If You’re Not Collecting Email Addresses, You’re Essentially Screwed

An email list is the single most important piece of owned media you can leverage in today’s digital landscape.

7 min readJun 25, 2022

Last week I talked about the 6 Critical Mistakes I See Small Business Owners Make where I went through the most common things my clients do that can cause them to either fail or not grow and scale as quickly.

There was another mistake I didn’t add to the list, and maybe I should have, but I wanted to go into greater detail. It’s not collecting email addresses.

Owned Media Marketing

According to the PESO model, there are four types of media; owned, earned, shared, and paid.

Paid media is things like Facebook ads, Google ads, and traditional advertising, and costs you money.

Shared media are things like followers on Instagram sharing your product or brand on their page, and costs nothing, but you have no control over it.

Earned media are things like testimonials and reviews, media coverage, and user-generated content (UGC) that is usually free.

Owned media is media that you own, such as social media posts, blog posts, and email marketing campaigns, and are free.

A good marketing strategy implements all four of these so all bases are essentially covered.

While you don’t need to do all of the things to be successful, most marketers will tell you at least to diversify your marketing so you’ve got a little owned, earned, shared (though you can’t really control when this happens), and paid media running at the same time.

Here’s an example of how you can utilize all three:

Instagram posts, Stories, and Reels (owned)
Someone re-shares your content on their Stories (shared)
Facebook ads (paid)
Blog posts on your website (owned)
Backlinks to your blog posts from another brand’s blog (earned and shared)
Google ads (paid)
Email newsletter to your subscribers (owned)
Customer reviews (earned)
Getting an influencer to promote your product (paid)

So you can see how diversifying your content and the channels you use deliberately casts your net wide, giving you ample opportunities to bring leads into your funnel.

Every channel you use is one more opportunity for customer acquisition.

To be clear, when I say “cast your net wide” across your channels, that doesn’t mean you should target everyone. You should still have a very specific target audience that you are speaking to when you interact with them.

Email Lists Are Important

Email has been a dominant player in the marketing world for some time, with no sign of it changing much in the near future. There are four key reasons why it’s critical to build an email list with your target audience.

Access

You’ll have direct access to your ideal customer. Instead of talking to every person on social media, for example, you can tailor your emails to your subscribers.

Nurture

Tailoring your emails will help you nurture your audience in a more effective way.

Trust

This gives you the opportunity to build the “know, love, trust” factor for your brand, which will ultimately give prospects the confidence to buy from you when the opportunity presents itself.

Owned

If any of your social media channels, blogging platforms, and even some website hosts were to crash, block you, or shut down, you’d lose everything. Not with an email list. You own it and nobody can take it away from you.

How to Collect Email Addresses

This is the part many business owners get stuck on. How do you collect email addresses? It’s a frustrating task when you have no idea how.

Trust me, I taught myself how to do it. It took me a little while to figure it out, but once you get it, it’s actually super simple.

Here are the steps to take:

Identify your target audience.
Create content that they’ll love and appreciate to build a solid reputation.
Create something they’d find useful, such as a free checklist or a PDF download.
Set up a landing page that collects email addresses.
Set up an email or second landing page with the download link with your freebie that triggers every time someone inputs their email address to the landing page.

That’s it. Simple, right?

Email Marketing Platforms

Now you know how you collect email addresses, but what platforms should you use? Here are three of my picks:

EmailOctopus

Quite possibly the easiest and most affordable platform I’ve ever used, EmailOctopus is perfect for complete newbies. The dashboard is very straightforward, and the free version allows up to 2500 subscribers and 10,000 emails a month.

When you use this link, you’ll receive $15 off your first month with Email Octopus.

After creating your free resource (I recommend using Google Docs, Slides, or Sheets, and getting a share link — make sure permissions are changed to “Share With Anyone With the Link”), set your email campaign up like this:

On the dashboard, go to “Lists”, and create a list called “New Subscribers.”
Go to “Landing Pages & Forms” (top bar).
Select “New Subscribers” to add new sign ups to this list.
Follow the prompts to design and create a new landing page for prospects to put their email address in.
Save the link for the landing page.
Go to “Campaigns” and select “New” (top right).
Give your workflow a name, such as “New Leads.”
Complete details, and choose “send immediately” on first page.
Choose your template and then start customizing your design.
Add the Google Docs share link to the button in the email.

Use the landing page link in your blog posts or share it with your audience on social media. This is what one of mine looks like:

Flodesk

Flodesk is a beautifully designed and easy to set up and use email marketing platform. Great for freelancers, and small businesses, the interface is minimalistic and super simple to navigate.

Here’s how to set up your email collection landing page with Flodesk:

On Flodesk Dashboard, select “Form” (top of screen).
Choose “New Form” (top right).
Select “Full Page” (on left).
Choose your design.
Create an audience segment “New Subscribers.”
Start customizing the design to best suit your brand.
Follow prompts to next pages, choosing “No”, “Notify Me”, and “Redirect to URL,” consecutively.
Add the Google Docs share link for your freebie in the URL section.
Copy the form link.
Add the form link into your blog posts.

You get a 30-day free trial with Flodesk, and then it’s $38/month. Or use this link to get 50% off your first year’s subscription.

AWeber

AWeber is more complex than Flodesk, and would be great for established brands or those wanting more robust features. It can be integrated with a number of apps, and has a few extra features that Flodesk doesn’t have, such as reporting and messages.

Here’s how to use AWeber to collect emails:

From the dashboard, click on “Landing Pages” (on the left).
Select “Create a Landing Page” (top right).
Click on “Freebies” (left-hand toolbar).
Choose your template.
Customize your landing page to suit your brand.
Select the “Sign Up” button and click on “Submission tab” (right panel). See screenshot below.
In the second box under “Custom URL” put your share link to your Google Doc.
Select “Save & Exit” (bottom right).
Publish the landing page and a popup with give you the link to the form.

AWeber email marketing platform landing page design layout — My screenshot of AWeber landing page design

I love the large variety of features AWeber offer, and the interface is pretty easy to learn. They have a free version for up to 500 subscribers, and the paid versions are affordable. Check them out here.

Lastly, always test your landing page and email campaign before sharing it with the world.

No Excuses

An email list is one of your most important assets to your business. It gives you direct access to your target audience, which is the best way to build a rapport and promote your products. After reading this post, you should have no excuses not to set your email marketing up.

If you need help, feel free to reach out to me at hey@saguaromedia.co.

Buy me a coffee or show me some 🫶🏽 here.