I discussed the email marketing definition and what we need to start email marketing in the previous section. And I clearly said that you need three things. A list of emails (the people who receive the mail), the email itself, and a system that sends the emails. In this section, I’m going to explain how to build an email list for free. Then, I will share my experience and let you know how to build an email list from scratch.
Before, I experienced many ways; I was searching for the email lists for sale, download some of them, and also searching how to send, for example, one million emails a day. But that’s not how email list management working. Sending one million emails is called spamming, and you will be blocked very soon (Trust me. I have done all the tricks before.)
But here are 4 simple ways to start email list building, maintain your list, and see some progress in your work. Note that. This is not a Hollywood movie that you jump from a building, get some ideas to work, and …done, it’s over. It would be best if you do it every day. It becomes easier every day. You will see the progress every day, but you should do it every day.
1. Build an email list with email scraping (GOOGLE)
Let’s start scraping emails using Google. Just go to Google, and let’s say we want to collect emails for people working in the publishing field in New York. Open a double quote, write “publishing” and “New York,” close double quotes and then open another double quote and enter the “@gmail.com” or another domain of the emails. Now, Google will find a lot of emails over the internet for people related to publishing. you can see a lot of results on the search page. (Here is an essential tip: go to Google settings and ensure you have the results per page to 100. so you can get more results per page.)
Now, we have a page with all the results. Simply on your keyboard, press ctrl+a (select everything on the page) then ctrl+c (to copy everything). Now we need a tool to extract emails from the text. Google chrome has developed this tool before. It’s called “Email Extractor.” you can add this plugin to your chrome. Go to the Google Chrome web store, search for “email extractor,” and add it to your browser. Then, when you search anything and click on this extension, it will show you all the emails directly.
With this method, you can build an email list for free and start your email marketing business. You can try many ideas in your search. For example, writing an “or” between “@gmail.com” or “@yahoo.com” will give you yahoo emails as well. Or you can type, for example, (site:”linkedin.com”) before your search query to find the emails on LinkedIn. In this case, also there is a website call RECRUITIN. You can specify what job and country, etc., you need, and it will give you the right query for LinkedIn. Then, if you plus that query with “@gmail.com” and search it on Google, you will have many people’s emails in the particular business.
2. Extract Emails from Gmail Account
If you have a Gmail account that you use for many years, apparently, you contact many people there. You can extract all the emails that contacted you someday on Gmail with a simple tool. It will help you generate a full list of emails from your Gmail account with names.
Open a Google sheet and open a blank sheet. Then go to add-ons and click on get add-ons. The Google workspace marketplace will open, allowing you to search for extensions for Google spreadsheets. For example, search for “email address extractor” and then install the extension. That’s also free. After installation, you will see the email address extractor plugin added to your Google spreadsheets. Just click open. Click continue, and then the plugin will ask you to select which folder you want to extract. Click, for example, on the inbox and select address “from,” which means people who sent you emails, and then click extract. You can now see emails and names extracted to a Google spreadsheet.
3. Scrape emails of companies and businesses
In this part, I want to talk about how you can find a business email and scrape the targeted company emails. Unfortunately, there is no automated method in this section. You should search for the company at Google with @ and the method I explained before in section one to find the email addresses, or you can open the company’s website, go to the Contact page and find the emails. Also, some services can do the job for you. They also scrape all the Google pages to find out the email of the domain you request. You can do it on Snov.io or hunter.io. But they are not totally free, and you can find limited emails per day by these tools.
4. Build Email leads by Lead Magnet
A lead magnet attracts anybody to give you the email in exchange for something you provide for free. So let’s make things simple. For example, you build a small guide about writing, and then you tell someone I will give you this guide in exchange for your email address. People usually love free stuff, especially if it’s high-quality content. So always, when you want to offer a lead magnet, be sure to make it high quality. Maybe you can build a free course or a free e-book or anything that can let people download it by filling a form that wants them to write down their emails.
The main question now is how will people know about my lead magnet?
I will let them know. I need to market my course or my free guide to collect emails.
And how can we market this?
In this case, there are several ways. For example, you can first build a landing page. And then promote it on social media, promote it by emails or answer the people who ask some related questions on quora. Also, any paid ads like Facebook ads that let you create lead generation campaigns can help you promote your lead magnet.
Also, keep this in your mind
whenever you collect an email, be sure to collect it in a proprietary email list. Separate your email lists from together and have appropriate tags on them. People that wanted your lead magnet may or may not be related to the publishers that live in New York. And in my experience, if you have 100 real people that subscribe to your email list by themselves, it is so much better to have 10000 emails that may even be not real or valid.
