What’s the secret to building a long-term successful online business? Email. Ignore people who say email marketing is dead. It’s alive and well, and the stats are there to prove it. I honestly rely on email to grow my business, and I love that it allows me to communicate with people openly. Anyone can reply to me, and we can have a conversation.
If you haven’t got a list yet, then this blog is for you. I’m going to take you through why you need a list, how to set one up, and how to get that all-important first 100 email subscribers.
1. Why you need an email list
Social Media is a great place to communicate with your followers. But how many followers on Instagram or twitter get your message regularly? On Facebook, your posts are seen by your followers, on average, at about 2%. There may be a good reason for this, but this doesn’t help if something urgent comes up and you want to contact your community instantly.
Your email can be sent straight to every person on your list because, these days, everyone checks their email regularly. Why wouldn’t you want to get your message instantly to your audience?
You don’t need hundreds of thousands of subscribers, either. Just a highly engaged targeted list of people who are involved with what you do, open your emails, click your links and respond to your calls to action. Achieving this is not difficult. You should start by just engaging with 100 people. Luckily this is what this article is here to help you with making it happen.
2. What do you need to get started with email marketing?
There’s no fancy equipment required for email. All you need is access to the internet and an email marketing service, sometimes known as an Autoresponder. There are all sorts of companies out there who will help you do this. Some you can get started for free, some you have a one-off payment, some are monthly.
You might be put off by talk of sequences and funnels or just worried about sending something out to hundreds of people direct at once. But don’t be. Nothing you do will be as crucial to the long-term success of your online business as building an email list, so it’s time to put those worries aside.
3. Strategies for getting 100 people on your new email list
You’ve signed up to a service, you’ve created an opt-in form or a landing page, how are you going to get people to sign up?
I bet you have more than 100 Facebook friends. How often have you been talking to someone, and they have told you they don’t know what you do these days? And how many of them then say they know someone who could be interested in what you do?
Now take a look at your online real estate. You’ve got all your social media profiles. Put your newsletter sign up link in your bio and schedule posts calling on people to join up. Tell them what the benefits will be. Why do they want to get this email?
Use your website. There are many places you can draw attention to your newsletter, including sidebars, banners, about page. A useful one to install is a message that comes up just as someone is about to leave the site so you can ask them for their email address before they disappear.
As part of this, you want to have some opt-in offer. Something people will get in return for their email address. It all comes back to solving people’s problems and giving them a quick win. What content could you create, or do you already have that you could provide people to download? Consider something genuinely valuable. You should be able to put a price tag on it of at least $100.
Don’t worry about the technical side of this, by the way. I know ‘opt-ins’ and ‘downloads’ might make you think you need expert knowledge, but your email marketing service will do this for you. All you have to do is tell it what to send to people.
Another thing to do is ask everyone on your list if they can pass your latest email on to someone else who they think would enjoy it and encourage them to sign up. Turn one subscriber into two. That way, you are widening your network to people you don’t know but who are interested in what you do.
Go live on social media. It’s such a great way to talk with your audience. You can have a conversation, people can ask you questions, you can share your knowledge, and then they know they want to hear more from you. You can go live on almost any platform now. Don’t just do it once; make it a regular thing. The benefits will be huge and not just for your email list.
4. Summing up.
These are all easy actions you can take no matter what stage you are at with building your business. Email is the number one way I’ve grown my business. Which means…if you haven’t got one yet, you need to get cracking! If you are ready to start building your list from scratch, the good news is that you only need a couple of things – internet access and an email marketing service provider.
There are so many different ways you can build an email list, but remember it not just a matter of having a list; it’s what you do with it that counts. That is something we will go into in more depth in a future post.
Are you taking the plunge into email marketing? Let me know how you get on.
Thanks for reading
Steven Smith
