audience’s attention (and their email address) than a newsletter.

Once you create your guide or template, offer it for free with an instant download or email delivery. Ask leads and site visitors to enter their email address so you can send them the template and just like that you've got another email on your list.

By offering your potential customers something that already has very high intrinsic value, they will feel a lot more eager to provide you with something that is very precious to you - their email contact.

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2. Incorporate a chat or chatbot

A fun, friendly, and helpful little chatbot is not just there to answer questions and keep you company while you are waiting to talk with their human counterpart.

They can be tremendously useful when it comes to lead generation, too.

For example, you can use a chatbot to ask users which products or services they are interested in, which in turn helps you with audience segmentation and funnel marketing.

When a customer begins a chat with your chatbot, ask a couple required questions to start the conversation. This will not only allow you to capture their email address, but build out their customer profile in your CRM and route them to the right department or representative when the time comes.

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3. Offer a free demo or trial

Many software products and other services offer a free trial before asking a user to commit to their product. Before signing up for the full version of your solution, users might want to see what's behind the curtain, and a free trial is a great way to help them make a decision.

Free trial signups and live demos are not only perfect opportunities to showcase how awesome your brand is, but also to capture as many emails as possible.

Therefore, consider adding this option to your website (or, even better, create a separate landing page for it) and be prepared to collect a lot more email addresses than your old-fashioned newsletter sign-up would give you!

Oh, and remember: alongside requesting the user’s email address, you may also want to ask for another way to contact them, may it be through a personal mobile number or a business virtual phone number. After all, collecting as much information as possible will help you round out a potential new lead and target them with the right type of content, at the right time.

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4. Add popups

If you thought that all popups were annoying little things taking up space on your screen, then you should think again. When created correctly, a triggered popup can be incredibly helpful for your email capture strategy.

For example, you can build popups that appear automatically when an online user has spent a specific amount of time browsing your website or reading a blog post. 

At this point, you can argue that they are probably interested in your brand, and therefore might be more eager to leave their email address when prompted. Add an extra incentive such as a discount off their first order or access to an ebook as a way to encourage people to leave their email address.

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5. Get blogging!

If you are not blogging right now, then you are missing out on a lot of potentially profitable business.

Blogging can reposition your brand as an authoritative, competent, and trustworthy leader within your industry. As another plus, you can blog about pretty much anything under the sun – from skincare products to form integration – and there will always be someone who is interested to read your content.

Exciting, original, and informative blog content provides a ton of value, so asking your readers to subscribe to your blog by providing their email at the bottom of a post can be an effective strategy to boost your lead count.

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6. Leverage the power of gamification

These days, gamification is almost everywhere. From enhancing employee productivity to boosting engagement in e-learning settings, the use of games is a digital marketing trend that is destined to stick around for a very long time.

And guess what? It can help with email capture, too.

Try launching a challenge, competition, or giveaway. These easy, fun, and seemingly innocent tools are, in fact, super powerful when it comes to capturing the attention of the masses and, of course, collecting their all-important email addresses.

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7. Organize a live event 

Last but not least, another excellent way to improve your email capture is hosting or sponsoring a live event. This could be a Q&A, a webinar, or a demo session to name a few examples.

Think about it - with a live event, your audience knows that they will get plenty of value, and the reason they sign up is because they’re already interested in (or, at least, intrigued by) the main topic.

Therefore, collecting their email addresses provides you with a list of quality engaged leads for your email marketing strategy – provided that you promote the webinar well enough, and that you create the right buzz around it.

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The Bottom Line

All businesses still benefit immensely from email marketing – from eCommerce retailers to real estate firms, tech companies and more.

However, if you want to win the email marketing game, you need to excel at email capture. Capturing new emails to support your lead generation strategy shouldn’t only rely on boring, time-intensive newsletter sign-up forms.

In this article, we explored seven great ways to boost your email capture – which one will you try?