Building a qualitative e-mail list is an important part of your marketing activities. You see, e-mails give you the opportunity to get directly in touch with your target audience and to share your message with the right people, one on one.
An e-mail list consists of relevant contacts that are part of your target audience. They are interested in receiving your communication and have given you specific consent to e-mail them. Since the start of the GDPR law on May 25 2018, this opt-in is essential for e-mail marketing.
Buying lists with contact details is absolutely not done. And let’s be honest, it doesn’t really work well enough to even consider it. Because when you contact people out of the blue, people that have never heard of you, chances are small that they will respond or become a lead.
Next to an opt-in, you should also provide an opt-out possibility. Usually, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of an e-mail. This will cause you to ‘lose’ 25% of your database year over year (source: Hubspot). This is not a problem actually: people that are not interested in your communication are not your customers anyway. So, building your e-mail list is not a one-off task, it is a continuous process.