Email addresses are crucial to your marketing strategy, because they are the one sure method you have to reach back out to customers without having to spend money to reach them again with paid advertising (or just waiting for luck and chance to bring you back).

But it probably hasn’t escaped your attention that email addresses are hard to collect.

In fact, only about 2% of all website visitors will give you an email address – and that’s if you do everything else right. But opting out of email marketing isn’t wise, for two big reasons:

• Email offers the highest ROI of all digital marketing, due to its low cost and high effectiveness over time, and
• Email addresses make it possible to do targeted advertising on platforms like Facebook and Linkedin.

So the question shouldn’t be “should we try to capture email addresses on our website?” Rather, it should be “how can we maximize our ability to capture email addresses on our site?”

In order to capture more email addresses on your site, you have to deploy several different techniques. Just putting the “please give us your email” plea in your footer just isn’t enough! Sure, put an email signup in the footer, but then go a few steps beyond.

You have many options for collecting email addresses in your website.

• If you offer live chat on your website (and you should), you can ask for a first name and email address prior to putting a live chat rep online.
• You can offer an offline chat (that’s a chat button on your site that facilitates the visitor sending you an email), which collects an email address as part of the process.
• Use a ChatBot. A chatbot is a little widget you program to ask customers questions and given them answers in a game-like, playful manner. Typically, you ask for an email address as part of the process.
• On-demand or self-scheduled meeting widgets are also a great way to get people to make appointments and collect email addresses

Remember that relevance is king when it comes to marketing. So think about list management when you think about email marketing. Do you have some customers (or prospects) who are more interested in custom, others who are more interested in bridal? Perhaps you have a following for designer fashion? If you create a list for each of these interests, you can do a better job of sending more relevant email to them.  You can even have different email subscription “rules” on different pages, sending the subscriber to the right list based on the interest suggested by the page they are on.

Put a bit of effort into email address capture and list segmentation, and over time you’ll realize the benefits of this undeniably numbers-driven pursuit.