It’s a paradox many new business owners face: You’re supposed to start building your email list before launch, but how can you drive potential customers to something that doesn’t exist yet, not even online?

You’re basically saying, “Hey, sign up for my thing. I use it, it’s going to be a thing!”

What if I told you that shaving brand Harry’s collected 100,000 email addresses before their product was ready for sale? I’ll explain how they did it below, but that’s just one case study of many proving that there are several ways to do email marketing without even a website, if you’re creative.

So if you’re wondering how to build an email list without a website, here are five tactics you can try.

1 HOURost a raffle

If you want fast list growth, freebies are a great place to start. They work well for several reasons:

You can offer something before your product is ready and people love free stuff.

The deadline-based nature of giveaways adds a sense of urgency to your campaign.

By partnering with influencers or other businesses, you can skyrocket the virality of a giveaway.

Even if your own product is not ready yet, you can take advantage of partner products as prizes.

Still don’t think this will work? Rafflecopter grew their email list from zero to 35,000 using their own giveaway software. Travel blog Who Needs Maps doubled their email list in seven days without spending a dime by partnering with brands to sponsor sweepstakes prizes. Foundr got 13,603 email signups in 10 days by running a competition.

Finding a gift prize when you don’t have a product

You’d be surprised how many companies would be willing to offer their products as prizes for your raffle. You just have to ask yourself, “What’s in it for them?”

Often, if you can show them that your giveaway will have impressive reach (for example, by sharing the size of your current email list or social media following), you can get sponsors.

But if you’re reading this post, you probably don’t have a huge reach yet. So another tactic is to offer to share the email addresses you collect from the giveaway with the sponsoring company. If you do this, be sure to include in the sweepstakes terms and conditions that you will share entrants’ information with third parties.

Here’s how Femtrepreneur’s Mariah Coz did it. After launching her gift and collecting new email addresses, she kept the gift list separate from her main list. Because her target audience was business owners interested in webinars, the first email to her new giveaway subscriber list had a strong call-to-action to unsubscribe if they weren’t interested in receiving more emails about it. webinars.

After that, those who stuck with his list received three more emails that were part of the pitch sequence promoting his online course on how to use webinars in your business. In fact, you can download their exact post-giveaway email sequence templates here.

How to Host a Giveaway When You Don’t Have a Website

Even if you don’t have a website, you can still host a giveaway entry form using one of these sites:

small pile

wishing pond

snake

PromoSimple

They will host the giveaway on their platform and provide you with a link that you can share or embed elsewhere.

The nice thing about using freebies to grow your email list is that people love free stuff. But the bad thing about using freebies to grow your email list is… people love free stuff.

That means it will probably attract a lot of people who only signed up because they wanted to win the prize. It’s okay. All it means is that you need to filter out those who are not really interested in your business.

two. Create a Simple ‘Coming Soon’ Landing Page

While building a complete site for your business takes time, that doesn’t mean you can’t create a simple landing page now that collects email addresses before launch.

Remember our friends from Harry’s? The shaving brand launched in March 2013 to a whopping 100,000 email subscribers. Co-founder Jeff Raider explains how they did it on Tim Ferriss’ blog.

In short, Harry’s created a two-page “microsite” with these elements:

An introduction page that read “Harry’s is Coming” and asked for an email address so subscribers could be the first to know

A second page that had a referral rewards program. It contained a shareable link, and the more people subscribed, the bigger the prize entrants would win.

Raider doesn’t mention paid advertising for its pre-launch microsite, so it sounds like the sheer virality of the referral rewards program made word-of-mouth marketing its best friend for this pre-launch phase.

So how can you do something similar to what Harry did?

Step 1 – Choose a landing page tool.

Tools like Leadpages and Instapage allow you to quickly set up a simple one page site to capture email addresses without any technical knowledge.

how to build an email list without leadpages website example

Step 2 – Choose an email marketing service.

Some options include:

market hero

get an answer

Aweber

MailChimp

Since it’s free up to 2000 subscribers, I recommend starting with MailChimp.

Step 3 – Integrate your email marketing service with your landing page.

Now, you just need to link your email marketing service to your landing page. To find out how to do this, search the help center for the landing page tool you chose. Here is a guide on how to link Leadpages with MailChimp.

Step 3.1 (Optional): Add the reference capability.

To really skyrocket your list growth, you’ll want to create some virality on your landing page. One way to achieve this is to create a referral program where subscribers are rewarded for referring other subscribers.

Now, Harry did this in a way that requires technical knowledge. If you have that, you can take advantage of their pre-launch campaign page code in this post. If you don’t have a developer to help you, there is an easier way. You can use KickoffLabs AnyForm integration to add a viral boost with referral tracking to Leadpages or Instapage.

Step 4: Share with your friends, family, and business connections.

To give your campaign a jump start, personally email your friends and family and ask them to share. And if you have connections in your industry, email them too. This was a big part of the success Harry experienced. Do not be shy. You have to start somewhere.

The easiest way to set up a quick email subscription landing page

Now, if the steps above were too much for you right now, there’s a much easier, cheaper, and faster way to set up an email subscription landing page: your email marketing service.

Whether you choose MailChimp or Aweber, each comes with built-in landing pages. These won’t be as customizable and won’t be able to handle referral programs, but they get the job done if you just need a place to send people to sign up for your email list.

This is how it looks inside MailChimp. Just go to Lists > Registration Forms:

Use MailChimp to build an email list without a website

Then select Form Builder and you’ll be able to customize a signup form that creates a unique URL for you to use:

If word of mouth marketing isn’t working, consider investing in Facebook ads and other social media sites to drive traffic to your landing page.