← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
981: Steal This Strategy: 4,587 New Subscribers in Under 120 Days
00:40:17
Email marketing is a long-term strategy that adds to the stability of your business.
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I don't necessarily think a training is the first strategy I would try though, because it does take so much of your time to develop and maintain. And I do think there are simpler ways to attract quality leads that will still get you to the same end result. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way, one that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Settle in. It's time to talk strategy. 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FreshBooks is the user friendly accounting platform for your business. Switching to FreshBooks has never been easier. Even if you're coming from another accounting tool. FreshBooks makes migrating your data simple and their support team is ready if you need help. Feel more confident about your numbers. Get FreshBooks now 60% off for six months@freshbooks.com that's freshbooks.com get started today and thank yourself tomorrow. I need to make a confession. I've added more than double the amount of new subscribers to my list in just three and a half months than I did all of last year. If you're new to the show, I definitely want you to make sure you subscribe we have twice weekly podcast episodes that drop drop every Tuesday and Thursday that are full of juicy strategy to help grow your business online and helps you as a whole person who has all sorts of things going on. So I cannot wait for you to be a regular listener. And if you haven't yet, I encourage you to go follow me over on Instagram. It's where the party is. You know I get to talk to you all the time on the podcast which is great, but I want to get to know you personally and I can only do that if we can have a two way conversation. So I would love if you would go to last project on Instagram and then head to my personal profile at Abigail says. Give me a follow there and send me a DM and say hello. I would love to hear more about you and your business and your goals for this year. If you're a regular listener, I would love if you would leave a rating and review. Your reviews mean so much to us and allow us to add more valuable sponsors and partners to the show who allow us to bring it to you for free. So doing that makes a huge difference. Also Share this episode I'm going to drop some knowledge that I do not hear other marketers say and it may ruffle some feathers, but I would love to start a conversation about it over on social. So share this episode, share that you're listening, share your biggest takeaways and be sure to tag me so I can hear all about it. By the time you are listening to this episode, this number is going to be seriously dated. But at the time of recording this, as of this morning, which I've since added hundreds of new email subscribers since I even looked this data up before I recorded this episode, I was at 4,587 new email subscribers since January 1st to the morning of April 17th, 2024 and I want to talk about the strategy. How did I get those people on my list? What's working? What do you need to be paying ATT attention to and what does it mean to you and your business? I know you've heard a gajillion times that an email list is important to your business and that it will allow you to reach your audience more consistently and it's something that you actually own. You don't own your social media followers, you don't own that audience on any of those other platforms and thus you want to get as many of those people's contact information so you can reach them more regularly on the schedule that you want. Especially when you don't have any control over how the algorithm works, which I feel like we all collectively understand. And yet I feel like there's a mixed perception of how important it is or isn't. If I were starting my business over from today, it is not the first thing I would worry about. But it is something I would set up very early on. And then when I was ready to pay attention to it and do something about it more strategically, I would do something with it then. But I would probably just initially set it up, little set it and forget it moment. And then when I was ready to really invest in these strategies, then I would pick it up. But it's not necessarily the thing that is going to immediately get you clients. Will it get you clients? Will it get you sales? Yeah, like so many. But it takes time to nurture a list and if you're adding cold subscribers, like people that you've never met before and you just attracted them with a brand new thing to your list, it's going to take some time to warm them up. And that's fine when you want to go get those initial clients. Usually word of mouth or sharing with an existing audience is going to get you so much further faster. But this is a long term strategy that adds to the stability of your business. Now the reason I've hesitated to talk about it is I often think that it can be a distraction. Now don't get me wrong, utilizing a list and using it effectively will get you sales 100%. But if you're so focused on marketing to bring people onto the list, but you're not actually selling to them or selling to the active audience that you have the attention of, you may not be in business long enough to even nurture those people. And so I know it's a little controversial to say, like don't start here, but it's not where I would start. It is something I would learn and grow and continue to invest in over time. But it's not going to get you that initial traction. I think there's a misconception that you can build a sexy opt in, put it on your website and then your email list will just grow. I looked at my numbers and of the 4,500 plus people, only a few hundred of those were from static forms. Not that the rest weren't from forms, they were, but from forms that I'm not like explicitly sending traffic to. Forms that are just sitting on a homepage or on like a call out button on a website. Those only made up a few hundred of the thousands that came in. And the reason that is is because you are trying to target someone, but you're putting it on a place that has more mass appeal. So the traffic you're sending is more broad and the lead magnet is more specific. And so for sure, your targeted people that are joining your list are going to be war. But there is a much faster way to get to your end game. So there may have been a few more, but I'm pretty confident that the majority of the 4,500 leads came in from seven different kinds of activities that I was doing in my business to attract those leads. Now, before I get into what the seven types were, I want to talk about why I'm having such a significant increase this year over last. I made a very conscious effort at the beginning of the year to decide that 2024 was going to be a year of visibility, a year of growth, a year of getting in front of more people and making a bigger impact. And in years past, it was about serving the audience that was already there. And I'm not saying you can't do both at the same time, but it's a little bit hard to do. And if you're not focused on visibility, you will get stagnant. But I think so many business owners get busy and they get in this place where they are serving and continuing to nurture the people that are already there, but they're not necessarily focused on long term growth. And if that's something that you want, if you want to see your business grow, this is a strategy that is going to help you get to that next stage. It is something that is going to be vital to the long term stability of your business. But how did I do it? Okay, so let's dig into it. The first thing that I did was I created a training in the fall of last year and it went incredibly well. I had hundreds of signups within the span of one or two weeks. And because it went so well, I put that training on Evergreen. Now, I wasn't necessarily marketing it, it did exist and it was very accessible if you knew where to look for it. But it wasn't something I was promoting actively on social media channels. And because of that, the overall traction was ultimately just a few hundred of that 4,500 plus. But a training is an opportunity. You can offer a free and valuable workshop training. It doesn't have to be long. Most of mine are way too long. Honestly, most of my trainings I could talk less, but I tend to want to share a lot of information, a lot of meat. And so I put a lot in there. I don't necessarily think a training is the first strategy I would try though, because it does take so much of your time to develop and maintain. And I do think there are simpler ways to attract quality leads that will still get you to the same end result. The next strategy that I utilized was a trend. Now you can do this at any time. You just have to pay attention to what's going on in your industry, the world, a timely event. Like imagine you are a lifestyle blogger and the Bachelor finale is coming up. You could absolutely do something that aligned with this event, that's happening in real life, that your audience all enjoys and you create something to make it fun. It could be a bingo drinking game. I know that's a wild example. But like, you get my point. It is specific to a time. My trendy thing was at the beginning of the year, I focused on the fact that in January, every January, people want to make and set goals. And so I made a tool that would allow people to make and set goals and I made it fun and I made it different. And trends will typically get a spike. Like you will get a lot of right away, but then it'll peter off very quickly. It's the same as going viral on a social media post. Like it's going to go up and then it's going to go down and that's fine. And I definitely think they're fun to include every now and again. But consistently doing it is a ton of pressure. Like you only relying on trends and trying to come up with something new every two weeks or a month or even every three months is a lot. When you could include this every now and again because you're feeling inspired and then have something that's more concrete that you rely on in between. Now what may surprise you is while it wasn't the majority of my leads, a significant, a significant portion of my leads came from sales. I love directing cold traffic to low price digital products. It's a great way to magnetize ideal people to you. And then you get paid to build your list. And since January, I've had well over a thousand transactions. Now, not all of those people were new to my list, but that's a thousand times plus that someone's email address came into my network. When you start building a list, this is actually my preferred way to start. I prefer to start by selling that low hanging fruit because you accomplish a lot all at the same time. You're able to build that list, you're able to get sales. You you're able to practice sending traffic to a location where you're trying to convert someone. Like you get so much out of that experience that I think in terms of bang for buck like it is one of the biggest opportunities. So if you want to know more about how I specifically do that, I'm giving you all the deeds. @bossproject.com jumpstart I walk you through how to create a no brainer digital product and get it ready for pre sale so that you can launch it and get it out into the world and ultimately convert people to join your list and get paid. Bossproject.com jumpstart so far we've had a training, a trend sales and the next one is what I'm going to call a refresh. You can take any lead magnet you've ever used before. You can even take old content that has been valuable in the past or done well on social. It could be a blog post, it could be social media content and you could refresh that content into a valuable freebie. Now for this one, it was specific to creativetempleshop.com, which is a website that I own and run and I sell a bunch of design templates for small business owners and the co op is the place to be. P.S. where you get access to all of them. You can find out more@creative templateshop.com membership but specifically on that site. For a long time I've had a pack of free social media templates and if I spent more time marketing this I know it would get more traction. But there is something happening in the market that I think is worth paying attention to. Yes, it was a great lead magnet that has gotten me a ton of leads over time and yes it was worth refreshing and some of the like super messy organic looking stuff that looks like it's made in the app is performing so much better that I didn't want to spend a ton of time trying to push people to templates that they work. But right now they're not hitting as hard. And so it's my job as someone who cares about their audience to make sure that the thing I'm delivering actually makes a true impact. And because I didn't feel like it was going to be as impactful to their businesses. Yes, I have it available, it still exists, but it's not something I'm like peddling. You know, it's something that's there. It's something that showcases how my templates work. So for me it's more of a tool to Give people a preview of what it would be like to be a member inside the co op and have access to all these templates. They can see an example of what a download sheet looks like. They can interact with adding that to their Adobe Express or canva account. They can customize it and see how easy it is to customize the templates we work with. It is an example of how my service works, which to me is worth it all on its own. But in terms of marketing it, that's not where I put my time and effort. That did bring in several hundred, I think, 300 plus leads since the beginning of the year. Now, what may surprise you is that more than half of the leads I've gotten in the last three and a half months have happened in the last three weeks. I'm a big believer in working backwards. So designing a signature offer and then a digital product and then a lead magnet for that digital product and then an activation. I'll explain the difference. It works so incredibly well because you have so much more information and I see so many people try to do it in reverse and they get frustrated. That's not hitting as hard because they're lacking a lot of insight into what their audience needs from them. So because I had put my primary focus on sales and using that to bring in new, fresh leads, but also nurture and activate the people that were existing on my list, I was really able to dive in with that group of people. I had designed a course. It was a mini course, so to speak. Not quite a digital product, but a mini course. And I put it on presale. I launched it, got people in the door, built the course, and then I went into observation mode. How are people reacting to the content? Where were they getting stuck? What were their questions? What were the things that came up for them? Where were their hesitations? What were their mindset issues? All of these things. And then before I did anything else, I worked on improving the actual product. I didn't immediately go out and be like, oh, their biggest problem is this. I'm going to make a free thing. No, I focused on delivering to my clients and gave them more to help them get closer to their goals. But the thing that surprised me is what they needed the most help with is actually the very first step inside my program. So, inside digital product Jumpstart. Want to learn exactly, step by step how to get paid to generate leads in your business? I'm ready to give you the exact steps that help me generate tens of thousands of qualified leads and millions in low ticket digital product sales. I won't just show you what I did, but teach you how you can do it too. I'm talking not just how to create low ticket digital products, but also showing you how to use them strategically to generate leads for your other existing or future offers. I'm sharing it all@bossproject.com jumpstart including exactly how I made $8033 and generated 277 leads my very first month selling digital products. Find out more at bossproject.com jumpstart the.
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One of the primary sticking points was people actually making a decision as to what they were going to launch, which blew my mind. I was like, what do you mean? Like that hadn't been an issue for me. So I was surprised. And I was like okay, well if you don't know what you're going to launch, then I want to design a tool that's going to help you make that decision. And so it started as a database of 500 digital product ideas across 50 niches. That was going to be a super comprehensive look at what I thought was going to be effective in various industries or what I knew was effective based on SEO data and research that I had done. But this is where there's an opportunity. I think people assume if you build something and you put it behind a paywall and it's part of paid curriculum, that you can't pull those pieces out and teach them on your social media or package them up and make them a lead magnet, of course you can. You can give as much value as you want. Me being so focused on give, give, give, give, give has only built my business. I have never once regretted sharing the whole tea. All of it. I give it all away. And, you know, could some of those people pay me instead of just absorbing my free content? For sure. But when they're ready to make a purchase, I'm one of the first people they think about because they know that I will consistently deliver the kind of information they need to hear. So I felt like taking the list of 500 would kind of be overkill. Like, I didn't necessarily think people needed 500 ideas to get off the fence or to make decisions. And so instead I boiled it down and I was like, how about I pick a hundred of these 500 and then add in some anecdotal things that are like the biggest mistakes that I see people making around making this decision. And I put it all in a PDF. Now, the interesting thing is because of the timing of this, like, I launched pre sale in January, I built the course at the end of January, and through half of February, I made product improvements for the next month or so. So, like, we're already into mid March before I even picked up building a lead magnet for this product. But by the time I got there, all of this content already existed. It was just a matter of packaging it up. I wrote kind of like an intro letter. I put all of the content together that was in, you know, a handful of different locations, had my designer design a PDF that made it beautiful using Hint Hint, one of the templates@creative templateshop.com and I was ready to launch this within a few days. Now, because I had spent all of this time learning about my audience, really identifying their biggest hang ups. When I posted this, the very first time I posted this, I had hundreds of signups within a matter of hours. Hundreds. That one social media post has gone on to bring in over a thousand leads. Now, not all of that was organic. I want to be very clear. It worked very, very, very, very well organically. So because of that, I put fuel on that fire and turned on paid ads. But I didn't spend very much. I think I maybe spent 150, 200 bucks and got an additional 700 plus leads after I had already gotten organic, 2 or 300. Incredible. Like some of these leads were costing me between 4 and 25 cents. Like insane. Now number six is a generic signup. I know that sounds boring, but I have two generic signups. I have one that's just to join my email list and I have another one that's just specifically about reactivating. If you were opting out and you no longer got emails, how you get back on my list. Those things exist as tools primarily for customer service. So if I'm talking about a launch that's coming up, I can say, hey, get on the list if you're not already so you can hear about it. Or if I'm having like a technical issue, I can send it to someone and they can sign up. Most of the time I try to bring people in by adding value, but I do also have gateways that are just get on my list. 32 of those signups of the 4,500 were for my just join the newsletter. And another like 33 or so were re opt ins. So to review, we have a training, a trend sales, a refresh, a lead magnet based on the biggest problem your ideal client faces as soon as they start working with you. And then we have generic signups. And the last one is what I'm going to call an activation. Now an activation is something you can do on your own, but I think an activation can be even more successful when you collaborate with people. Now I think doing so strategically takes time and really understanding what's going to be the most valuable for you and your time and effort. Like it's going to take time for you to decipher that, but you just have to try some things. You have to be willing to try some things. But what is an activation? An activation to me is any opportunity to bring people on your list via some sort of live, I don't even want to call it event, a live call to action, so to speak. You are doing something now. You are going to go do this thing because we talked about it. You're going to go through this challenge, you're going to come to this training, you're going to participate in this. Cause you know you are calling people to action more so than just delivering information. You are giving them an activity to do. Does that make sense? Does that differentiate for you? Like a lead magnet is value packed and activation is action packed. Now if you were to look back at the history of my company, the majority of my leads I would say have come from sales like 66% of my email list. The last I checked is a customer. They have bought some something from me at some point. But activations tend to be my biggest spikes. They're like the launches of the lead magnet world. And when used appropriately, that activation leads in to an actual sales sequence where you're actively selling in this time period based on whatever the activation was, whatever the event or cause or plan or whatever. Now for those of you who are curious, my activation, it's called one day launch digital product Fast track is where I am taking someone and I am going from idea concept to launch post in just one day on your first or next digital product. Now you're like, didn't you just say that you have a course on building your digital product? Yep, I did. Does it make sense to have an activation that helps them accomplish a similar goal? I would argue yes. You can teach someone so much in a short time span, but it's never going to be everything. And a goal with an activation, in my opinion should be that they actually get value from it. Anytime you're giving any of these things away, like there needs to be a value exchange, they need to have something they can take away. And with an activation specifically, this is like we're doing it together. Whereas a lead magnet, they're doing it themselves based on whatever you gave them. Now you can take an activation and put it on Evergreen, meaning it's running all the time and someone could do it on their own later. You could totally do that. Totally. But there is some power in this collective. All working together and all going after the same goal. It brings people together, it creates community, it creates buzz, it allows people to participate with something. It gets people excited. And when you get people to actually participate and they get real results, you get to utilize that as momentum into all the other things that you're doing now. This isn't to say there is one right or wrong way to build an email list. Nope. You can do it how you want. You have to follow your intuition here. I have just found that to get the best results, building in reverse makes the traction so much more. When I have tried to start with an activation like a training to then sell them into a product, it works a hundred percent, but it hasn't been as successful as when I sold it to my warmest audience. First got some data and feedback and then utilize that to build some momentum to launch it again. I think if you can make that second launch even stronger, you're going to go so much further, faster. But the point I want you to take away from here is not the Seven different ways that you could build your email list, which, I mean, go for it, do those things. Absolutely. Copy, paste, add those things into your life, add those things into your marketing plan. But the part I want you to take away, that I think is probably the biggest. Aha. Is that growing your list requires active marketing. Can you passively put up a form and have it exist on your website and get leads? Yes. But if you want to 10x that or 100x that, actively marketing it will go so much further, so much faster. Now, I hear a few of you saying, but that activation you did, like, that was with a sponsor, like someone else is marketing this thing. Duh. That was on purpose. Like, I'm not saying you have to go out and get every lead yourself. You can utilize things like strategic partnerships and collaborations to magnetize more people to you, to find more right, fit people and get them across the line quicker than trying to go out and organically find them yourself. I have added tens of thousands of people to my email list doing my own lead magnets, doing my own events, you know, continuing to participate in those things. But building strategic relationships has been massive and I do not want to underestimate how powerful it can be to the future of your business. Now, the ironic thing is I've had several strategic partnerships the first half of this year. When we're not even through half the year, we're in month four, I guess month five by the time you listen. But only one of those strategic relationships added leads to my list. Not every brand partnership should have a goal of growing your list. That can be an option, but it doesn't have to be the end game. I've had brand partnerships that were purely like a value exchange. I do social content, you pay me for the impressions. Boom, Done. I've also had people sponsor me to, like, MC an event and it was way more about me being a leader and being able to have a thoughtful conversation and make the event go well. They were paying me for the fact that I have talked for a living for 10 years. And then I've also had strategic partnerships that were about growth. Now, the reason it worked is the activation was not just for me. The activation was designed to help both me and that brand partner. So think about if you were wanting to partner with another brand or another person, bigger or smaller than you, same size as you, it doesn't matter. I need you to be thinking about first. What are they going to get out of it before you start thinking about how you're going to take from that relationship the more you focus on giving, the more it will give back to you every single time. If you haven't yet started your email list or you're looking for an email service provider, I hands down recommend Flodesk. Now, they are not paying me to say this. I am an affiliate partner for them, so if you use my link, I do get paid. But they did not pay me to say this. I have been with a handful of other email marketing service providers. Some were clunky, some were tech heavy, and some were far more complicated than they needed to be. Do you need all the bells and whistles? Do you need all this, that and the other thing? Arguably, no. Like, I think most of the complicated tech that exists in the email marketing world is not really necessary until you are north of 2 to 3 million dollars. Before that, simple flows and static emails that are sent and scheduled on a certain day will work just fine for you. And what I love about flodesk, I'm a designer. That's where my training, that's where the world I came from. Having email that is simply beautiful means a lot to me. And there was this trend for a long time that said, you know, if it looks like you just wrote it in Gmail, that it was going to be more effective because it felt like it was just for them. And do I think that has some merit? Yeah, maybe a little bit. But people are savvy. Email has existed for more than a decade and they know when the email is just for them versus you sent it to a large group of people and I think you trying to like con them into thinking it was just for them is kind of sleazy anyway. I would much rather have an email look and feel like my brand and the values of my company than worry that it looked like it just sent it to only them. I want them to feel special when they open their email. I want them to be like, oh my God, I love what they're doing. Like, this feels amazing. I want them to have those reactions and Flodesk is by far the easiest way to do that. I also love that the price stays the same regardless of how big your list is. Every other email platform I've ever used has a sliding scale. The bigger your list gets, the more you pay. End of story. At Flodesk, that's not how it works. You can continue to scale your business and the cost of running your email stays the same. It's freaking amazing. So if you want to check it out, I would love if you would use my link. It would mean so much to me. Bossproject.com flodesk you can check it out for free. Like you are not required to sign up to move forward, but if you choose to definitely recommend. And keep in mind we send hundreds of thousands of emails a year. We have a very large email list and I am confident in the delivery, in the functionality, in the ability for it to serve y'. All. So bossproject.com flodesk and if you guys have more questions about email, I would love to do more episodes about growing your email list. Feel free to send me a dm. Would love to hear your thoughts and takeaways anytime. I hope you have a great rest of your day. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me, Abigail says and ossproject so we can share it. Okay. Second favorite to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from Boss Project, I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.