Welcome back to Freestyle Friday where I share one actionable tip, strategy, or tactic to help you build your business online and get one step closer to creating your Freestyle Lifestyle.
Today I’m going to share with you how I built up my email list to my first 100 subscribers.
Before we dive into the tactical.
Let’s talk about the foundation for building your email list.
Foundation
In order for us to create an email list that is effective in building a relationship with people, it’s important that we start with the end in mind.
What I mean is, we need to identify exactly who we want to attract to our email list.
I don’t want to build an email list of complete random freebie seekers who opt into my email list just to get the freebie and then bounce…
No thank you.
I’m in it for the long haul.
I prefer Quality over Quantity.
So my end goal is to build a relationship with my email list.
A relationship so close that everytime I decide to put an offer together that serves my market, people on my email list will buy the offer just because my name is on it.
So how do we do that?
We start with identifying the market we want to serve.
Market
Our market will come from from the the big 3
- Health
- Wealth
- Relationships
Once we identify which of the big 3 we want to play in, then we can dial it in further to a niche and then a sub-niche.
Here’s the market I want to serve.
Market → Wealth
Niche → Email Marketing
Sub-niche → Creators and Business Coaches
I want to serve a market that makes use of my skills as a copywriter and chat closer and be able to serve people who don’t have those skills.
Gary Halbert (one of the greatest copywriters of all time) had a great phrase for this, he says he wanted to market to “Players with Money”
i.e. people who can afford to buy his services but were just unaware of the solution.
An unsophisticated market.
Next up:
Create a Lead Magnet
Once we’ve identified the market we want to serve, next we need to create a bait (lead magnet) to attract them.
Do a bit of research on what your market is currently spending money on.
Doing a bit of research for coaches and creators, I found that building an email list is something they are currently buying courses on and investing in services for.
So this is a problem that I want to solve for them and offer my copywriting services to solve.
I also found that coaches and creators are having a hard time monetizing their audiences.
They’ve taken the time to build up an audience on their social platforms but haven’t been able to figure out how to turn their audience into moolah.
So I created an offer to help coaches and creators monetize their audiences with my copywriting services.
I wrote a short guide on the Phoneless Sales Process I learned when I worked for a social media influencer to attract my market into my email list.
You can check that out here:
Once we have those foundations down.
Next, we can dive into the tactical.
Sign up for an Email Service Provider
An email service provider (ESP) is where you start to build your list.
There are many out there, like ConvertKit, Aweber, Beehiv, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse…
The functionality of each software is different, just take the time to learn how to build a list, do broadcasts, and create sequences.
A couple of sequences you want to write is:
- Welcome Email
- Welcome Sequence
Create a Landing Page and a Thank You Page
A landing page is where people opt into your email list in order to join your email list.
The thank you page is directly after they opt in, where ideally you have another offer where people can work closer with you.
Once those are set up, next up is getting traffic.
Traffic
There are two ways to get traffic to your landing page.
- Organic
- Paid Ads
The first way is organic traffic can be built by building up an audience on social media and directing them to your opt in link.
It takes time to build an audience but if you have the time, it can be effective if you have a clear strategy for building up an audience on social media.
The second way to get traffic is by purchasing it through paid ads.
Meta Ads, YouTube Ads, LinkedIn Ads etc.
Once you have your lead magnet and landing page set up, all you have to do is create ads and send them to your landing page link.
Building a Relationship with your Email List
Building a relationship with the people on your email list comes down to frequency.
Frequency builds Familiarity.
Familiarity builds Liking.
And liking is one of the psychology triggers Dr. Robert Cialdani, author of Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion mentions it as a way to influence other people.
So if you’re serious about building an email list, realize that it is a slow burn.
It will take time to build a relationship with people on your email list.
So pick an email frequency that you can stick with.
Minimum, 3x a week. Ideally, daily.
And that’s about it.
I used this strategy to build up to my first 100 email subscribers to my email list.
Hope it helps you to start and build your own!
My wins for the week:
-Created a new opt in page to attract business coaches and creators to my email list
-Set up all of the assets I mentioned above
-Created ads to start driving paid traffic to my list
-Got back into the swing of writing a Weekly Newsletter
Remember, we are the creators of our lives…
The authors of our own story…
We only get ONE life and you’re holding the pen.
Make it one to remember!
Til next time…
Freestyle Your Lifestyle!
Destrie Monis
Also: When you’re ready, here are more ways I can help you…
If you’d like my personal help with setting up a profitable email list for your ideal audience, shoot me an email at [email protected] with the Subject Line: Email List,
I’ll ask a couple questions to see if I can help and send more details if we’re a fit to work together.
If you’re a coach or creator with a large social audience and want to monetize your audience, I can set up a Phoneless Sales Process to convert your high-ticket offers… Book a time on my calendar here to see if I can help.
This exact process helped one of my clients with an audience of ~4,000 make $46k in a week with under 10 hours of work for his offer.