This article is created for business owners, marketers, influencers, or even regular Instagram users to learn how they can get emails from their (or anyone else’s) Instagram followers, with a couple of easy tricks.
We’ll cover three main ways how you can get emails from Instagram followers:
- How to instantly get email addresses from all your Instagram followers
- How to grow your email list with Instagram for free
- How to use Facebook Ads for getting follower emails
Let me walk you through it.
How to instantly get email addresses from your Instagram followers
Did you know that 40% of all Instagram users have their email addresses publicly available?
You can find email addresses in two places:
In the user’s Instagram bio or if it is a business profile, you can click on the special “Email” button to see the email address (this special email button is only available through Instagram’s mobile application).
Approximately 30% of all Instagram users have a business account, even though they are not a business at all. Why are they doing this? Because it’s super easy to switch to a business account + because users get access to additional stats about their profile that they otherwise don’t get to see.
What people overlook is the fact that when they’re making the switch to a business profile they agree for their contact information to be publicly displayed on their accounts.
Where to Find Instagram Email Addresses?
As we mentioned, business profiles have an ‘email’ button on their profiles. And if you click on it you’ll be able to see their email address.
This means that if you have less than 500 followers you can go over every follower to check if they have their email displayed. Copy-paste it into a spreadsheet (can be a drag but it’s well worth it) and use it for your email campaign.
Anyone with more than 500 followers (there’s no upper limit) can reach out to us to get the email list of the followers of any Instagram profile.
Using our Instagram research team, we analyze and deliver user emails in less than 48 hours, cleaned of spam traps, fake accounts, and bots. We also verify every email with Clearbit so you can safely contact only real people and not worry about being flagged by Google for reaching out to invalid emails.
Let’s sum up the process of how to build an email list with Instagram:
- Create incentives (discounts, free trial, or free content) as an exchange for followers emails;
- Create an impressionable post or story and sponsor it so that you can include a link
- Extract emails of the remaining followers;
- Start your (Instagram) email marketing. 🙂
Extra tip: Get the email addresses of your competitors’ followers
Other than businesses getting the email addresses of their followers, the second most used tactic is to go after the followers of their competitors.
How to start?
- Share with us your most important competitors;
- Our research team analyzes their Instagram follower emails (20-30% will have their emails publicly available);
- In 48 hours you get the data, ready to be used for outreach.
How to contact your competitors’ followers?
Since the approach is different than the one used for contacting your own audience, here’s how our clients usually go about it:
“Hey {name},
We saw that you follow {competitor} on Instagram, so we thought you might be interested in xxx.”
Reaching out to people this way is not only personalizing the message but also binding to GDPR and CCPA regulations because you’re mentioning where you got their public email from (Instagram).
And if you’re still hesitant to email them, you can use the list as Custom Audience and show ads only to those people on Facebook and Instagram.
Let me emphasize that: You can run Facebook and Instagram Ads on people that follow your competitors!
Check out the case study below to see the results one client had with 10k competitor emails used for social media ads.
Case study: Using Targeted Emails in Facebook Ads for 13x ROAS
How to grow your email list with Instagram for free
Let’s think for a second about the value of Instagram followers for any business. They’re people that went out of their way to visit a certain business on Instagram and select the “Follow” button, agreeing to keep up with any post they share on Instagram.
So how can you convert Instagram followers into subscribers and customers?
To make people do a certain action (share a post, subscribe to a newsletter, or purchase a product) you need to offer some value in exchange. The best ways to get people to sign-up to your email list from Instagram are:
- Easy to enter contests/challenges or giveaways
- High-value freebies
Let’s cover how you can execute each one of them and start collecting those emails.
1. How to run contests and giveaways for your Instagram fans
Instagram contests are a great way to strengthen your relationship with your fans while growing your Instagram email list. Here is the most important stuff you need to know to run contests.
- A clear set of official rules that are easily accessed
Since you cannot include links in the description of a post, use the comment section to direct them to your website, or landing page where they can read the rules and leave their email to enter.
- Comment & subscribe to enter the contest
No matter what the giveaway is, always make your audience announce that they’ve entered the contest by leaving a comment. That way we’ll get social proof and a higher perceived value of the prize.
For those of you who want to get a tone of virality in their contest, you can ask your followers to tag a friend in their comment.
Once they leave their comment they will click your link and access the landing page with the rules and your email form.
- Choosing the right reward
Offering an expensive prize that’s not really relevant to your brand will attract freeloaders who will follow only while the giveaway is active. Such followers are not the ones you want to target, right?
The best way to keep them at bay is by offering a prize related to your brand or profile theme.
It can be in the form of an exclusive gift basket containing your products, loyalty points, or free membership.
As you can see from the image, other than their personal contact information, you should add an Instagram handle section. That way you’ll know whether the person that signed up also commented on your post.
2. The 4 step process to turn Instagram followers Into email subscribers
In addition to everything else that we have shared about turning Instagram followers into email subscribers, we will also share a free 4-step process that will help you turn some of your followers into email subscribers.
Give your followers a reason to share their email address
If you want your followers to share their contact information and email address, you need to give something back to them. One way to do that is to share exclusive offers with them. Get to know your followers’ pain points and help your audience solve them, and I promise you, they will reward you for it.
For example, if you are a business coach, you know that your Instagram followers are business owners that constantly need new clients for their business, you can create a free PDF where you will discuss how they can do that.
That’s why the first and most important step in this process is to give your followers a valid reason to share their email addresses with you. That means that you should consider creating a lead magnet.
You should put yourself in the shoes of your followers and ask yourself what would they love to get from you for free.
If you don’t know the answer to this question, don’t worry, you can always create an Instagram story and directly ask your followers about their opinion. Even if you have multiple ideas about what you should give to your audience, you can create a poll where you share your thoughts and see what your followers vote for the most.
Here’s an example of a story where a fitness coach asks his audience about their opinion.
The lead magnet you choose depends on your targeted audience and their needs. For example, if you are running a women’s fashion brand, giving your audience a 30% discount code when they subscribe to your email list would work pretty well.
But, if you are selling a digital course, giving a free ebook or mini-video course would work better than giving a discount for your high-ticket item, because your audience gets the chance to experience your teaching methods before spending any money.
The most important thing is to not ask your audience for their email addresses without giving them anything in return. You have to create some kind of value first.
As of right now, Instagram doesn’t have a section where you can get your followers to share their email addresses with you, but that’s why you can use the Instagram bio to do this.
Here, we will share an example of how another business does this.
This is the profile of a creator that teaches other moms how to create and grow an online business. He uses this free guide about making money as a freelancer to get people on her email list, where she later upsells her paid courses.
Quick note: if you want to have multiple links in your Instagram bio, other than your lead magnet, you can use a link-in-bio tool such as Linktree or Lnk.Bio.
Create a landing page
After you have understood the value of your lead magnet and created yours, you can’t convert your Instagram followers to list subscribers if you don’t give them the option to join your list.
That’s why the next step in this process is to build a website where your audience will give you their email address and get something in return.
If you don’t want to get too technical about creating a website, we would suggest you use a one-page website builder that is easy to use and allows you to create a landing page for your lead magnet in no time.
Some of our suggestions for one-page website builders are ConvertKit, Carrd, Mailchimp, Unbounce, Wix.
Create your email list and send emails to your subscribers
This is a pretty simple step. After you have created your email list, you should start emailing people that have joined it. You may also want to have an automatic welcome series of emails for new email subscribers.
You should be consistent with your email sending so they know when they should expect your emails. Make a schedule and stick to it.
For this step, we recommend you try some of these email marketing software: Omnisend, EmailOctopus, EngageBay, ConvertKit, GetResponse, AWeber, or ActiveCampaign.
Promote your lead magnet
People won’t have a desire to get your free discount code or ebook if they don’t know that such a thing exists, so that’s why you should promote it.
Use everything you have at your disposal: Instagram posts, their captions, Instagram stories, Reels, your bio, and the comments you leave on related posts, make sure that you mention your lead magnet everywhere you can and where it is natural to do so.
A clear CTA at the end of a post or story can do wonders in terms of getting more email subscribers.
You can also add the option for your subscribers to refer their friends that are also interested in your niche in return for something. For example, you could offer an additional 20% discount for every 5 referrals they bring to your email list.
If your email list is working and giving you good ROI, you shouldn’t stop with only using organic ways to reach new subscribers. Instead of depending only on organic engagement, you can try and use paid ads through Facebook or Instagram to increase your post’s reach.
However, if you don’t want to go through this long and hard process of acquiring email addresses from your followers, make sure to read the next section, where we explain how to get numerous email addresses pretty fast.
How to Use Facebook Ads to Get Follower Emails
Facebook Ads are great for getting more exposure to your Instagram followers. But, the platform doesn’t offer a direct option to target your followers.
Why, you ask?
Because everyone would use them since the targeting would be too great and they would make less money from advertisers.
However, there is a workaround that enables you to run ads on an audience that probably follows you. Let me explain:
Retargeting your Instagram followers with Facebook and Instagram ads
Creating this type of ads is just like any other type of Facebook retargeting.
The process is basically setting up a new Custom Audience that contains your Instagram followers, and then creating your ads to target that custom audience.
- How to create a custom audience with your Instagram followers
Once you’re in Facebook Ad Manager click on “Audiences” -> “Create Audience” -> “Custom Audience” -> “Engagement”. Once you’re in these Instagram engagement ads you can choose to create an audience based on:
- People who have engaged with your Instagram business profile
- OR who have watched one of your videos on Instagram
We recommend selecting the first option and retarget people that have interacted with your account. That’s because you get additional targeting opportunities with “Instagram business profile” such as:
- Everyone who engaged with your Instagram profile (this includes visiting your profile OR engaging with your content or ads);
- Only people who visited your Instagram profile;
- Only people who engaged with your content or ads;
- People who sent a message to your business profile;
- People who saved any of your posts or ads;
- Target Instagram Followers With Facebook Ads.
How To Use Your Instagram Email List for Best ROI?
There are numerous ways to use an email list from your Instagram followers, but here we will share the ones that worked the best for our clients.
Facebook Custom Audiences
Facebook has a special feature called “Custom Audiences”, where you can handpick every single user that sees your ads. You do this by importing the email addresses from the people you want to target.
Facebook invented this option not so long ago, in order to help brands and businesses retarget their existing customers, but the best part is that Facebook doesn’t verify the source where you got emails from.
This means that you can use the emails you have collected through your lead magnet, but at the same time because Facebook doesn’t verify the source, you can also buy email addresses from our service at Influencers Club, either from your followers or from your competitor’s followers and use them in your email marketing campaigns.
If you are interested and want to get numerous emails from your targeted audience, make sure to schedule a quick call with our team, where you can talk about the details and whether you want to get emails from your followers or your competitor.
Upsells
When a follower signs up for your email list and you deliver him the freebie or discount code you promised, wait one or two days and send them an upsell where you will offer a paid product that in most cases is complimentary with your freebie.
There is a great chance that this will work because they have already expressed interest in your products, and if they liked and get value from the freebie you delivered, they might be tempted to buy one of your paid products.
For example, if a customer signs up for your free digital marketing ebook, you might later offer them to buy your digital marketing video course, because it is more than clear that the person is interested in digital marketing.
If the person also buys your video course, after some time continues with the upsells by offering him a 1-on-1 consultation. Upsells are how many brands and businesses make the most of their money.
Product Launches and Deal Emails
If you have a new product launch, you must use your email list because it is completely free to do so, and you can use the profits that you get from your email sales to fund your other marketing efforts for the product launch.
You might also want to use your email to create hype even before the product is launched by sharing how the development process is going.
Also, if you have a deal for some of your products going on, that can be a completely random deal that you decided to do, maybe a Black Friday or Cyber Monday sale, it doesn’t matter, just make sure to inform your email list about it and I am sure that you will get some sales.
Conclusion
Although email marketing is one of the oldest marketing strategies, it still has many advantages over other marketing strategies. By having email addresses from your targeted users, you have the opportunity to always reach them directly in their inboxes and convert them into customers.
If we know that there are 1 billion Instagram users and 3.8 billion email users, can you imagine what effect combining them both will have on your sales numbers?
Utilizing Instagram in order to grow your email lists is a pretty good way to attract new email subscribers. If you use your Instagram posts correctly, you add the right CTAs and also create the best lead magnet possible, you are likely to see an increase in subscribers, which will also result in more customers.
If you want to grow your email list manually, by using a lead magnet, we just shared a simple 4-step process on how to do that.
However, if you would like to accelerate the growth of your email list and sales numbers, feel free to schedule a call with our team because we can give you emails from numerous targeted customers in no time.
GET INSTAGRAM EMAILS
If you are interested in learning more about how you can get validated Instagram data, make sure to schedule a quick call with our team, where you can discuss the details related to your targeting.
