For a business, email addresses are like bamboo to a panda—easy to collect and essential for survival. You can never get enough of them. If you collect email addresses from your site’s visitors, you’ll net a mailing list of folks already interested in your products. The more emails you get, the more leads you’ll have at your immediate disposal.
Email capture works for both you and your customers. Once you have a robust mailing list, you can send out promotions to increase sales, product launch news to generate brand interest, and all sorts of other content to build a lasting relationship with both new and long-time customers.
Jacob Sappington, director of email strategy at ecommerce-focused growth agency Homestead Studio, has personally seen the power of email capture: “The whole reason why email is so powerful is because it’s a much cheaper delivery platform, a much cheaper distribution than other forms, including SMS and paid ads,” Jacob says on Shopify Masters. Let’s take a deeper dive into how you can make the most of both obtaining and utilizing these email addresses.
What is email capture?
Email capture is the practice of gathering email addresses from current and potential customers through your website or social media. You can create custom forms or advanced targeting features to collect this information, or utilize well-timed pop-ups. You can also record email addresses when people make a purchase. The beauty of email capture is that everyone on your list has opted in to receive ongoing communications from you in the future. You can then use your email list for targeted offers and personalized marketing, as well as to build your brand with learning materials, news, and insider stories.
Common ways to capture emails
To build your email list effectively, focus on meeting potential subscribers where they’re already interacting with your brand. These strategies use sign-up forms and offers to capture emails while helping you engage customers and grow your email marketing efforts:
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Encourage sign-ups at the point of sale. Ask customers to agree to promotional messages during checkout when they fill out their order details. This moment feels natural, since they’re typically already sharing their email to receive purchase confirmations and shipping updates.
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Use a sign-up form while they browse. Add a pop-up or embedded sign-up form on your website while customers explore your products. A well-timed prompt can encourage visitors to subscribe before they leave.
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Leverage special offers and discounts. Offer incentives on social platforms like Facebook, Bluesky, or Mastodon to collect email sign-ups. For example, “Sign up today and get 10% off your first order” can boost engagement and conversions.
7 email capture best practices
- Utilize the “micro yes” strategy
- Keep it simple
- Create multiple places to subscribe
- Incentivize potential subscribers
- Get the timing right
- Track the right metrics
- Send out a “welcome series”
The best email capture methods and lead capture tools treat the user with respect. It’s no good having a huge list of email subscribers if it’s full of addresses from people you tricked into providing them. Not only will recipients be less willing to read your messages, but if they mark them as spam, you can suffer low email deliverability. This means that your messages might start being automatically marked as spam, and even your interested subscribers won’t see them.
Building good subscriber relationships begins with the capture method, so here are several pointers to guide you:
Utilize the “micro yes” strategy
Pose a short question for the user to answer before presenting the email capture form. You just need a small or “micro” yes from a potential subscriber to get the ball rolling. According to Jacob, this helps to ease the user in.
“It’s just something as simple as saying, ‘Do you want 10% off?’ Or ‘What are you shopping for today?’ The main idea here is that you’re asking a really small leading question that someone’s really likely to say yes to, and that gets them bought in a little bit.”
Keep it simple
The best email marketing techniques are the simplest. If you don’t present too many choices, the user only has to say yes or no to one thing.
“There’s this thought in the email marketing community: One email, one objective, one call to action,” Jacob says.
This applies equally to email capture. Make a clear statement, telling the audience what they are signing up for on your lead capture forms, and don’t provide them with multiple choices. Tell them if they’re signing up for a newsletter, for offers, or for future product news, but keep it simple regardless.
Create multiple places to subscribe
Make it easy for the user to sign up for your email list on your site. Don’t limit it to a single pop-up form. Offer dynamic capture widgets, custom landing pages, and inline capture forms in various places throughout the customer journey.
Some people are happy to add their email to a pop-up or floating bar. Others might search the footer of the page for the various contact options or navigate to a Contact page. The idea is to give customers options.
Incentivize potential subscribers
Emails are valuable to you, so to encourage more sign-ups, it makes sense to offer the user something valuable in return. If you’re selling physical goods and services, that could be a sign-up offer, perhaps a 10% discount or bonus gift with the first purchase. It might also be access to exclusive content or advanced notice of product drops or sales.
For companies selling digital goods and services, a free resource like a useful PDF is a good option. For paywalled publishers, you could offer free articles, specialized newsletters, or emails containing articles handpicked for the subscriber.
Get the timing right
It’s not just about the how, but the when. An immediate pop-up over a blog post is a great way to scare off a new sign-up. It may be better to wait until the end to make your offer, once they’re already hooked. Discounts are great for first-time visitors to get them on board, and you can trigger a pop-up for those right away. A “before you leave” pop-up, perhaps with a free trial offer, is perfect at this “exit intent” stage. As an alternative, consider countdown timers (i.e., pop-ups indicating a sale for subscribers will end imminently) to improve conversion rates.
Track the right metrics
Once you have an email list, use it to the fullest possible extent. Tracking is a big part of that. There are three important metrics for email capture: the open rate (how many of the emails your customers actually open and look at, the click rate (how many times people click a link that takes them to your site), and the unsubscribe rate (how many people don’t want your communications anymore). According to email marketing company Mailchimp, the average open rate is 35.6%, the average click rate is 2.6%, and unsubscribe rates run at around 0.2%.
Still, don’t get too attached to making all those numbers go up. If your email list is padded with the people who haven’t self-selected to be there, your open rates may still be high, but your click rate and the all-important conversion rate might stay low.
“I told this to a client last year, ‘We’re going to lower your open rates, we’re going to lower your click rates, and you’re going to make more money because of it,’” Jacob says. According to him, the most important metric to watch is your revenue trend over time.
Send out a “welcome series”
Make the most of your email capture by immediately sending a welcome series—a short succession of timed emails for new customers.
“I would say the general framework of four to five emails over a one- to two-week time frame is a good base level to start with,” says Jacob.
This is where you can build brand awareness with stories, make offers, and keep your products in the minds of new sign-ups. And this small flurry of communication just after the visitor has explicitly requested it can cement the brand in their minds. If they sign up and don’t get their first email for months, then they may wonder why they’re even on your email list.
4 email capture software tools
By making use of the best email capture tools, you can ensure you both obtain and utilize customer information optimally.
Some sales platforms, like Shopify, have built-in tools to capture emails, gather data and insights, and plan and execute email campaigns. You can also integrate external email capture tools into your Shopify site. Here are some of the best tools for email list building, with all the features you’ll need to succeed:
Shopify Forms
Shopify Forms is a dedicated service that automates much of the process of email capture and subsequent email marketing. Shopify Forms offers seamless integration with all of Shopify’s other tools, making it a great option if you’re already running a Shopify-powered store.
From capture tools and welcome emails to personalized recommendations, custom forms and form fields, and seasonal sales, Shopify Forms helps you grow your business with actionable insights. You can use the forms dashboard to show you how your potential audience engages with those forms.
Pricing: Shopify Forms is free with a Shopify subscription.
Shopify Email Capture
Shopify Email Capture has one huge selling point for Shopify merchants using Shopify POS systems: It can capture details about visitors in brick-and-mortar stores by matching them with their Shopify Shop Pay account. It does this by matching their payment data, and even gives you the customer’s email and phone number at checkout.
Pricing: Shopify Email Capture is part of any Shopify plan, which starts at $5 per month (when billed annually) and rises to $399 for the advanced plan.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a business-to-business (B2C) marketing and customer relationship management (CRM) platform that offers multiple integrations with website builders, including a Shopify integration. In addition to helping you collect email addresses, it can also track user behavior on your site. For instance, you can see when a visitor has added an item to their cart but then left before checking out.
“I kind of view [Klaviyo] as a data platform that ingests data from a bunch of different sources,” Jacob says.
Pricing: Klaviyo is free for up to 250 profiles, and then begins at $20 per month.
Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a user-friendly email marketing platform with list-building tools. It includes several features to capture email addresses, largely through pop-up dynamic forms, creating promotional emails, and tracking them.
Mailchimp also integrates with social media ad platforms. You can integrate Mailchimp with your Shopify storefront using the Mailchimp app.
Pricing: Mailchimp’s free plan allows you to send up to 1,000 emails a month. Paid plans range from $13 per month to $350 per month.
Email capture FAQ
How does email capture work?
By asking website visitors to provide their email address in different forms, or by recording their email address when they make a purchase, you “capture” their emails so you can send them promotional materials and other forms of content. You can share capture forms across different types of hardware (laptops, mobile devices, etc.) as well as through various platforms (your company’s website, social media, etc.).
What is a good email capture rate?
A good email capture rate varies depending on your industry, but the average click-through rate for links sent to captured emails is around 2.6%, making anything above that a strong benchmark. Ecommerce businesses often aim for 3% to 5%, while highly targeted campaigns or strong incentives can push rates higher. Factors like sign-up form placement, timing, and the value you offer—such as discounts or exclusive content—have a big impact on performance, so testing different strategies is key to improving results.
Is email scraping illegal?
Email scraping—the practice of harvesting email addresses from websites, social media platforms, online directories, and other public sources—isn’t always illegal. However, it becomes illegal when it violates privacy or anti-spam regulations. In the US, sending commercial emails to scraped addresses without proper consent or failing to include required elements (like an unsubscribe option, valid sender info, and accurate subject lines) can lead to fines under the CAN-SPAM Act. In the EU, collecting and using personal data—including email addresses—without explicit consent is illegal under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Many other countries, like Canada and Australia, also require express consent before sending marketing emails.
Sending messages to scraped addresses without permission is not only risky legally but also less effective—self-provided emails from users who opt-in are far more valuable for building engaged subscriber lists. Having users double opt-in can ensure your email list is actively engaged with your brand.
