How to Get an Email Address and Build Your Email List of Clients

Key idea: You can’t control social media algorithms or the programs of various real estate marketplaces, so it’s critically important to have your own list of email addresses. The list you create is yours to keep and use regardless of the actions of outside entities like Facebook and Zillow, securing your ability to market to your clients and prospects.

At the risk of oversimplifying it, the best way to get an email address from a client or prospect truly is to just ask for it. But sometimes this can feel awkward, especially if you haven’t stayed in touch with someone or if you’re connecting for the first time.

In this Silver Dollar episode of Stay Paid, we suggest 7 ways you can get email addresses from those who follow you on social media. Two of them involve having conversations that make asking for an email easy. The remaining 5 are tactics you can use to collect emails by other means.

1. Start a conversation with a direct message. We offer some simple scripts you can use to move a conversation off social media and into an email exchange. The important thing to note is that you aren’t looking to make a deal at this point—you simply want to add value.
2. Rekindle relationships by engaging. It’s likely that there are people among your followers who you haven’t connected with in a while (maybe a long while). There are also those who you don’t follow but would eventually like to do business with. In both situations, turn on notifications so you don’t miss their activity, and when you get notified, make a point of liking and leaving comments.
3. Use lead magnets. A lead magnet is an item of value that you offer in exchange for someone’s contact information, typically an email address. You can offer a lead magnet in any of your social media posts, in an Instagram Story, and in your bios.
4. Run a promotion or contest. Entice people to join your list with the offer of a prize. Listen to the episode for tips about what you should consider when selecting a prize.
5. Tap your strategic referral partnerships. We spoke about strategic referral partnerships in episode 427, including who might make the best partners. In this episode, we talk about how you can join forces to gather email addresses that you and your partners can both use.
6. Conduct a survey. People love to share their opinions—it’s one of the reasons why surveys are so popular. Consider using a service like SurveyMonkey to create a survey, then post the link to your social media accounts so people can participate. You can require an email address to access the survey or include a request for it within the survey.
7. Get email address from LinkedIn. Using your desktop, you can download your list of LinkedIn connections, and if someone has chosen to share their email, it will be included in their record. To download your connections:
   1. Log in to your account and select “My Network” from the top of the screen.
   2. On the left side under “Manage my network,” select “Connections.”
   3. On the right side of the screen near the top, select “Manage synched and imported contacts.”
   4. On the right side of the screen, select “Export contacts.”
   5. Select “Connections” and “Imported Contacts,” then “Request archive.” In about 10 minutes, you’ll receive an email from LinkedIn with the extracted file attached.

We hope you enjoy this episode and act on the advice Luke offers at the end. We’d also appreciate it if you took a moment to leave us a 5-star review and comment on Apple Podcasts. (We read them on air!) Thanks for listening!

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