What Exactly is a Mailing List? In short, it’s the people who liked your site enough to sign up and give you their email address (the key to their inbox). When you receive an email from your readers treat it like gold.
In your mail list are your future customers, your future friends, and potentially future blogging partners. It’s pure gold. You have to treat it well because like any friendship it can go cold. Think of your email list as a relationship. If you never email them, or just call sporadically, or just reach out to them when you have something to sell – it’ll be a pretty one-sided and selfish relationship.
You need to treat your email list like a good friend. Check in on them weekly, send them amazing advice and tips, help them, educate them, send them gifts. Then when you ask for a favor (or sell your product) they will already have a relationship with you and help you out much more willingly! To make a million, you need to help a million.
What Do You Send to Your Email List?
I get this question from my readers a lot. “What do I send to my list?” And it’s a great question! What do you send to these complete strangers who signed up on your blog? Let’s go back to the example above. It’s a new friendship, this person likes your post enough to give you their email address, but they need to get to know you better now. So how do you do that?
Woo them. Help them. Be a friend. When you see your list as one person and write directly to them, then you won’t come across as forced or fake.
Examples of emails you can send to your readers
- A welcome series
- An email course
- Optins
- Upsells after a purchase
- Your newest blog post
- Weekly tip
- Survey or just a personal email with a few questions
A Welcome Series
If you are just starting out and you don’t know your market too well yet, then do a welcome series.
- Send a welcome email telling them a bit about yourself and asking them to share who they are. Make this a two-way conversation. Especially when you are just starting out, you need to get your readers to reply to your emails so you can understand them better.
- In the second email continue the conversation. Send them a helpful tip or amazing advice.
- In the third email, share one of your best posts, and ask them what they think about it.
- In the fourth email focus completely on them. Ask them what they are struggling with, ask how you can help. The responses to this email will help guide the direction of your blog and give you future blog posts and product ideas!
- In a welcome series, you can have 3-6 emails that help to build a relationship with your reader. There is no set number of emails, as long as you keep adding value to your reader, you’re good.
A welcome series is there to build a relationship with your reader. It gives you the ability to get to know them. Their responses will become future blog posts and product ideas. Keep a log of their comments and concerns so you can start to paint a picture of your true reader.
How Often Do You Email Your Mail List?
Like any relationship, you need to keep in contact. If you never call or text your friend, and only text her when you desperately need someone to watch the kids, she may be unexpectedly ‘busy’. But if you have a great relationship with her, you go out for coffee once in a while, you chat with her weekly, you send her funny articles and helpful recipes – she will clear her schedule when you need help. The same goes for your email list.
Like I said before, treat your list like a good friend. Even though there are thousands of people on my email list, I know many of them very well. We’ve had multiple emails back and forth. I know their issues, I know where they blog and what they struggle with, precisely because I’ve treated them as a friend.
Why Do I Use ConvertKit?
Sign Up Forms and Funnels
ConvertKit allows me to add an unlimited number of specific sign up forms to each of my blog posts. Each form can also feed into a tailored email sequence funnel like I showed above. These funnels help drive sales to my products even when I’m not working on my blog. They help build relationships with my readers. They’re awesome!
Autoresponders are your invisible salesforce. It does all the selling for you when you are away from your computer. Your emails are being sent and going out.
Yes, email marketing is pricey. But imagine hiring a team of salespeople to go out and sell your product. That would be thousands a month. And essentially, that is what an email autoresponder does for you.
If it’s highly segmented and personalized, the autoresponder emails will convert your readers into customers on autopilot.
As busy people we need all the automation we can get. And this one is pure gold.
Segmentation and Triggers
Convertkit also allows me to segment my list so I can tailor specific messages to only a set of subscribers. This increases my conversions, open rates, and click-through rates and decreases my unsubscriber rate.
I can also segment my readers and see who is highly engaged and send them a coupon or gift. And I can delete my cold subscribers from my list to remove people who no longer read my emails. The goal is not to have a huge list, but to have a super-engaged list of subscribers.
Triggers are also an awesome feature of Convertkit. When someone clicks on a specific link in one of my emails, it can move that person to a new email funnel or add a new tag to them. This allows me to be more personal in my emails with my readers.
Additionally, Convertkit does not ‘double count’ my readers when they optin to multiple forms on my blog. This saves me lots of money by not inflating my list size incorrectly.
Dealing with Cold Subscribers in ConvertKit
Worried about unsubscribers? Here is an answer directly from the source. “ConvertKit has a cold subscriber feature that tracks who hasn’t opened an email, in the last 90 days. Every 90 days or so, we recommend sending an email to this filter. Something like, “Do you still want to be on this list? Click here if you do!” If the subscriber clicks, they are removed from the cold subscriber filter, and then you can delete all subscribers from that filter. Additionally, they won’t become a part of unsubscribes, they’ll be fully deleted. This is great news for you, because it makes your open rates better, as it’s a smaller number being divided!”
Optin and Lead Magnet Ideas to Grow Your Email List
Optins, also known as freebies or lead magnets, act as little gifts in exchange for the reader to subscribe to your email list. It attracts your ideal customer (if the optin is tailored to a product funnel) and grows your email list quickly.
Below is a list of different types of optin you can tailor to your niche and give to your reader in exchange for their email address.
- List of tips
- How-to video
- Coupon
- Short ebook
- Checklist
- Spreadsheets
- Cheatsheet
- Free stock images
- Calendar
- Printables
How To Grow Your Email List
Phew, we’ve covered a lot in this post so far. So now that you know exactly what I do to grow my email list and exactly how I do it. What other ways are there to grow your list of subscribers? You now know how important it is!
- Optins
- Webinars
- Sharing a landing page to your optin on social media
- Popups
- Run a giveaway
- Create landing pages and send traffic to them
- Add a Call to Action in the banner of your Facebook blog page or group
- Use Pinterest to promote your freebie
- Promote your freebie on Facebook promo days
- Do a Facebook Live
- Write a guest post and direct people back to your landing page
This post mostly focused on optins within blog posts to grow your email list. But another fantastic way you can use optins is to offer them on a landing page. A page dedicated to one purpose, either collecting and email address or selling a product. Landing pages work great at converting subscribers. You can see my Facebook Group Promo List landing page here and my Start a Blog in 5 Days Free Course here.
Also remember, when you guest post, always direct people back to a page to gather emails, rather than just to your home page. Subscribers are more valuable than page views.
Why Build an Email List if no One Reads Your Emails
But wait, are you worried that people don’t read emails anymore?
Sure, there are challenges with reaching your readers through any medium that you use. Facebook limits your reach when you post, Pinterest doesn’t show your pin in the smart feed, and your emails end up in the Promotions tab and your reader never opens them. There are always challenges with reaching your future customers.
But this is nothing new. Imagine you have a brick and mortar store. How many people drive by your store without noticing it? Or if you run an advertisement in a magazine, how many people will flip through without glancing twice at your product?
Don’t let the challenges of building an online business stop you.
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Every day, with a credit card in hand, THOUSANDS of your most valuable potential customers opt-in to someone’s email list with the hopes of having their most urgent problems solved. Question is… Are they opting into yours? The success of your business rests heavily on your answer to this question. The success of your business is directly tied to the strength of your email list.introducing...
