Thinking of ditching growing your email list now that events are starting up again after the pandemic?
Nooooo! Don’t do it! Your email list is one of the precious resources your business can have, and you should be constantly nurturing and building it. And yes, while events are starting to get running again (which is fantastic news), you should think of your email list as something that works with those events…not instead of them.
Ever met customers at events which aren’t quite yet ready to buy from you, but still love your work? They’re a perfect fit for your email list, where they can enjoy receiving your emails until they are ready to buy. And what if we did have another pandemic and everything closed again? Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to have your email list to fall back on?

Email is the easiest, most time-efficient and most effective marketing tool available to you, so make the most of it!
And if you’re regularly going to events then why not take that brilliant opportunity to build your email list – you’ll never see so many of your potential customers, face-to-face in one place again.
Here are my top tips for getting people on your list at events:
- If people are asking questions and seem to love your work then let them know you have an email list that’s free to join – letting people know it’s free makes them feel they’re getting a service from you, rather than just doing you a favour by going on your list.
- If people ask for your contact details or a business card then recommend they sign up to your email list, where they’ll get to know about all your latest products first.
- If you offer any digital freebies or have a VIP club for subscribers, then make sure people know about this with signage and/or tell them.
- If you want to get people to sign up on paper, that’s fine, but make sure you’re complying with GDPR privacy laws. Better options might be to:
- Get people to sign up on a tablet straight into your email provider. Just set up a digital full-page form on your tablet ready for them to fill in.
- Create a page on your website with one of your forms on it and give it with a URL that’s easy to remember – so for example thevictoriabrown.com/signup or thevictoriabrown.com/emails
- Create a QR code, which directs people to your full page sign-up form…this is really easy to do – just google ‘create your own QR code’ and there are free tools online. You can then print out your QR code and display it on your stand or have it on a tablet so that people can use it to sign up to your list. This tip was actually given to me by one of my amazing students on my email list course!
