Worth It or Worthless? Building Your Email List
“Your email list can be a gold mine,” Have you ever heard that or something similar and wondered exactly how that could be possible for you?
For the time you spend crafting emails and offers or thinking about crafting emails and offers – you might wondering if building an email list is actually worth it.
The answer is yes, If you have the right people on your list and a strategy for converting them into paying clients. But without those two those things, you could have thousands on your list and see very little return on your investment.
The Right People
When I was first starting out, I focused on getting as many people as I could on my list. Why? That’s all most of the online marketing gurus were talking about. Everyone was teaching that the larger the list the better. And they had stats to back it up. At one time, the statistics were that only 1-3% of subscribers would respond to offers. This is why they pushed you to get more people on your list. Three percent of 100 is just 3 people. But three percent of 10,000 is 300.
Bankable Insight: We are not internet marketers. So trying to create conversions from email marketing like an internet marketer does is not going to work. See, for most internet marketers, it’s all a numbers game – the focus is on quantity. For you and I, we are about building relationships, which means we focus on quality.
We are not building an audience to sell to. We are building an engaged community of co-creators who want to hear from us because we can help them.
As a catalyst entrepreneur, we have three responsibilities to the people that join our community:
- Honor the relationship by keeping the conversation going. Imagine dating someone, who stopped talking to you. Would you stay?
- Provide value. While they opted into your list because of your offer or event, the expectation was that you would provide continued value. Imagine if the person you were dating, started talking about things that weren’t relevant to you. Would you continue the relationship?
- Extend mutually beneficial invitations. We aren’t creating a community and building relationships out of the kindness of our hearts. Our ultimate goal is to sell our products and services. If you were in a relationship with someone who invited you to things that you were not interested in, would you look forward to their invitation?
The Right List Building Strategy
Inconsistent communication, unhelpful content, and uninteresting invitations lead to a community that is unengaged and unresponsive. Here’s how you can turn things around and make sure you get a return on the investment you are making into this relationship:
Think Long Term
You will need to invest time, effort (and money if you choose) to build an engaged community. It takes time to find the right recipe of opt-in offers, messages, promotion strategy, and delivery format. Don’t leave the process too soon because you are listening to people that say you need to get 500 subscribers in 30 days. There are things you can do to increase your opt-ins, but employing quick fixes won’t get you the quality you want.
Be strategic about your traffic sources
Traffic that originates from a source that is out of alignment with who your ideal client is, will rarely produce people who will take action. You’ll be growing a list of freebie seekers and tire kickers with no intention of engaging with you. Think of it like a one night stand. These people will never even read your emails let alone make a purchase.
Avoid sharing an invitation to your list and opt-in in general places, on line or offline. Focus on opportunities where you can target the audience, like Facebook ads or groups where your ideal clients are actively engaged.
Track Activity and Clean your List
Monitor the subscriber activity in your list. If you have a number of subscribers that have not opened any of your emails, don’t continue to send them your content and offers. There could be several reasons why a subscriber is not opening your emails, they:
- Don’t like your email content
- Do not use the email address any more
- Have forgotten who you are
- Are freebie seekers
I clean my list every 90 days through an automation set up in my email service. Here’s the process I use:
- Find all subscribers that have not opened emails for 3 months.
- Remove these people from your primary list and add them to a new list.
- Send out three broadcast messages to them on different days advising them of the situation and asking them to re-subscribe if they want to continue receiving your newsletter.
Create targeted segments
What if there was a way to know exactly what your list community needed? What if you could ensure your content and invitations were valuable and desirable?
This is what I’ve done through creating quizzes as opt-in offers. If you’ve taken either of the quizzes I’ve created, you were tagged in my email system so that I know what will help you the most. For example, with the Growth Alignment quiz, if you responded that you don’t know how to find your target audience, you were tagged a certain way in my system. You will get content that helps you find your ideal client. And when I see a certain number of people that have this need, I start digging a little deeper to figure out if there is a course or offering I can create and invite you to.
In my upcoming Quizology course, I’ll be teaching how you can use this exact approach to segment your email list. If you have a list and have been wondering how to increase the return on your investment, this approach is a smart way to figure out what content and invitations will lead to more clients and sales.
Learn more about Quizology and reserve your spot in the live 3-hour workshop.
About the Author Tai Goodwin
Tai Goodwin on a mission to help 10,000 women entrepreneurs create more joy and wealth in their life and business. She's the CEO of Aligned + Bankable and creator of the Bankable Brilliance Course. An intuitive business growth strategist and teacher, her specialty is helping clients create bankable business models that allow them to increase their impact and income without burning out. Tai is a former corporate trainer with a master's degree in instructional design and over 20 years of experience designing course, training programs, and certifications. She is also the author of Girlfriend, It's Your Time and founder of Brilliant Business Girlfriends.