Do you hear a lot of marketers talk about the importance of growing your email list, but struggle with the idea of actually doing it? If so, this post is for you, as you’ll learn 5 ways to gather leads online.

Spend 4 minutes watching the video, or read on for the tips.

We all need more leads, and using your website to collect leads is a great strategy. But you must be proactive in giving people a reason to join your email list.

Create some kind of offer to entice visitors to share their email address, because once you have contact information, you can follow up and focus on transitioning a casual website visitor into a customer.

Here are five ways to try:

#1 Give Gifts

Most of us have given a company our email address in order to receive an ebook, or “exclusive” video. This is a tried and true method to gather leads and grow your email list.

This doesn’t mean you need to put together something complicated. Let’s face it, no one wants to read a 70-page ebook. But a short checklist telling me the top 10 things I need to do? Yes please!

Just be mindful of providing solid information. If your “resource” is nothing but a glorified company brochure, people may feel cheated. That is not the way to win a customer.

You can keep it short, but make it valuable.

#2 Offer a Coupon

Who doesn’t like discounts? In fact, I’m willing to bet at some time in your life you’ve bought something you didn’t really need, just because they offered you a special deal.

Come up with an offer and create a pop up that promotes it. For example, you might offer people 10% off their first purchase if they give you their email address.

#3 Create a Quiz

Something else you’ve probably done is entered your email address to find out which Harry Potter character you’re most like.

While the wizarding world may not apply to your brand, there are still ways that a quiz can work for you. A couple things that have worked for my clients in the past are:

  1. Can switching to {Company name} save you money?
  2. Is {service name} right for you?

#4 Design a Challenge

This one takes a bit more time and energy, but you may reap big rewards by challenging your visitors to hang with you for a week to learn a new skill. Once someone puts their email in, they will get an email every day with a short lesson.

Using this strategy for a customer, allowed us to collect 365 new leads within a few months, about 20% of which turned into paying customers.

Want to see an example of how this works? Take a peek at one I have set up to improve your Google rank.

#5 Run a Contest

This is probably the simplest one on the list, but also the one that will allow you to collect the most leads in the shortest amount of time.

We know cash is king, so offer up a $50 gift card. All someone has to do is enter their email address and you’ll “draw” a random winner.

The only real downside of this one is that every wants to win money, even if they aren’t ever going to be a customer. So while you might add 100 new people to your email list, maybe only 20 of them are going to be valid leads. But hey, that’s still 20 news leads!

The important thing to remember is to have fun and get creative. If it sounds boring to you, it will probably be boring to other people and won’t yield new leads.

So put some thought into what makes you willing to enter your email address, and then apply those tactics to your own business.