How to get niche-specific, validated email lists

Email marketing is the highest ROI marketing channel, but your ROI is only as good as your email lists. So, let’s talk about how to get quality, targeted email lists for your niche that deliver better leads and more sales.

Bad data & low-quality lists

Unfortunately, most of the openly available email address lists are outdated, generic, incorrect and the same shared email lists that your competitors have.

Yes, these are the same tired lists your competitors have been spamming with emails for years. The recipients of all these emails have already changed email addresses or have well-tuned email filters that send you right to the spam folder.

To break through you need active, validated, highly targeted email lists for your email campaigns. So how do you get them?

Permission > Spam for Better Leads

Let’s be honest: Scraping email addresses or buying email lists of people who have no idea who you are and never gave you permission to email then is just spam. Not cool.

But there’s a better way…

Imagine someone has thousands or millions of fans in your target customer demographic who consistently consume and engage with their content.

Now imagine that this person was willing to tell their fans to subscribe to your email list and even incentivized them to do it with a chance to win a prize.

Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Well, that’s exactly what you’re going to do. Here’s how.

How to build quality, targeted lists of email addresses in your niche

Social media is amazing because there are billions of people across millions of communities who know, like and trust the influencers who serve those communities.

Maybe it’s fashion advice, beauty tips or the latest yoga workout. Or maybe it’s something more niche, like a specific style of woodworking or an esoteric book club.

Whatever it is, there’s a community like that somewhere on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, etc.

It’s your job to find and partner with the leader of that community. They know the platform and community better than you, so share your goals then follow their lead on how to proceed.

Here’s how to do it: A real life example

Let’s say you want to reach fashion-forward young moms on Instagram. You do your research and identify Emily Rose Hannon, who has over half a million fans, as a potential partner and she agrees.

You’re not an Instagram expert, so you tell her you want to grow your email list and ask her what types of campaigns attract that kind of engagement on Instagram.

She tells you that Instagram giveaways are popular because they:

• Are Instagram-native, so people are familiar with them
• The giveaway prize incentivizes action (people subscribing to your list)
• They are quick and low effort to run

You agree and plan a quick 48-hour giveaway using these rules:

• Like this post
• Tag 3 friends
• Subscribe to the email newsletter at the link in my bio

She adds your email opt-in link as her Instagram bio link for the duration of the giveaway and BOOM: you get thousands of new, highly targeted email subscribers.

Amazing, right?

Regardless of the industry you’re in, you can find the right partner. I recommend starting with Instagram since it tends to work the best (especially with giveaways).

Depending on your budget, you may need to work with smaller influencers since the ones with large audiences can charge quite a lot. I recommend starting with a few small campaigns, then increasing your budget if you’re seeing enough ROI to justify further investment.

Once you have the process down you can rise and repeat with difference partners across different networks. The best part is that it doesn’t even matter how big your social following is since you’re leveraging their audience.

Making it easy

I know what you’re thinking: That all sounds great, but how do I validate the thousands of entries you get to make sure they followed all your giveaway rules AND collect and validate their email addresses?

Yes, manually checking all of the entries to make sure they followed the rules, then picking a random winner and validating emails is a real pain. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to turn followers into email subscribers: It's called POPSMASH. Right now it's just for Shopify stores, but join our newsletter here if you want to know when we release the standalone version that works with any platform.

Now, go build your list & make those sales💰

TL;DR Too many people rely on existing email lists that are out of date, have bad data and are un-targeted, which results in low quality leads and few sales.

The only way to do it right is to build your own high quality email marketing lists by partnering with people who serve audiences that represent your target customers. And now you know how 😉

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