How to Grow Your Email List
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Here’s the video!
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Have you noticed this too? It REALLY annoys me!
All the online experts say that to build your email list you should "share your freebie with your following."
Completely forgetting the fact that not everyone has an 100k Instagram following, and if your followers only consist of your 300 family & friends and not potential buyers, sharing your freebies with them isn't going to be the game changer you hoped for.
Next the experts give advice like...
🥸 (Expert) "Run ads to your freebies."
👩💻 (You) "That sounds expensive…"
🥸 "Post your freebie in a Facebook group."
👩💻 "That’s not allowed by the group rules."
🥸 "Just be active on Instagram daily."
👩💻 "Sorry, my mental well-being says that’s a hard no."
…So you’re left feeling…😤
Just know you're NOT crazy or alone. Experts online seem to love dishing out very impractical list-building advice, and I'm here to change that.
So if you're feeling like your list growth is going SO slow.
Read this blog till the end cause I'll spill the beans on my exact strategy which works, even if you're a complete beginner.
This is the exact strategy which has led to over 60,000 opt-ins to my list over the years.
Let me just note, not one of my social channels has anywhere near those follower numbers, so it obviously didn't come from Instagram or TikTok.
Let's get right into it!
Okay so we already know the problem: the advice to "share your freebie with your audience" doesn't produce that many email subscribers if you have no audience.
This is what I call the "traffic" problem.
A percentage of your traffic who sees your freebie will love it and convert to an email subscriber. But if you have next to no traffic, it'll result in next to no subscribers. That's why your email list currently likely consists of 2 people plus your darling supportive mother. 👵🏻
Now the one thing the list building experts do get right is the advice to create a freebie, because it is true that almost no one really cares about your call to action to "subscribe to my newsletter" and giving away some useful freebie will significantly up the conversion rate from people seeing the opt-in call to action to people actually getting on your email list.
Creating a freebie is just one ingredient, not the entire recipe.
If you just create a freebie and that's it and don't focus also on the traffic side of things, it's almost a complete waste of time because you're missing the traffic piece.
only with traffic will your list actually grow.
So many people think:
“oh my freebie must be terrible, I need to create a new one. No one is opt-ing in so obviously I created the wrong one."
99% of the time, that's not actually true and you're solving the wrong problem. That's why some business owners have 7 different freebies they spent months creating and their email list is still sitting at 32 people.
The problem isn't that your freebie idea is terrible, the problem is you don't have traffic going to the freebie.
Remember in summer camp when your counselors would create a sugary explosion by dropping a few Mentos into a Coke bottle and watching it explode?
Your list growth is like the mentos +coke experiment.
Your freebie is the coke. Your traffic is the mentos. And only when the two are mixed together do you get the explosion of growth on your email list.
If you have one without the other, you have... well, two individually tasty yet unhealthy items. Not an explosion.
Now for some wild reason, the two ingredients needed for our explosion seems to be conveniently forgotten by many who teach how to build a list.
When experts tell you to create a freebie and then promote it and you're thinking "Promote it to who?! I don't have an audience." just know, you're not crazy, they're just only explaining half of how list-building works.
So what can we do about this traffic problem?
If you have attempted to do what the experts say and "share your freebie with your following”, you've either already or are soon about to realize that all your friends & family probably aren't your ideal clients and the vast majority just aren't therefore interested in your freebie.
OR you post to your businesses social media account which maybe have a grand total of 300 followers and get a grand total of 1 opt-in.
the reason this happens is because of conversion rates.
Not every social media follower, even if they're interested in your topic will opt-in when you tell them to on social media. You're likely to get just a couple opt-ins from a 300 person social following. And that's when you realize you have a longggg way to go!
If you have a social following of 100,000 then yeah sure, just posting to social will get you the opt-ins you need, but if that's not the case, this is another big waste of time for most business owners.
So how do we get the mentos, AKA the traffic so that someone actually visits your opt-in page and therefore you get subscribers?
If you hear this next piece of terrible advice from an expert, I would honestly walk directly out the closest door and don't trust a word more that person says ever again.
What am I talking about? I'm talking about ads.
Ads are not a beginners game with a beginners budget.
At the moment, getting quality leads from ads is costing around $8 - $12 per lead on average.
Yes you can get leads for $1, but those are not what we call "quality" leads.
I spoke to a lady who had built a list of $1 leads and she had kind of indicated:
"well people must just be running ads wrong if they're getting $10 leads, I can get them so much cheaper."
To which I asked how many of her $1 leads have actually bought her product?
Her answer? None.
If you're a smart entrepreneur, you know that the goal isn't to get the cheapest leads possible, the goal is to get quality leads who will actually buy your offer. And when I chat with mastermind friends who do actually turn their quality leads into sales, their leads are costing about $8-$12 per lead.
Next we need to do a little math:
Say you want to build a 1,000 person email list, with ads at $8-$12/lead.
That'll cost you $8,000 - $12,000 (for the leads alone).
You will also have to pay an ads management fee. If you want someone decent, the minimum will be $3,000 per month. They always want you to sign up for a starting contract of 3 months.
If you choose to run ads to build your list, expect to spend around $17,000 - $21,000 to start.
See what I mean about ads not being a beginners game? 👀
If your business can support that start-up cost, incredible, go run ads. However, if that's feeling a little out of your budget, keep reading.
So if posting to your own social media doesn't work and running ads isn't right unless you can risk loosing $20k to start... what can you do?
On July 10th at 2 PM ET, I’m sharing everything you need to know in my masterclass:
In the masterclass, you’ll learn:
How to build a list that can be used to not only book out your current business (whatever that is - from coaching to calligraphy to web design & way beyond)
How to future-proof it too, so that your digital product dreams can become reality (and sooner than you’d think!)
If your entrepreneurial dreams have been on hold whilst you try, and fail to figure out list building, you need to be there.
LIVE attendees will walk away with an extra bonus - my Irresistible Digital Product Blueprint.
It'll be your secret weapon to understanding your audience on a deep level. You'll uncover exactly who your ideal buyers are, what they desperately need, and how you can meet those needs. And it's yours when you come to the masterclass live!
Now I know, I know, someone is going to hate me for putting the answer in a separate masterclass. But honestly, this is not a 5 second quick fix tip or an easy hack for someone who wants a shortcut to success.
There is no quick hack to list building and business success, so if that's what you're looking for, you're going to need to go somewhere else to find it.
The masterclass is 90 minutes long, so we're going IN DEPTH into how to fix this traffic problem. If you're serious about list building and you want the FULL answer that actually works and not just a 20 second tip in a YouTube video, I look forward to having you at the masterclass.
In the masterclass we'll sort through your traffic problem.
Because as you know, if you don't have traffic, no one will see your freebies and that means, you won't get opt-ins and your list is likely to stay a party of 3 for a long while.
It's why when I see someone has a list building course which consists only of "pick an email marketing software, make a freebie, send weekly emails" I'm so annoyed. Because if you simply do that, you're going to basically get nowhere with your list building.
