Podcast Summary: Shiny New Clients!

Episode: Grow your email list: The strategy that got 700 opt-ins in a week!

Host: Jenna Harding
Date: February 16, 2026

Episode Overview

This energetic, strategy-packed episode of Shiny New Clients! centers on Jenna Harding’s practical, generous approach to email list growth. Jenna breaks down the “List Growth Method” she developed—one that delivered 700+ opt-ins in a single week—and dispels outdated or pushy tactics, focusing instead on simplicity, clarity, speed, and authentic value. The episode is essential listening for any entrepreneur, especially women-led businesses or service-based professionals, looking to transform the way they attract and nurture prospects.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Problem with Old-School Email List Growth

Traditional Freebies: Jenna explains that the outdated method involves creating one elaborate lead magnet and using it for years, but this no longer works due to changing audience behaviors.
- “Back then, years ago, you could just make one freebie and use it literally for years. But that’s not how things work anymore.” [03:05]
Covert Sales Pitch Pitfalls:
- Many coaches advise using freebies as disguised sales pitches, but this approach turns people off and limits your opt-in rate.
- “If your secret intention is to sell someone something, you are optimizing this thing to make a sale. You are not optimizing it for massive growth potential.” [05:10]
- Using quizzes as sales traps is called out as tired and “ingenuine” (or, more properly, disingenuous).
- “It takes the fun out of it. I feel like it’s ingenuine. Ingenuine. Ingenuine. Is that even a word?” [16:45]

The List Growth Method: A New Approach

Constant, Varied Freebies:
- Continually offer new, ultra-targeted lead magnets to suit different audience segments and settings.
- “Nothing like a fresh freebie to reinvigorate your list.” [03:45]
Simplicity Is Key:
- Jenna highlights a failed attempt to combine “on-camera confidence” with tech setup, resulting in a confusing, underperforming freebie.
- “If you don’t have a clear promise and a clear result... it becomes very difficult to talk about it in a succinct manner. And you need to be succinct on Instagram.” [10:20]
Case Study—The 700 Opt-Ins in a Week:
- After simplifying her process and focusing on one quick, actionable result, Jenna created a freebie on a Saturday afternoon and saw a 75%+ conversion rate, with over 700 sign-ups in a week.
- “We don’t need to be putting six weeks of effort into our lead magnets... I did it in a Saturday afternoon.” [13:30]
Three Criteria for Winning Freebies:
1. Crystal-clear promise: Can you state the result in three seconds?
2. Speedy format: Is it fast for your person to consume (not a 45-min webinar!)?
3. Immediate payoff: Can your lead gain value within an hour?
- “The fact is, good freebie doesn’t give more, it gives less more clearly, which is better for you and your leads and the health of your subscriber list.” [14:45]
Generosity, Not Pressure:
- Overdeliver value with no strings attached; let your email list build the relationship and create future sales opportunities.

How the List Growth Event Works

Freebie Creation in 48 Hours:
- Jenna recounts the success of her two-day “Freebie in a Weekend” event, now rebranded as “Grow Your List With Instagram” (moving to midweek for broader accessibility).
- “You’ll still be creating an entire freebie and funnel in 48 hours... not a sneaky sales pitch freebie.” [08:10]
Flexible Tech Setups:
- Multiple “tiers” of tech, from free to advanced, ensure the process works for both new and experienced business owners.
- “We have multiple tiers—T I E R S—so you can have no tears—T E A R S.” [21:00]
Coaching, Support & Templates:
- Live coaching, feedback, step-by-step processes, and promo templates are provided.
- “The goal with this event is every single thing is done by the time we wrap up on day two.” [22:10]
Pre-Event Prep & Accessibility:
- Pre-recorded lessons available so attendees can arrive with ideas or get help brainstorming onsite.
- “Some people freeze at the idea of needing to come up with something on the spot... so now we will facilitate both types of person.” [23:50]

Quick Wins and Nurturing Dormant List Members

Reactivating Old Leads:
- Announcing a new freebie can also wake up disengaged subscribers, offering them a quick, tangible win and rekindling their interest.
- “That is such a powerful way to reinvigorate the people who already showed interest in you before, but may have fallen off a bit.” [25:00]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Jenna’s humor and relatability:
- Throughout, Jenna weaves in playful anecdotes—like befriending chickadees at her bird feeder—to infuse a sense of fun and “real-life” grounding.
- “This is how I am regulating and healing my nervous system. This bird feeder.” [01:30]
On Over-Complicating Freebies:
- “If you don’t have a clear promise and a clear result... it becomes very difficult to talk about it in a succinct manner.” [10:20]
On Generosity Over Gimmicks:
- “Good freebie doesn’t give more, it gives less more clearly, which is better for you and your leads and the health of your subscriber list.” [14:45]
On Sneaky Tactics:
- “You’re never going to get to the end of someone’s quiz and they go, ‘You know what, you're fine, don't give me your money.’” [16:20]
On Event Accessibility:
- “We have multiple tiers—T I E R S—so you can have no tears—T E A R S.” [21:00]

Timestamps for Key Segments

00:00–01:50 – Jenna’s intro, bird feeder story as nervous system “regulation.”
01:50–05:10 – Why traditional freebies don’t work anymore; pitfalls of sales-focused lead magnets.
05:10–08:30 – The importance of offering new, diverse freebies and Jenna’s “bazillion” lead magnets.
08:30–11:00 – Mistake case study: Combining too many topics in one freebie.
11:00–14:30 – The “aha!” moment: Simplification leads to 700 opt-ins in one week.
14:30–17:00 – The three criteria for effective, no-pressure freebies.
17:00–21:00 – Event evolution: Freebie in a Weekend → Grow Your List With Instagram, supporting multiple tech levels.
21:00–24:00 – How to participate in the event, pre-event content, live coaching, and support options.
24:00–End – How to wake up dormant subscribers with your new freebie, and Jenna’s closing encouragement.

Takeaways

Keep it Simple: Targeted, easily-consumed freebies outperform complex “hidden sales pitch” lead magnets.
Rapid Results: Your lead magnet should create value for the lead within an hour.
Continual Innovation: New freebies wake up your existing audience and keep your list fresh and engaged.
Supportive Community: With accessible tools, live support, and updated templates, Jenna’s system is designed for entrepreneurs at all levels.

This punchy, practical episode is perfect for service-based business owners ready to ditch the sales traps and build an email list with genuine value and lasting growth.

Transcript

A (0:00)

Welcome to Shiny New Clients, the marketing podcast that helps you attract shiny new clients to your business. We'll talk about social media, what makes people buy, how to go viral, and marketing psychology all in 20 minutes or less. Whether you're a coach, a stylist, or a wedding planner, if you've got a service based business to sell, this is the show you need to fill your calendar. I'm Jenna Warner, your new marketing coach and this is Shiny New Clients. It's that time of year again, the time when I help you grow your email subscribers. I started getting passionate about this when I found out how much money my peers were spending on growing their email list. I didn't know that I was some kind of list growth wizard, but I have been growing my email list absolutely for free and I will tell you how so you can do it too, because I teach it now. Also, it's really important that you know my view, what I am seeing right now because my all star husband has set up outside our living room window a bird feeder. Oh, a nuthatch just landed. The sweet, charming nuthatch known for its acrobatic tendencies and sparky personality. I'm like probably 2 meters from this bird feeder and it has, it's just like all day action. We saw red, yellow, orange and beige. Ish, beige, ish, beige, beige colored pine grosbeaks earlier. There's at least a dozen chickadees that I'm trying to befriend. I went out there and held bird seed in my hand and tried to get them to land on me. They didn't this time, but they will. This is how I am regulating and healing my nervous system. This bird feeder. Back to business, let's talk about the list growth method. My absolute favorite way to constantly grow my email list. Grow my email list every single month using a freebie funnel. But not your average freebie funnel. Okay, so let's break down some of the language that we're using here. The classic way to grow your email subscribers is, is to offer your audience something that they then trade you their name and email for. So they give you their name and email, you give them some sort of free resource. Back when I made my very first lead magnet, it was like 2020 and it took me, man, it took me weeks to put together. It was so formulaic and super strategic and it was pretty and beautiful and I made it in canva and it took me forever. And then I used that same freebie for years and years and years. I mean, it's probably still Floating around out there somewhere. See, back then, years ago, you could just make one freebie and use it literally for years. But that's not how things work anymore. We don't just have one freebie that we give away on repeat for years because you need different freebies for different, different settings. We need to surprise and delight our audience. People will hear you talk about one thing and say no, and then hear you talk about another freebie and say yes. If you only have one freebie and one of your followers hears you talk about it and doesn't want it, do they just never come onto your list? Do they just never subscribe? No, you make a new one and you tell them about that and then you go, okay, yeah, now you're speaking my language. So it does. It just. It's a disservice to just have one. And in my experience, when I keep talking about the same one over and over and over again, they like, they lose steam. Right? Nothing like a fresh freebie to reinvigorate your list. A lot of people will teach freebies that direct are supposed to directly lead to sales, right? Maybe your freebie tells people your methodology or it introduces your offers, or it makes people feel like they're missing a missing puzzle piece, and that missing puzzle piece is you. So they should pay you. And this is the approach. A lot of people have had to freebies for a long time and a lot of coaches teach for freebies. But the problem with that is if your secret intention is to sell someone something, then you are optimizing this thing to make a sale. You are not optimizing it for massive growth potential and massive list growth potential. You're not setting it up to get a bazillion people downloading it and then building trust with them, and then they fall in love with you and then they see the sales content and want to buy. Think about it. Last time you put up a sales post on Instagram, how did it perform compared to the other content you put up that that week? Chances are the sales content got the lowest amount of views and engagement and comments versus your growth and nurture content. Right? And then yet at the same time, we, well, we can make a lead magnet that's designed to sell something secretly and it's going to pop off. That's not how we do it around here. Hence my creation of the list growth method. So last year I released a bazillion that's a official stat. A bazillion. I released so many lead magnets perfecting my list growth Method and coming up with a repeatable strategy that you can use to create a resource people actually want. And they will like happily opt into your list to receive and then become happy little subscribers on your email list. Last year I taught this entire strategy at a two day event called Freebie in a Weekend. And it was so fun and a lot of people made multiple freebies, got hundreds of downloads immediately after they promoted it using the templates we gave them. It was a a great two day event, but a bunch of people couldn't come because it was on the weekend and they either didn't want to work on a weekend or like had their kids or something. So now we're running the event again because it was so successful. But we can't call it Freebie in a weekend anymore because it won't be on a weekend because people didn't like that it was on a weekend. So I'm really grappling with, I thought that name was so good, but now it's gonna be something like grow your list with Instagram. So you'll still be creating an entire freebie and funnel in 48 hours, but this year, 2026 on a Thursday, Friday instead of a Saturday, Sunday. And the freebie you create will not be a sneaky sales pitch freebie. You're gonna follow the list growth method. Okay. So while I was perfecting the list growth method, I created a freebie that did not do what I wanted it to do. And then in hindsight, I realized the exact mistake I had made. So let me know if you have made this one as well. I started making this resource all about on camera confidence. I could talk for days about how to have more confidence in your content. And then while I was talking about having more confidence, I started to incorporate things like how to set up your space, like how to set up your ring, light and stand. Because people are always asking me how high to set up their phone stand when they're filming content. And the answer is hip height if you're doing a full body, and basically eye level if you are talking to the camera. Anyway, as I started talking about stands, I started talking about what to set your phone settings to, like should you be recording in 180, 1080p or 4K. And then I started talking about lighting and I started talking about all of these technical things and what your Instagram settings should be. So this document that was supposed to be about on camera confidence became two things at once. It became how to set up your phone and your space to film as well. As have confidence while filming. And while that might not seem like a huge deal when it came to promoting this opt in, I realized the problem I had caused, which is if you don't have a clear promise and a clear result from your free thing, then if you it becomes very difficult to talk about it in a succinct manner. And you need to be succinct on Instagram in your promo content, you need to be able to say in a sentence or less what someone is going to gain from this offer. So then I started to try and simplify what I was saying and I would have like half the people were opting in for the confidence stuff and then they were getting all the tech stuff and they were like, wait, what is this? And then people would opt in for the tech stuff and they get the confidence stuff and they'd email us and be like, I think I got the wrong thing. So it became such a mess and I was glad for it because it reiterated part of the strategy behind the list growth method, which is simplicity. Simplicity in all its forms, Simplicity in the message, simplicity in the title, simplicity even in the tech setup. So then it's Saturday afternoon, right? I'm on my back porch hanging out with the chickadees. And I think because I over complicated that last freebie, what if I swing far the other way and I try just completely oversimplifying a freebie. How simple can I make this entire process and can I do it in a Saturday afternoon? And I did. I sat there on the porch and in one Saturday afternoon I created the entire freebie. The text setup, the opt in page, the delivery email while I was just sitting there on a couch. And then I was like, okay, I've got this. I have nailed it and I can now teach this and make it repeatable. The week I promoted this freebie, I had a almost a 75% conversion rate on the opt in page and over 700 people opted into it and it was like, bingo. We don't need to be putting six weeks of effort into our lead magnets. We don't need to be using like sneaky witchcraft and where we're trying to like secretly convince someone to buy from us in our lead magnets. They can be so much easier. And then let your list do the work. Your email list is so valuable. It is such a valuable asset. If you sell to people right away in your freebies and they don't feel like they're going to gain from actually being on this list, half of them are going to leave One of the like tenants of this strategy is generosity and over delivering and giving to people right away. The fact is, good freebie doesn't give more, it gives less more clearly, which is better for you and your leads and the health of your subscriber list. Remember when people got so obsessed with quizzes for a while and you could like pay somebody $5,000 and they would build you a quiz and we all know, like we all know that when you take the quiz it's going to at the end tell you to buy something. Like it's about putting you into a category that you'll resonate with. You're never going to get to the end of someone's quiz and they go, you know what, you're fine, don't give me your money. And I feel like that kind of sneaky selling like it's a turn off now, right? I don't want to do your quiz just to be told that I should pay you for some sort of transformation. If, if you're pulling me into a quiz so that I can like find my fun little archetype and what kind of a whatever I am, like it's teen magazine in 2007. That's so fun. But I don't have that fun anymore doing entrepreneur quizzes because I know at the end you're just going to tell me to buy something. It takes the fun out of it. I feel like it's ingenuine. Ingenuine. Ingenuine. That's one of those words. Is that even a word? It's not. Ingenuine isn't a standard English word. I mean disingenuous. I feel like we might need to make it a word because I use it often. Whoops. If you're thinking, I wonder if my freebie follows this formula that Jen is talking about or is at least close to it. Here are three criteria you want to see if you meet. Can you state the result someone gets from your freebie in three seconds? Well, firstly, they should be able to get a result from the freebie. And can you say it in three seconds? Is the format fast for your person to consume? Like if it is a 45 minute webinar? No, that's not fast to consume. The way we build freebies, it's like a really quick read. It shouldn't take them more than a couple of minutes because the fact is people aren't going to give us a couple of minutes. Our attention spans are too broken. And thirdly, does your lead gain something from your freebie? Within an hour of receiving it. If your freebie gives them a six month action plan or something like hypothetical and long no, that's going to be a no. We want to know that they could gain something within an hour after reading this. Their life is different. Their life is better somehow. All right, so I'll say them again. Can you say the result someone gets within three seconds? Is the format fast for someone to consume and can they get a result within an hour of receiving it? That is the criteria of a list growth method. Freebie. The way that I am going to teach you how to do it at how to grow your list with Instagram formerly known as Freebie in a weekend. I'm so bummed you can't call it that anymore. Will help you come up with your idea, create the resource itself, set up the entire freebie funnel. So like all the tech back end and I'll even give you templates to promote it. On Instagram. Last year some people left and immediately had hundreds of new subscribers on their lists. I am so excited for this event because it was such a success last year and because it ultimately saves you so much time. Like no more sitting on ideas, no more struggling with tech with nobody to ask questions. Questions too. We actually have. Okay, let me tell you about the tech. The way that we set up the tech is we have multiple tiers. T I E R S so you can have no tears. T E A R S. So basically if you want to use like tier 1, fancy tech tech similar to what I use, it's like a little bit expensive, but there's lots of moving parts. If you have like a huge list or huge following, this is probably for you. So that would be like the fanciest tier. But there's also a super simple tier. I believe it uses only free software. And we will show you how to set up your freebie funnel and just keep it like as basic and simple as possible. So if you're a little bit newer, you're just starting to grow your list, you have a small following, then you can use that version. I even have my operations manager, Jenna is coming to this event and she runs a breakout room where people can ask her tech questions. And if you get stuck on something, the goal with this event is every single thing is done by the time we wrap up on day two. Some people told me last year they didn't come because they didn't have an idea for a freebie. And that just made me do like literally the ultimate face palm. Because I'm like, guys, yeah, that's the idea. Like, we're going to show you how to come up with one. We're going to give you different options, we're going to show you different ways to ideate a bazillion different freebies. You're going to easily come up with one. We also have coach support. We lay out this step by step process to make it as easy as possible for you. But because of that, I've added something else this year. You immediately get to log in and watch the intro lesson. So you can start right now coming up with your ideas so that you have some already when you arrive on the date and then come to the event on the day and pitch your idea to a coach and get a little bit of feedback on it. And then just like you're off to the races. So some people will be coming up with their idea right there the morning of, but other people, Keeners, if you want to watch the lesson and come up with your new freebie idea or ideas beforehand, you can do that too. It works for different brains. I think some people kind of freeze at the idea of needing to come up with something on the spot, which I do totally understand. That can be stressful for some people. Some people like that pressure, other people don't. So now we will facilitate both types of person. Here's another really good thing that you can do with the new freebie. If you have people who are on your email list but don't typically open your emails or they're not highly engaged, they're just like, you have their email but you don't have their attention. You can use your new freebie launch to wake those people up. So maybe they haven't been opening your emails and paying attention to what you've been sharing, but you can slide into their inbox with, hey, I have a free present for you, no strings attached, you're going to get a quick win from it. You're going to get a result within the hour. Like, that is such a powerful way to reinvigorate the people who already showed interest in you before, but may have fallen off a bit. As you can tell, I'm so passionate about this strategy and I know people like beat themselves up for how many email subscribers they have or don't have. So I'm so excited to give you the tools you need to grow your list and continue to grow your list for years to come. Like I said, early bird tickets are on sale now. I'm so excited to see you there and to help you grow your email subscribers using Instagram. Grab your ticket and I look forward to meeting you.