Building an email list is still one of the most effective ways to grow your audience and nurture relationships with potential customers. Despite the dominance of social media, email marketing remains a vital tool for most businesses.

As a WordPress user, you’ll have some simple and affordable tools you can use to start collecting emails and growing your mailing list without feeling overwhelmed. In this post, we’ll cover a few different strategies to collect emails. I’ll also share my own experience with various email providers, alongside some techniques you can easily implement on your WordPress site.

Why email marketing matters

Email marketing allows you to communicate directly with your audience, offering value and fostering trust. It’s still one of the most reliable methods of keeping your subscribers informed about your services, promotions, and updates. You’re not reliant on the unpredictability of social media algorithms to communicate with your customers and followers.

Best of all – you own your email list. Should you lose access to your Instagram or Facebook account for some reason, you lose your followers on those platforms – maybe forever in a worst case scenario. Not so with your email list. It’s yours to keep.

But to send those emails, you need to have a list of subscribers. That’s where WordPress comes in.

Using an email marketing service

It’s possible to use WordPress to collect subscribers and bulk email them every time you publish a new blog post, all without having to integrate with a third party service.

However I don’t recommend a WordPress-only approach. Instead, you should sign up to an email marketing platform and integrate it with WordPress (which sound scary, but isn’t. It’s usually simply a matter of installing a WordPress plugin). There are a number of reasons I advocate this approach:

1. Avoiding spam filters: Put simply, you do not want your emails marked as spam, and your subscribers never seeing – never mind reading – your words of wisdom! Whilst there is no foolproof way of preventing your email ending up in the junk, there are ways to minimise this – and dedicated email marketing platforms are set up this way.
2. List management: An email marketing service will provide you with the tools to effectively manage your list, segment it, analyse it. It will seamlessly handle subscribing and unsubscribing your contacts including features such as double opt ins – where a new subscriber has to confirm via email that they do really do want to join your list.
3. Campaigns and Automation: You’ll be able to craft “campaigns” – the emails that you want to send out to your subscribers. You can schedule them if you wish. You can automate a series of welcome emails on consecutive days after for new subscribers. You can even send different sequences depending on where they signed up.
4. Tracking and analysing your performance: Who successfully received your email? How many opened it? How many clicked on any links in the email? How do these stats compare to your previous email campaigns. Vital info for any serious business.

Which email marketing service should I choose?

There are plenty of email marketing services to choose from. For a long time, I used Mailchimp to collect and manage my email list. Mailchimp was amongst the earliest bulk email specialists and it remains popular. However, it does get very expensive as your email list grows. I’ve also had some experience of other platforms – Active Campaign for example. These days I use Brevo (which used to be called Sendinblue).

The great news is: whichever platform you plump for, it will almost always integrate with WordPress via a plugin. Yet another reason to choose WordPress over other website builders.

Brevo: good value for money with excellent WordPress integration

Brevo offers a much more affordable pricing structure compared to Mailchimp, and the integration with WordPress is very good.

Like most providers, it offers a free plan, which is a great way to grow your list – and your business – without incurring unnecessary expenses. Brevo is free whilst you subscriber count is 100,000 or lower (although you can only use automation on 2000 of those) and you can send up to 300 emails per day. The first paid tier is only around £5 per month. The Brevo pricing page has a handy costs calculator – based on your subscriber counts and the number of emails you expect to send each month.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am an affiliate for Brevo, so if you sign up after clicking on the link, I’ll earn a few pennies. However, I only ever recommend products that I use and genuinely really like. I’d never promote anything purely because of the financial incentive.

Transactional emails v Marketing emails

I especially like Brevo because – alongside marketing emails – it also handles what are known as transactional emails. Transactional emails are the messages your website sends to a single recipient automatically, based on customer actions (like order confirmations or forgotten password resets) or other automated WordPress activity – for example notifying you that you have a new comment on your blog. Marketing emails on the other hand are newsletters, promotions, and any other type of bulk email sent to a list of subscribers. Brevo allows your website to send unlimited transactional emails, which is often a limiting factor with other platforms.

How to grow your email list with WordPress

There are a few simple, yet effective ways to collect emails with WordPress. These strategies can help you attract subscribers and keep them engaged without overwhelming your audience.

1. Subscription Prompts – Asking your visitors to join your list

Sometimes, the simplest solution is the best. Just ask your visitors to subscribe to your email list!

You can use a WordPress plugin to display a sign-up form in strategic locations – your site’s header, footer – for example or as a pop-up when a visitor has been on your site for a certain amount of time. Or inline at the end of your blog post – or even during it, like this: 

The above form was created using a free WordPress plugin from Brevo – I told you their integration was good! 🙂

2. Lead Magnets: enticing your visitors to sign up

A lead magnet is something of value that you offer to your visitors in exchange for their email addresses. This could be a free e-book, checklist, template, or guide – usually as a PDF. Of course it doesn’t have to be a PDF – it could be video or even a free Facebook group. You can see a promotion to my lead magnet – 10 No-brainer reasons to move your website to WordPress NOW! – at the end of every post in my blog.

I use a lead magnet as a way to offer value right away, which builds trust with my audience.. You can also create your own lead magnet that speaks directly to your audience’s needs and goals.

3. Landing Pages: focused pages just for email sign-ups

A landing page dedicated to encouraging visitors to join your email list is another powerful tool.

Unlike your regular site pages, landing pages are designed with one goal in mind: getting your visitors to sign up. You can easily create landing pages with plugins like SeedPod or a configurable theme such as GeneratePress – removing any distracting elements, even your logo and site navigation, if you wish.

These landing pages should have a crystal clear call to action, explaining exactly what the subscriber will get by joining your list. Focus on the value, whether it’s receiving tips, exclusive offers, or important updates. I’ll be covering landing pages in more detail at a later date.

Keeping it simple with WordPress tools

As a WordPress user, you don’t have to worry about complicated integrations or techie issues. You can use plugins that integrate easily with both Brevo, Mailchimp, Active Campaign or your email provider of choice. All you need to do is focus on creating valuable content for your subscribers. Collecting emails with WordPress is actually pretty straight forward.

Final thoughts about collecting emails with WordPress

Building your email list is an ongoing process, but it doesn’t need to be complicated. By using tools like Brevo for email marketing alongside simple techniques like lead magnets, subscription prompts, and landing pages, you’ll be well on your way to growing an engaged email list. You do need to be consistent however. Just remember to provide value to your subscribers. Do this consistently and they’ll gladly give you their email address.