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Join for freePosted: Mon 10th Aug 2026
Discover practical and creative ways to grow your audience, from sign-up forms and QR codes to social media, events, and incentive offers.
Discover how to capture valuable insights, such as your subscribers' interests and preferences, so you can deliver more relevant communications, nurture your audience over time, and ultimately grow your business.
Strategies to attract new contacts to your list
Creative ways to capture valuable information like interests and preferences
How to manage your list over time to drive success
Bring each session to life with a 30-day Constant Contact free trial, helping you turn insights into action.
Andrew Davis is a UK-based digital marketing trainer, keynote speaker and generative AI specialist with over 25 years of experience in the digital industry.
He has worked with organisations including FIFA, Forbes, Ogilvy, Sony PlayStation, Dyson, O2 and Tesco, helping teams understand how social media, content strategy and emerging technology can drive better marketing outcomes.
His career spanned launching BBC Radio 1Xtra and Myspace.com, alongside four years serving on the Ofcom Advisory Committee for England. Andrew is known for making complex digital topics practical, engaging and easy to apply.
Constant Contact offers email and digital marketing tools that make it easy for your small business or nonprofit to get the attention and revenue it deserves. Constant Contact has joined Lunch and Learn to share its extensive marketing expertise.
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Lightly edited for clarity.
Caitriona: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Lunch and Learn as part of Marketing Mondays. My name is Caitriona, and I'll be your host today. Marketing Mondays is a free five-week webinar series from Constant Contact and Enterprise Nation, designed to help small business owners improve their email marketing with practical, easy-to-implement advice.
Whether you're looking to improve open rates, avoid spam folders, grow your subscriber list, or use AI more effectively, each session offers actionable insights to help you market smarter and achieve better results. In this session, we'll discuss practical and creative ways to grow your audience – from sign-up forms and QR codes to social media events and incentive offers.
We are joined by Andrew Davis, a UK-based digital marketing trainer, keynote speaker, and generative AI specialist with over 25 years' experience in the digital industry. You can also take your learning a step further with a 30-day Constant Contact free trial, allowing you to test new ideas and follow along as you learn.
We'll be sharing a link to the trial in the chat box during this session, so do keep an eye out for that. Please also add any questions to the Q&A as we go. The session is being recorded, and we'll share the recording and resources afterwards.
Over to you, Andrew.
Andrew: Brilliant. Thanks a lot, Caitriona, and hi, everyone. Good afternoon – it's just hit twelve o'clock. Welcome to the session on smarter ways to grow your contact list.
Over the next half hour, I'll be showing you what I think is one of the most powerful ways you can grow your business. Email marketing might not be as exciting as social media or as cool as generative AI when it comes to what people talk about, but when it comes to being effective over a long time – decades, even – email is still there.
One of the things I really want to show you is how you can grow your contact list and nurture your audience in order to convert them, whether that's converting them to tell other people, to make a sale, or whatever your objectives may be.
Before I start, I want to find out your level of experience when it comes to email. You should have a poll in front of you – let me know whether you'd say you're basic, intermediate, or advanced.
The basic is that you know what email marketing is, but don't really use it – you might collect emails here and there. Intermediate is that you've got a bit of a strategy: you might know ways to collect emails, and you might even segment your list, but you know there's a lot more to learn.
Advanced is that email is like your best friend – you're converting people, retargeting people, segmenting people, and you've got GDPR covered. At that point, it's really just about the small nuggets you can pick up to improve.
If I share the results, you'll see that most of us are basic, which is completely fine. We've got a few intermediate and a couple of advanced, so what I'll do is pitch this at a basic-to-intermediate level.
But don't worry – if you're basic, nothing here will go above your head, and if you're intermediate or advanced, it won't be too basic for you either. I'll make sure everyone is covered.
So, why email marketing?
For me, it's one of my favourite tools for getting people to convert in some way, shape, or form. There are lots of stats when it comes to email marketing, and one of them is that for every pound spent on email marketing, you get 36 pounds back in return.
That's a really high return on investment, and it's exactly why email remains one of the most effective ways to turn your audience into active buyers. Another thing is that it's reliable – it has a delivery rate of about 97%.
You also control when you communicate with your customers when it comes to email. You're not at the mercy of algorithms in the way you are with social media – Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest can all restrict your reach unless you pay.
At the moment, when it comes to social, you're looking at anywhere between 2% and 5% reach – that's how many people your post will reach, and it's all to do with the relevancy algorithm, which comes down to content optimisation.
But email is the second-highest channel when it comes to reach and getting people to open their messages. The first is text and WhatsApp messaging.
However, this phone is my most prized possession, so if somebody emails me, I don't mind – I'll just go into my email. If somebody WhatsApps me, and it's a business, I might be more offended – I'll still open it without a doubt, but I might feel that line has been stepped over unless I've given strict permission.
So email plays a really useful role because it's not as unpredictable as social media can be, and it's not as personal as text.
When you get somebody to subscribe, you want to think of every new subscriber as a gift, because essentially they're saying, “I give you permission to speak to me – I give you permission to enter my inbox.” Ten to 15 years ago, that was normal – people gave out their email all the time – but now it can be a challenge.
So think of it in terms of permission marketing: if somebody has given you permission to speak to them, how can you nurture that relationship?
I've been doing digital marketing, as Caitriona mentioned earlier, for a long time – 25 years, in fact, across three different decades. The fact that email marketing is still as strong today as it was 20 years ago tells you something, especially in an age where technology and people's behaviour change all the time.
I'm not sure if anyone was here last week when I talked about AI – if you were, put a one in the chat, and if not, put a two, just so I know how deep to go into my backstory. It's about 50/50, so I'll go through my backstory very quickly.
I started off moderating chat rooms and forums for the TV show Pop Idol, for Liverpool Football Club, and for Friends Reunited – 25 years ago, back in 2001. Email was already a big thing then.
When I left there, I went to the BBC and was part of the team that launched Radio 1Xtra. I produced radio shows there for about five years, and again, email played a big part.
When I left the BBC in 2006, I was part of the team that launched Myspace – this was when Facebook was only available to students. Even though this was the beginning of social media as we know it, email was still a big thing.
When I left Myspace in 2009, having been there for the rise and the fall, I started training. For the last 15 years, I've travelled the world training organisations of all sizes, and email still plays a big part.
As I said, in a world where technology and people's behaviour are constantly changing, it's really important to see what's stayed consistent – and email is one of those things.
In my journey over the last 25 years, especially the last 15 years training people, I've worked with a lot of experts doing really big things in this space – small businesses and individuals making millions. I'm always keen to find out what they do, because success leaves clues.
There are two things they've all said to me that have always stuck with me, and I hope they stick with you, too. One: spend way more time on distribution.
Distribution is what you do once you send those emails, or once you click publish on social media – what happens next. Spend time on distribution.
The second is that the money is in the list – or the money is in the community. You may have heard the phrase “your network is your net worth,” and essentially it comes down to community – email is one place where you can store that community.
So what I want to go over quickly today is: strategies to attract new contacts to your email list; ways to capture valuable information, like people's interests and preferences, so you can segment your list; and finally, how to manage your list over time to drive success.
I can see a lot of you introducing yourselves in the chat – that's great, feel free. I saw Enterprise Nation post on my LinkedIn, so do feel free to drop me a message or connect with me there.
So, let's move on to strategies to attract new contacts.
Here's a question for you – please let me know in the chat. Think about the last few times you've signed up to something, and specifically the last time you signed up and gave your email address. What did they do in order to get your email?
The reason I ask is that I like to reverse-engineer things: if somebody persuaded or influenced you to hand over your email, maybe you can do the same to your own audience. So, what was the incentive they offered you?
So, some kind of attraction – freebies, discounts, a free guide or PDF download, a good lead magnet, or something else of value. Some of you mentioned an information sheet, a discount, a newsletter, an event, a competition, a free resource, or new knowledge – someone even mentioned buying a product and getting 10% off.
Discounts can work in the sense that people sign up because they want the discount, but that doesn't mean they necessarily want to hear from you again, so just be aware of that when you use them. You can obviously still use discounts and a call to action as well.
One of the things I like to do is ask myself what somebody offered in order for me to give my email – because I know I don't like giving my email out to people, so I'm always looking at things like that.
Another thing to consider is that there are two types of email marketing permission you can get: implied and express. Implied basically means you already have some sort of prior relationship with somebody.
Express permission is where someone actively says yes to receiving your emails – for example, you might already have a relationship with them and say, “I've got an email list, is it okay if I add you?” They have to say yes, for GDPR reasons.
Express is pretty much the standard we all know – you put something on your website, whether that's information or a discount, and in exchange, someone gives you their email.
There are different ways you can capture emails. In person at checkout, for example, I recently bought something from a sports shop, and they asked whether I wanted a paper receipt or an emailed one. That's a way of capturing emails, and if you read the small print, saying yes often means signing up to marketing information too.
At events is another example. I've been to events where, old-school, someone just has a pen and pad and writes your email down, or you write it down yourself. Print material is another route – you might see it on posters, flyers, or direct mail.
But the one we'll probably use the most is online – on your website, through a lead magnet, a social media ad, or a landing page. I've seen this a lot on Instagram: you're looking at something, you show interest, and an email box pops up – thanks to cookies, it might even fill in your information already.
Those are just some of the ways you can capture emails.
So, another question for you: what do you currently offer to entice somebody to give you their email – in other words, what's your lead magnet?
Earlier, I asked what somebody did to influence you to sign up – in most cases, that will have been some form of lead magnet. So, what do you do? Do you offer lead magnets, and if so, what are you doing right now to try to get somebody's email?
If it's nothing, that's completely fine, and if it's something like “stay up to date with the news” or “get our free monthly newsletter,” that's fine too – not necessarily because it's the best way to get people to sign up, but because it helps you understand where you currently stand.
Plenty of you said “nothing yet,” and that's a perfectly good starting point. One of the things that's worked for me in the past is a lead magnet: I used to put together a list of 600 free marketing tools and get people to sign up for it.
Actually, it started just on my website, but because there were so many tools, I began offering to send a document to anyone who wanted the full list – and that's one of the things you can do too.
A few of you shared what you already do: a shop where people sign up in person, a free jewellery guide download, free ebooks, free guides, and free competitions.
Someone mentioned trying lead magnets without success. Most of the time, when lead magnets aren't working, it's either because the message or the offer isn't strong enough for the person you're trying to reach, the offer is right, but you're attracting the wrong type of person, or you simply don't have enough traffic to your landing page in the first place – those are usually the main reasons.
One of you mentioned offering recipes as a taster for a book – that's exactly the idea. But the key for any lead magnet is working out how you're going to entice people, especially when there might be millions of others offering something similar. What are you going to say to convince someone?
It reminds me of a line from the film The Usual Suspects – my favourite film, if you haven't seen it, do – where a police officer simply says, “Convince me.” When it comes to your landing page or lead magnet, keep that in mind: what are you going to say to convince the end user?
This is where you might use generative AI for help. But here are some other ideas: a loyalty or referral programme, a contest or giveaway, an ebook, guides, checklists, or workbooks – that's what I offer quite a lot.
Webinars, classes, or events – which is why you're here today, since you likely signed up to something similar. Case studies are another option.
Something else that's quite popular at the moment is GPTs or apps that people are creating through AI, sometimes called “vibe coding.” For example, I created a tool that checks your email headlines and gives them a score out of 10 – people are doing things like that too.
As I said, you need to create some form of sign-up. If someone lands on your page, you need to give them something to sign up for – and if you reverse-engineer it, before someone gets the ebook, they need to fill out a form, and that's how you capture their details.
Behind that form might be exactly what they're looking for, so you need to convince people, on that form or landing page, to enter their details. So, what's the headline? Show the value they're going to get – what's in it for them?
Keep it simple. One thing about human behaviour is that our attention spans have shortened, so you need to get to the point quickly – everyone is fighting for attention, so keep it simple and set clear expectations.
Don't build an amazing landing page and offer, only for what's behind it to fall short – that's like receiving a beautifully wrapped surprise package, only to find a pen inside. It just doesn't add up, so make sure it meets expectations, and include your privacy policy too.
I know that in other Marketing Mondays webinars, we've gone into more detail about privacy and the metrics to look at, so I don't know, Sophie, if you've got links to some of those – check the chat, as Sophie from Constant Contact will post some of the webinars we've already run with Enterprise Nation.
So, let's look at ways to capture valuable information, like interests and preferences – this really comes down to segmentation.
Segmentation is something that really sets email apart from other channels. If you look at social media, imagine if I could post something on my feed or in Stories and send it only to certain lists – I know you can have a close-friends list on some platforms, but it's very limited.
Imagine if I could post directly to just my school friends, my work friends, friends who share a hobby with me, or my family – that would be ideal. You can do that with email.
Social media has tried this before – it was called Google Plus, and it just didn't work, because it wasn't part of how people actually used social media. But for email, it is part of the behaviour.
This is why email converts higher than a lot of other channels: segmentation can lead to better engagement, improved open rates and clicks, better conversions, increased revenue, decreased unsubscribe numbers because the content is more relevant, and better customer retention, because people keep coming back.
There are different ways you can segment. You can segment by geography – city, county, postcode, country – or by demographics, such as income, customer preference, or relationship status. You can also segment by behaviour: did they open this email or not, did they purchase, did they leave something in their cart?
Going back to what I said earlier about reverse-engineering: you've got the lead capture form, someone fills out their information, and then they usually get an email confirming what they signed up for – or it might be a double opt-in, after which they receive what they were after.
A lot of people who work in email stop there, and that's where you're leaving money on the table. Instead, you can create a welcome series, so that rather than just receiving the one thing, someone might get an email two or three days later pointing them to something else they'd be interested in, or offering more value – and you can keep that automation running for as long as you like.
This is really important because, essentially, once someone has given you permission to talk to them, your next role is to nurture that relationship. Nurturing is about getting people to like you, to know you, and then to trust you – because if I don't trust you, I won't buy from you, and the same goes for your customers.
Time is always going to be an issue, so this is where you can automate certain conversations. If I joined your list yesterday and my friend joins next week, we'll get the same emails – just not at the same time – and that's the key.
Other popular ways to segment include people's birthdays, as well as, as I said, location, company name, and job title. Something like a birthday just gives you an excuse to speak to someone and open a conversation.
One of the things about networking and building relationships is that you can't go straight in with a sale – you need to build the relationship first, in a nice way, before you ask someone to buy. Birthdays are a good way to start or open a relationship: “Happy birthday – for the next 24 hours, here's a 10% discount,” and that could be enough.
So, we've got five minutes left, and we've flown through this – let's look at how to manage your list over time to drive success.
Most of you said 77%, then 55%, then 66%, then 44% for the poll on what percentage of consumers rank email as their preferred way to receive information – but the answer is 55%. That's how consumers rank email as their preferred way to receive information.
This week's Small Business Now report from Constant Contact is definitely worth checking out – we'll try to get a link into the chat. What you'll find is that the more email marketing you do, the more metrics you gather, and the more you'll work out whether people like receiving your messages by email.
If you're active in other areas, like social media or your website, you can work that out there too, and it's worth comparing across channels – for example, if 55% prefer email, is it 78% for social media? Usually it isn't, but these are the kinds of things you'll want to look at.
Now, when it comes to re-engaging people, because you're going to have a list, and if you don't speak to that list very often, they're not going to stay engaged. So how do you re-engage with them?
You'll get a copy of the slides, but these are just some of the things you'll want to be able to do to re-engage your fans, customers, or potential customers, whoever they may be.
You'll also have people who, if you're emailing consistently, become your true fans. There's a great book called A Thousand True Fans, and the idea is that if you've got a thousand true fans, and each of them is worth a thousand pounds to you over a year, that's a million-pound business.
So, who are the fanatics – the people who love what you do? One of the key things, as I said, is nurturing. What I often find with email marketing is that people are good at getting people into the shop – here's a discount code, here's a competition, here's a great lead magnet – but once they've got that email address, they don't look after the person.
Once I've got you into the shop, I move on to attracting the next person, and eventually, once someone has a question and there's nothing more for them there, they leave. So really, the key is being able to get people into the shop and then look after them once they're there.
Now, when it comes to email, there are a lot of laws around it. Social media has a couple of laws, but it's still something of a Wild West – generative AI is a complete Wild West right now – whereas with email, there are a few laws, and a few ways you'll want to protect it.
Beyond your engagement strategies, you have a responsibility to keep your data secure. As I said, the money is in the list – your data is an asset.
In this world, we've traditionally had hard assets, like land and property, which is where the wealthy have always made their money. But in this new world, the soft assets – your community and your data – matter just as much.
If you look at the biggest companies in the world by value, they don't necessarily own cars, hardware, or land – it's soft data, soft assets, and that's what you have too.
So, always use two-factor authentication, and when someone signs up, get them to confirm. Don't share your list – you can leverage it, but don't share it.
Make sure your email software is GDPR-compliant, which is something Constant Contact really focuses on, especially because we understand the issues you can run into.
So, my final point: nurture your relationship with new subscribers. Treat each person as an individual by personalising your emails, and spend time regularly on growing and maintaining your list.
If you're interested in Constant Contact, feel free to try it – claim a 30-day trial. You'll see plenty of things beyond email, but everything I've spoken about today, from automation to segmentation to using AI to write your emails, is covered.
You can even set up a brand kit, so you just add your email address, and it automatically brands your whole email to match your branding. If you're interested, feel free to scan the QR code and try it for 30 days – Enterprise Nation has just put it in the chat.
Does anyone have any questions before I finish?
I find some people prefer WhatsApp – I actually have a WhatsApp group myself, called AI in a Nutshell. It's about AI, but quite specific, and while it's not as big as my email list, it's a good community. But as I said, WhatsApp is your phone, so that's where you need to be really careful.
On WhatsApp groups specifically – I've felt more engaged myself in WhatsApp groups than through email, but again, it depends on how often you actually convert people through them. A lot of WhatsApp groups are more about news and information, so they sit at the top of the funnel rather than driving a sale directly.
If you're a business, there are two types of conversion: a hard conversion, which costs the end user time or money – like “buy this” or “come to this event” – and a soft conversion, like a share or a follow. WhatsApp is very good for soft conversions, but the deeper you build the relationship, the more you'll want to move people somewhere else.
On how often you should contact your email list without becoming a nuisance – I hate to answer this one, because the honest answer is that it depends. I know people who send messages every day, and to be honest, it can be annoying, but sometimes there are a couple of gems in there, so I stay subscribed anyway.
I also know people who email so rarely that I've forgotten who they are and why I signed up in the first place, so you don't want that either. But I also know people whose emails make me stop what I'm doing, because I want to hear what they have to say – and that comes down to your content, and getting people to really know who you are.
So it really depends. If you've never done this before, try committing to it once a week, and then decide what type of email to send – Constant Contact, for example, has newsletter templates where you can simply fill in the information.
One of the best ways to capture information face-to-face at a show – pen and paper is one option, or you can use a QR code, so people can just get their phone out, scan it, and you've got their details. That's another approach I've seen work really well.
On whether there will be more sessions after next week, you'd need to speak to Caitriona at Enterprise Nation about that, but I'm sure they'll be running more sessions in future.
Brilliant. So, I'll pass you back to Caitriona now – thank you all for the feedback and for listening. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn – you'll get a copy of the presentation, along with my LinkedIn details and a QR code if you're interested. Enjoy the rest of your day.
Caitriona: Thank you so much, Andrew, for your presentation, and thanks to everyone for joining us on today's Marketing Mondays webinar. We'll be sharing the recording and further resources in a follow-up email this afternoon. It's been a great session – I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day.
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