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]](https://www.dummies.com/wp-content/uploads/340228.image0.jpg)
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