How to Build an Email List
Knowing how to build an email list is extremely beneficial for your business and here’s why…
Up to 97% of the website visitors who land on your website won’t be ready to buy from you right away when they first discover you. Therefore, you’ll want to be able to keep in touch with them to warm them up to you until they are ready to buy and the best way to do that is with weekly emails that you’d send to them if they join your email list. This will help you actually convert some of the people in that 97% to become buyers down the road, instead of totally missing out on the potential sales that could come from them.
The second benefit of knowing having an email list is the conversion rate of email subscribers. Email subscribers are 3x more likely to become buyers of your services than social media followers! This means that your goal should be to move your social media followers over to your email list, so you can better nurture them through weekly emails to influence more of them to work with you.
So overall, you can see that knowing how to build an email list will help you book more clients AND make more money in your business! Below, I include the four steps on how to build an email list. You can watch the video below or continue reading in the blog post.
Step 1: Select an email service provider.
The first step in how to build an email list is to select an email service provider. An email service provider is a tool that will allow you to store all the email addresses you create, it allows you to send emails to everyone on your email list, and it allows you to automatically send out a free download or other incentive you may want to be sent out automatically when someone subscribes to your email list.
The top two email service providers that I recommend are ConvertKit or MailChimp.
MailChimp is great if you’re a beginner and you don’t want to spend money on an email service provider yet, since creating a MailChimp account is free. It’s perfect for automatically sending out your free download when people subscribe to your email list and for sending out weekly email blasts to your email subscribers.
Once you’re ready for more advanced features and you don’t mind investing money into an email service provider, ConvertKit is great option. ConvertKit allows you to set up automations with series of emails over several days, it has functionality that allows you to easily tag/categorize email subscribers and more! It starts at $29 a month and it’s a great next step after you outgrow MailChimp.
Step Two: Create an email opt-in incentive.
The best way to get people to join is to offer an incentive for people to join your email list. One of the mistakes that many people make is only offering a “newsletter” in exchange for people’s email addresses. When email marketing was new, people got exited about generalized newsletters, but now that marketing emails are so common, you have to offer people something more valuable for them to care enough to hand over their email address to you.
So one of the most valuable things you can offer is an incentive like a free guide or a free checklist. These are the fastest and easiest for you to create. All you have to do is select a topic to write about in the guide or checklist and type up all the info and make it look nice in a tool like Canva and you’re done!
When deciding on a topic to center your guide or checklist around, I recommend making it about one of the top problems, challenges, or desired results that your target clients are experiencing. And you can title it in a way like this…
5 Steps to [Get Desired Result]
How to [Get Desired Result] without [Challenge]
Opt-in incentive example
Opt-in incentive example
Step 3: Connect your email opt-in incentive to your email service provider.
Once your email service provider is selected and you’ve created your email opt-in incentive, now it’s time to connect your email opt-in incentive to the email service provider, so it’ll be automatically delivered to your email subscribers’ inbox — anytime anyone signs up for it!
The beauty of having an email service provider is that you don’t have to manually send out your free guide or checklist to everyone who signs up for it. The tool will do that for you. So to get it connected, you’ll need to follow the appropriate tutorial for MailChimp or ConvertKit — whichever email service provider you decided to use.
Here’s the tutorial for how to send a file to new subscribers in MailChimp.
Step 4: Promote your incentive on your website, social media, your content, etc.
Now that everything is all set up, it’s time to PROMOTE! Your goal should be to promote your email opt-in incentive as often as possible so you can make as many people aware of it as possible. Sometimes, people go through all the trouble of creating an incentive like this and they barely mention it in their marketing and therefore, they hardly get anyone to sign up for it.
You’ll want to promote your incentive everywhere! Here’s a few ideas for places where you can mention your opt-in incentive:
Your Website
Pop-Up
Footer
Home Page
Blog Side Bar
Social Media
Captions in Your Posts
In Your Bio
During Live Videos
In Instagram Reels
Your Content
During YouTube Videos
In Blog Posts
During Podcasts
In conclusion — Knowing how to build an email list is a great skill to possess in your business. You’ll be able to have a list of people to nurture to become future buyers in your business, you’ll be able to have an audience to announce future offers to, and you’ll have an audience that’s 3x more likely to buy than your social media followers. When you follow the steps I’ve outlined here, you’ll be well on your way to building your email list in no time!
