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Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones represent an opportunity to easily collect web marketing e-mail addresses on location. All the following methods of mobile e-mail address collection are worth using in your business.

Get customers to text their e-mail addresses

Use your advertising to ask customers and prospects to text their e-mail address. Here are two ways to ask for e-mail addresses by text message:

  • Ask people to text their e-mail addresses to your mobile phone number. If you don’t expect a lot of volume or can’t afford a short code or text-messaging platform, this method allows you to accept e-mail addresses from people on your mobile phone and add them to your address book so that you can send people e-mails.

    It’s highly manual, and you have to share or advertise your own mobile phone number, so use this method only if you can’t afford better technology.

  • Ask people to text their e-mail addresses to your short code. A short code is a short phone number, usually four to six digits long. To enable this for your business, you need to buy or rent a short code, and then you need to make sure that your text-messaging application is set up to populate your database with e-mail addresses sent by text.

    If you have a dedicated short code — one that you own — you can ask people to text their e-mail addresses directly to your short code. Your platform’s database can automatically recognize the e-mail addresses and put that information in the proper database fields for you.

    If you use a shared short code — one that you rent or share with other people — you need to ask people to include your keyword along with the e-mail address. For example, “text KEYWORD emailaddress to 12345,” where KEYWORD is your short code keyword, e-mailaddress is the subscriber’s e-mail address, and 12345 is your shared short code.

Provide forms in mobile websites and apps

Your mobile website should include a sign-up form so that people can join your e-mail list from their mobile phones. List the domain name of your sign-up form in all your ads (for example, www.yourcompany.com/sign-up). Keep your sign-up form short.

[Credit: Courtesy of Constant Contact]
Credit: Courtesy of Constant Contact

People signing up might be typing on a very small keyboard. Ask for an e-mail address and a first name and allow them to select from an appropriate list. You can collect additional information later.

You can use mobile websites and applications to collect e-mail addresses at

  • Networking events, so that you don’t need to take a business card and type the info in later

  • Trade shows, when you’re walking the floor or working your booth

  • In your store, if you have a physical location and you interact in person

  • In your office, during an appointment

About This Article

This article is from the book: 

About the book author:

John Arnold is a renowned marketing trainer and speaker as well as an entrepreneur and small business advisor. Arnold continues to train and advise small business owners as a Constant Contact regional development director.

Michael Becker is the managing director of North America at the Mobile Marketing Association. Becker has written more than 80 articles on mobile marketing and is an adjunct professor of mobile marketing at Golden Gate University.

Marty Dickinson is the president of HereNextYear.com, a company that combines writing, speaking, and internet strategy to help clients become recognized authorities in their fields. Dickinson also works as a business consultant to web designers and SEO specialists.

Ian Lurie has been a digital marketer for over 25 years. He created and sold the digital agency Portent, Inc. and provides consulting and training services.

Elizabeth Marsten is the senior director of strategic marketplace services for Tinuiti. Marsten has experience in Google AdWords, Microsoft Ads, Amazon Advertising, Facebook, and other platforms.