← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
983: The Fastest Way to Build an Email List from the Ground Up
00:36:57
Email list growth is one of your most powerful business assets. It's the fastest, most direct way to reach your entire audience,
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On most social platforms. They want to keep people on the platform so they are going to do everything in their power to avoid sending them elsewhere. But with email, you get to drive traffic way more directly than you can with social posts. 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. You're about to make a trade, which you do you listen to. 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Get FreshBooks now 60% off for 6 months@freshbooks.com get started today and thank yourself tomorrow. That's 60% off for 6 months@FreshBooks.com I recently did a quick poll inside of our co op community to ask people about a potential up upcoming training and I gave people a bunch of title ideas for the kinds of things I am interested in covering. But I wanted to hear from them what they wanted to hear more about. And the kind of shocking thing that came out of this conversation is I was getting a lot of questions about how to build an email list from scratch. For someone who's never done this before And I thought this was such an interesting conversation that I wanted to bring it to the podcast right away. So I'm excited to dig in today and share some of the basics so that if you're feeling like I don't have a clue where to start, that this will give you some jumping off points to get you going in the right direction. Now, all of that being said, I have put together a really amazing free resource for y'. All. I have been in visibility mode this year in a huge way and seen a huge influx in leads myself specifically hitting nearly 10,000 new subscribers in just the first six months of this year. And I want to go over all of the strategies I've been using, what's been effective for me, what's been the least effective for me, and give you some takeaways that are really tangible that you could potentially implement inside of your own business. Now, if you want a copy of that case study with all of my notes, including all of my data, you definitely want to head over to bossproject.com leads that's L E A D S bossproject.com leads and you can download a copy of the case study and I'm going to give you all of the details. I think the first question on anyone's mind if they're thinking about building an email list is why? Why does it matter? Why is it worth my time? This feels like a lot of effort. What is this even going to do for me? And I want to share a couple of reasons because I'm not sure I really understood the power of email. When I started my business I was just kind of willy nilly collecting emails and hoping for the best. And while that definitely got me places, I think having this information at the ready would have had me making different decisions out the gate. Now the first thing I want to point out is this is direct access to your audience. Unlike social media, there's like algorithms at play and you have no control over if someone's going to see your content or not. And while technically speaking from an email perspective, they still have to open the email, you are way more likely to actually reach your subscribers. The average post on social is going to be reached by up to 10% of your total audience, which that's small. But when you send an email it is going to go out to 100% of your audience. Now they get to choose to open it or not. However, you reaching 100% of the people on your list every single time is such a huge advantage over other types of communication. You also Own this list unlike anything else you do, you can't take your audience from one social media platform to another. With email, if you were to change email service providers, you own your list and you own the contacts on that list. So you can take them with you. You can even sell them as part of a business transaction. If you ultimately were to exit your business, you could sell those leads. Now, there's obviously ethical implications that you need to be thinking about here, but you ultimately have have control over how and when you communicate with this audience. It also has higher engagement rates as opposed to social media posts. I mentioned that ultimately your social media is being reached by up to 10% of people, but you are going to get more people opening and interacting with this email simply because of the form it's delivered to you. On most social platforms, they want to keep people on the platform, so they are going to do everything in their power to avoid sending them elsewhere. But with email, you get to drive traffic way more directly than you can with social posts. Yes, you can absolutely use things like bots to deliver a message that ultimately they click on and open. And it's a very effective tool and one I absolutely use in my own business. But with email, when they click a link, it's immediate. There's no jumping through hoops or using other automations to make this work. If you want them to go to your homepage, if you want to go to their services page, if you want to send them directly to a sales page, you can do that every single time with ease. This is also a huge opportunity to personalize and segment. When you post online, you are just broadly putting this message out to everyone and hoping it resonates, resonates with the right people. But with email, you have an opportunity to actually segment your list. So while yes, you can absolutely send an email to everyone, you can start to track things like purchase behavior, interests and preferences, and send emails specifically to smaller segments of your list where it's ultimately going to be more effective for that audience. It's also a huge way to build relationships. With email, I've had such an incredible opportunity to really get to know my audience on such a deep level. Often I am getting people replying to my emails, sharing individual stories about what's going on in their life and in their business. And because it's private, people tend to be so much more open. Now, I will say you're going to get less replies to your emails than you probably are comments on social media, but the replies you get are going to be much more Heartfelt. And on a much deeper level, email is obviously such a huge way to drive sales and revenue. And I imagine for the majority of you, considering even starting an email in the first place, this is the primary motivation for you. You want to sell more of your products and services, you want more people buying what it is that you have to offer. And email is one of the best ways to ultimately convert your list. So yes, you can absolutely get people in on the very first go. I've been tracking my leads for a very long time and if we were just to look at the last six months, 10% of my leads come direct from purchase, meaning they have never been on my list before and they go and buy immediately and when they buy immediately, then they're added to my list. But those other 90% of leads, they need nurturing, they need time. And email is one of the best ways to continue that relationship and build trust over a longer period. So they can convert later. Sometimes they're going to convert in a couple of weeks, sometimes they're going to convert in a couple of months. I've seen people who've opened 400 plus emails before they bought from me, but because they consistently show up and consistently provide value, it's going to be on everyone's own, own timeline. I hear you. You're like, I was already convinced I need an email list. How do I do this? Okay, I hear you. Let's dig into it. So the first thing you're going to need to do is ultimately pick an email service provider. There is a lot out there and more pop up every single year. There is way more email service providers than when I started my business and they continue to just grow in numbers. But some of the popular ones, in no particular order at all, are Mailchimp, Mailerite, ConvertKit, ActiveCampaign, Omnisend, and Flodesk. There's definitely others, but those are some top ones that you might see in this industry. Now, when you go to compare and shop around the various email providers, one of the things I really want you to consider is cost. Ultimately you're a small business and if you're starting your email list for the very first time, you keeping your costs low in terms of how much it costs you to maintain and send emails is going to be important. And I have looked at a bunch over the years. I started out helping people with mailchimp way back in the day. Way, way, way back in the day when it was one of the only options for businesses. I was pretty early to ConvertKit and spent many years there and loved it while I was there. Ultimately, I found that a lot of the things I wanted to do seemed more complicated than they needed to be there. I enjoyed the flexibility, but I didn't like that I had to essentially code my emails to make them look pretty. And while I could buy templates and even hire someone to do some of that, I wanted to be able to do this on my own. We moved to ActiveCampaign after that, and ActiveCampaign is an incredibly robust tool and is typically used by much larger businesses. When I got into that world, I saw a lot of opportunities for ways we could leverage the tech. But I was absolutely overwhelmed by the exorbitant costs on most email service providers. You're going to find out there on almost all of them, actually. You will pay more the more leads you have. So as your business grows, your costs increase to maintain an email list. And that just really felt unfair. Like, I get that there's operational costs to sending emails, but in the grand scheme of things, sending things electronically, it does not scale as incrementally as they're charging you for. They're making more and more profit based on the size of your business as you scale. And I didn't like that literally at all. And so when flodesk came to market, I was absolutely blown away. I jumped on board when they were in beta and we moved our list of 50,000 plus people over to Flodesk like wild. And the crazy thing is, is the cost, like the cost is so inexpensive comparatively to all of these other email service providers. And it doesn't scale with you. It is the same cost regardless for your service. And I just think from an ethical standpoint, what an incredible way to empower small businesses. And they have a very, very loyal following and I am very proud of the relationship I have with them. That's taken years to develop. But personally, one of my favorite things about flodesk is just how out of the box beautiful it is. My emails look good every single time. And as someone with design experience, how my emails looked really mattered to me. They have incredible templates built in, lots of opportunities for customization, and it's super simple to get started. So. So while I encourage you to shop around and definitely look at your options, if you're interested in trying flodesk, you can try it completely for free. This is not sponsored. I just want to share my personal experience with you. So if you go to bossproject.com flodesk that's f, l O D E S K Flodesk with no W. You will be able to try it for free and when you're ready to Upgrade, you'll get 50% off your first year which is huge. Such an incredible savings for small business owners and really going to set you up for success early on. I just encourage you to dive in and see what that could do for you. 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 Abercrombie Kids is bringing the ultimate first day energy back to school. It all starts with on trend outfits for the that front door photo shoot, plus the coolest tees, shorts and jeans to take them through the rest of the year. Get them ready for their close up and keep them comfy too. Make this grade their best one yet. Shop all things back to school in store, online and in the app.
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I also wanted to talk about some of the other ones that come up because I specifically was getting this question in our group and the question came up with well, I know all of these email service providers exist, but what about ones that are built in to the web service themselves like Squarespace and Wix and GoDaddy and Shopify all have their own email. And here's what I have to say about that because not only are you going to see that in the web space, but you're going to see that in the course and digital product space as well. You're going to see a lot of products that are marketed to you as an all in one provider provider. And I have just always been incredibly hesitant about using an all in one provider because it usually means they do a lot of things okay, but nothing great. And I want to use the best service possible to give my customers the best experience possible. And if I'm using an all in one platform to just really simplify my life, but it's not providing a great experience on the other side, I just don't love that. So yes, it does tend to cost a little bit more to piecemeal these things together. It also is going to be something you have more control over at the end of the day and you can use a provider that is dedicated to having the best in class email service. So I would run pretty far away from Squarespace's email. GoDaddy's email. I know very little about Wix's email service. Back in the day I very much disliked wix. They've done a ton to improve their platform, so I don't have bad things to say, but I haven't personally tried their platform in so long that I don't feel equipped to give you a proper opinion on it. That being said, there is one exception to all of this. While I think Flodesk is a recommendation I would recommend for 99% of the people listening to this show. If you happen to be someone selling on Shopify, I do encourage you to look at email service providers that are specific for e commerce. If you are selling a physical product, if you're selling a digital product, I do not think it's necessary at all. But if you're selling a physical product and dealing with things like mailing and abandoned cart and all of these other things, not that those things don't happen in the digital product realm they do. But there are some incredibly robust tools that are very particular about paying attention to purchase data and I think that is such a huge benefit. So I know Omnisend. I haven't personally used Omnisend, so I can't necessarily rep their brand, but I know Omnisend is specifically targeting those physical Product E comm brands and it really integrates nicely with Shopify so that it can pay attention to purchase data and provide more personalized experiences for your customers. So that is where I would probably deviate. But for the majority of you, I definitely think Flodesk is the way to go. And like I said, you can get that free trial@bossproject.com Flodesk and it's Flodesk. Okay. Now that being said, I did briefly mention that some of these course providers also offer email. I want to be mindful that some have email included, but it's not like an actual email service provider and I want to differentiate between the two. So for example, I use Teachable for selling the majority of my digital products, coaching services, etc. Courses, all the things. And I've been with Teachable for eight years. You can literally google Teachable Review and you're going to find my personal review on why I've been loyal to them for eight years. But nonetheless they do have email built in, but it is not an email service provider. So what it's going to do is when someone purchases from a platform like Teachable, it's going to send them receipts, it's going to handle the actual transaction, they're going to get a receipt, they're going to get the login information and they are going to get communication directly from Teachable in that way. And you do have the ability in the platform to send messages to directly to students. So you could in theory have a free product listed on Teachable's platform, get anyone who enrolls and then email that select group of people. That being said, it is literally just a text based email. It is very simple and it is not meant for ongoing email support. It's more meant to like send to a select group of people purchasers. More often than not, when I want to email my purchasers, I'm still emailing through my email service provider for consistency sake. But the built in emails for Teachable are meant to be more like communication tools about the actual product that they have gotten. Now that's my opinion. I don't necessarily know what Teachable's opinion on how that tool can and should be used, but it's definitely not going to include segmenting, it's not going to include workflows. Aside from Abandoned Cart. The Abandoned Cart features are great and those sort of things kind of go out automatically and you can customize those things. But it's not an email service provider in the more traditional sense. Ultimately in terms of key features, I Want you paying attention to ease of use. How easy is it for you to onboard, how easy is it for you to maintain? How easy is it for you to send emails? And then does it look the way you want it to look to ultimately represent your brand? But first and foremost I would be thinking about Price Point. A lot of them are going to have very similar features. Some are going to be more robust than others. Like there are some that the reason you pay more is because they have a ton of bells and whistles in terms of technology. But I think the majority of people are actually overcomplicating what it looks like to send emails. You can send incredibly powerful emails with very simple workflows. And I often find the more complicated the workflow, the more complicated the funnel, the lower it's converting because people are just having to jump through too many hoops. People love transparency and when you can just deliver what they're looking for without the like extra hoops that feel fake, people tend to trust you more. So I would definitely look around and see what feels right for you and pick the platform that aligns with your brand. Now the next thing you're going to need besides an email service provider, which that is typically going to be your biggest decision making. If you want me to just simplify that for you, go with Flodesk. Unless you're with Shopify and then go with Omnisend, that would be my blanket recommendation. But after you pick your email service provider, you need to get a way to get people on your list. And the first thing I would do is set up a general sign up. This sounds incredibly basic because it is incredibly basic. You wouldn't necessarily have any exchange. It would just be a form for someone to join your list. So you could go out and talk about that. You're starting your email list and you're excited to communicate with people and you would love for people to just join you. You can get started that way without any sort of deliverable on the other side. That being said, the only people that are going to utilize that are going to be your warm audience, the people that already know you, the people that already trust you, the people that already care about. They're the ones that are going to opt in without any sort of value exchange. And it's a great way to get your feet wet, get started, get that list going. But it's not going to like carry you long term. I always have a general signup form and I will continue to always have a general signup form mostly for customer service purposes. But you are going to want something to attract leads to you and give people a reason to want to be on your list. So the reason to be on your list could be the communication. And that happens a lot in the newsletter realm, when the newsletter is the deliverable. Perhaps you're setting yourself up as kind of reporting on a certain topic on a regular basis or helping people overcome a certain thing on a regular basis. I've seen this work in all sorts of technology spaces, all sorts of health and wellness spaces. There isn't anything wrong with that. But I do find the more popular way to get started is to actually develop a lead magnet. Now, the question you may be having is what is the lead magnet? I've heard of it, but I'm not really sure. Ultimately, an opt in, a lead magnet, a freebie, they're all the same thing. You are having someone give you typically their first name and email in exchange for a free offer. This could be a free email workflow, it could be a PDF or a guide, it could be a template of some sort. I can definitely get into all the things a lead magnet could be and give you more details on what that looks like in a future episode. But ultimately you're having a value exchange. The easiest way to think about this is think about the times you've done this yourself, because I guarantee you, even if you've never made one, you've been a part of one, you've seen something on the Internet and you've been like, ooh, I want that guide. Ooh, I want that little email course. Ooh, I want that whatever it is, right? And you gave your name an email and then you got a confirmation email and you were able to download it. We've all been through that process, we've all seen it happen. You just have to decide what is it that you're going to offer for free that people want and that is going to help solve a problem. Ultimately, it can be informational. It doesn't necessarily have to be a problem solving tool. Sometimes just piquing someone's interest is all that is necessary for this to be an effective way for you to gather leads. But after you develop the actual thing they're going to get, you need a way to get that information from them and then ultimately deliver it. So a potential for that would be to create a form. You can embed a form on something like a website, but for the majority of you, the place I would start is actually a landing page. Now, many of these email service providers have this built in some do not. So definitely pay attention to that. But with Flodesk, you have an opportunity to build a static landing page and it automatically includes its own URL. So even if you don't yet have a website, you can start collecting leads and communicating with them on a regular basis. Now, it is simple, a very simple page, and ultimately all it needs to do is be super clear on what they're getting. This doesn't need to be long. In fact, I wouldn't make it long. You're convincing them to get it should be happening before they land here, so that by the time they land here, all they're really trying to do is enter their name and email address. You've already done the selling, you've already done the peaking their interest part and they're just entering their information so making it clear that what you said they're going to get is what they're going to get. Then they fill in their name. I collect their first name always and their email. You technically don't have to collect names, but you will see long term that being able to use someone's name in your communication with them is going to lead to more conversions. So I do suggest from the beginning that you collect people's first names. You don't necessarily need to collect their last name at all or any other sort of information from them because the more details you ask for, the less likely they are to move forward to the next step. So beyond that, if this is the very first time you're doing it, you don't necessarily need another page that they land on. You can use something called a thank you message. And so when you have the landing page, they enter their name and email address. This will auto populate after they hit submit and it will say like thanks so much, it's on the way to your inbox, that sort of thing. They aren't necessarily being redirected to another page. Now if you wanted them to redirect to another page or you have another page built, you can absolutely change the thank you location to be instead of an opt in message to have it redirect. Totally cool. I do that all of the time. In fact, most of the lead magnets I have, they enter their name and email and then are taken somewhere else. Either because I plan to sell them something on the other side of that, or I want to give them additional details or I even want to give them opportunity to download it directly or read it immediately. Now you are going to want a way to deliver this lead magnet. So when someone joins your list They've filled out their name and email and hit submit. Typically what happens is they're added to a tag or a segment. This is going to vary a little bit depending on the email service provider that you go with. You want that segment to trigger a confirmation email. And you can set this up in a very, very simple workflow. And on the other side of that workflow, have it just be one email. So then in that workflow it would just be like when someone is added to this tag, send this email, and that can be the entire workflow. It doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. And it will simply have, you know, a brief description of what they'll receive, maybe a little mock up of what it looks like, and then a download button. And with Flodesk, you can add that PDF directly to the email. Or if this is hosted somewhere else, like on Dropbox or Canva or wherever, you can have it redirect to a link if that's your preference, really simply and easily. So it's really a process of driving traffic, piquing their interest, telling them what they're going to receive. They enter their contact information and then in exchange, you send them an email with that specific deliverable. Now beyond that, there are two main things you'll have to do after you have this set up. You have your lead magnet set up, you have your landing page set up. You have the email that's going to send that confirmation email. After that, your main job is to send traffic to this landing page. You want to utilize your social media or other means of contacting your audience and let them know, hey, this exists. I'd love to help. Here's why you need it. And send them to the landing page where they can opt in. But once they're an actual subscriber, they need to be receiving emails from you. I would not start an email list if you didn't have a plan to actually communicate with these people. You want to have a plan on the other side. You can absolutely have something like a welcome email be triggered after they get that immediate delivery of the lead magnet. Or in addition to, you can send regular communication. So there's kind of two ways email works. On the back end, you're going to have things that are automated based on workflows that are specific to the individual subscriber. And then you're going to have kind of live communication where you are writing an email specifically to a certain group of people or your whole list and scheduling the email to send at a certain date. And Time. I would say for me especially getting started, the majority of my emails were live, meaning I was writing the email, scheduling it, and sending it a certain time and date. As my business has grown, I have developed more workflows that send automatically, but I still have far less than I assume you probably think I do because I still do a lot of live promotion and I enjoy that. I enjoy the act of launching, I think it's fun. And I used to assume that it was going to be this huge lift every single time, but I have definitely found low lift ways to launch on a more consistent basis that don't eat so much into my energy. You simply need to develop a cadence. I think more often than not, the way to consistently see your email get results for you is if you create consistency for yourself, meaning you have a rhythm in which you're regularly communicating with this group of people and they become used to this rhythm. In an ideal world, I would say you're communicating with them at least once a week. If you can't commit to at least sending an email every other week, I would say you're probably not ready to start an email list I now send. I mean, gosh, it depends. But on a regular week I send three emails for sure to my prospects and one email for sure to people who have paid to be a part of my membership. Now a lot of the time I have additional things I'm doing where I may send one email, but there's variants on that email and all of those other things. But on an average week, I'm personally planning on four touch points and have a plan in place to make that rhythm really doable for me and something I can maintain. But you should definitely start small. Like don't feel like you need to rush into emailing people every single day. That's a pretty quick way to burn yourself out when this is not something you're used to, but figure out what is going to be a cadence you feel like you can keep up with and maintain and stay on top of. Because I am way more apt to maintain my email communication than I am my social media. I have absolutely had months in my social media where I went like nearly dark or didn't talk at all. But during that time period I was still regularly emailing my list and that was the thing that was keeping my business running. I know this can feel like a lot, especially when it's all new, but ultimately to get started, we're talking about picking an email service provider, identifying what that lead magnet could be, setting up a landing page, setting up an email confirmation, and even if you wanted to skip that, you could have it uploaded directly to a specific place and then redirect the traffic there so you don't necessarily have to send an extra email and then figure out a regular way to communicate with these people. It's simple. It's just about getting started. Now if you want a little bit more encouragement or you want some ideas on the types of ways you can deliver value or even drive traffic to build your email list, I would love to give you my entire case study of everything I've done the last six months to add nearly 10,000 subscribers to my list. You can get it all for free right now@bossproject.com lead that's L E A D S bossproject.com leads. I'll see you soon. 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 bossproject 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.