4 Steps to 4x Your Email List Growth Rate with Zach Swinehart

0:01Light that spark fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Marketing Against the Grain. Today, we'll be breaking down four steps to 4x your email list growth rate. To drop these value bombs, I brought Zach Swinehart, aka the Conversion Wizard, into EO Fire Studios. Zach helps clients 2 to 7x their email list growth at conversionwizard.co. His opt-in forms have driven over 100 ,000 subscribers for clients, including EO Fire. That's us. Amy Porterfield, Jonathan Fields, and more.

0:41And today we'll be talking about how your number one most valuable marketing asset is your email list. We'll talk about a direct relationship between email opt-ins and revenue. We'll talk about why so many people ignore email optimization and Zach's four steps that will 2 to 7x your email list growth quickly and easily and so much more, Fire Nation. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Zach and our sponsors. Marketing Made Simple, hosted by my friend, Dr. JJ Peterson, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Marketing Made Simple brings you practical tips to make your marketing easy and, more importantly, make it work.

1:20A recent episode on whether vulnerability is a superpower in business is a must-listen. Listen to Marketing Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. Ever thought about giving a TEDx talk? It's one of the most powerful ways to share your message with the world. And four-time TEDx speaker, Taylor Conroy from Thought Leader can help you get there. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire to join Taylor's free training where he teaches you how to land a TEDx talk and spread your message to millions. Zach, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:58All right. So I have a cheeky answer. By the way, what's up, Fire Nation? can I say something that I believe about being successful that's not necessarily the most people disagree with but that's not necessarily like commonly represented does that count counts okay so I feel like when I was wanting to start a business I thought that a lot of it came down to kind of like intelligence creativity things like that like getting getting a good idea and getting lucky with it but I've kind of come to appreciate and tell me what you think John curious to hear your take. I feel like most of becoming successful is just pain tolerance and persistence.

2:35I would also add delayed gratification. If you can do all of those things and you do them long enough before you are taking that gratification, then yes, you are going to win in the long run. Totally. I feel like the biggest way I sabotaged my success when I was younger, I have ADHD, so I think that adds to it, is that once something got hard and got a little bit less novel and exciting, I would kind of switch to the next shiny object and it would just be kind of like all these false starts and constantly quitting when I was closest to getting through those kind of like pain milestones. zones.

3:12Fire Nation, you've already gotten value from today's episode, and we haven't even started talking about the four steps to 4X, your email list growth rate, which by the way, is something that we've experienced here in the land of EO Fire, which we'll be talking about in more detail later. But I want to really kick into how you believe, Zach, that our email list is not our second, not our third, but our number one most valuable marketing asset, defend this position? Well, fortunately, it's a very easy position to defend. I feel like we've all, anyone who has been reliant on social media as a platform within the past, I don't know, five years or whatever, has learned that social media networks have learned they can make some nice extra money by essentially gating access to your audience unless you pay.

4:06And that's kind of the thing is like, if you think about platform dependence, if you have your entire ability to contact your audience dependent on somebody else's platform, you can have your business sunk overnight. And you've seen it with SEO traffic dipping for people. You see it with like social media, having to pay to reach your followers, that sort of thing. and what's really nice about an email list is that you have permission to contact these people and if your specific platforms let's say on convertkit or whatever uh gives you problems you can just move your subscribers to a different platform every platform at least i hope every platform that somebody would use would allow you to export your email subscribers to a csv file and it's not even that hard to migrate these days so um so to me a business like the viability of a business comes down to your ability to get in touch with the people who want to buy stuff from you.

5:01And in my opinion, email is and will continue to be the very best way to do that, especially in the age of AI. Like, I don't know about you, John, but I don't even Google things very much anymore. I just asked ChatGPT. And so when you can capture somebody's email address and keep getting in touch with them, I feel like that's the kind of golden formula. But again, I'm keen to hear your take. What do you think, John? It's kind of crazy when you start using ChatGPT, you realize you just don't ever want to stop. Like it was the other night I had like four ingredients on my counter. It was like vodka, lime juice, and like two other random things.

5:38And I'm like, ChatGPT, can I make a drink out of these four ingredients? And like, it just came back with this like amazing like opportunity to make this drink and that drink. And I was just like, I could never have done that with Google. Like it would have, you can't do that. But with chat GPT, it's like you're able to use a brain for you and it's going to just keep going down that path. And to kind of go back to the email list thing, 100%, I mean, we have been crushing it with podcast sponsorships for over a decade now. And one reason that we've been crushing it, I mean, we are now on our second seven figure two year deal with HubSpot.

6:13We have multiple, multiple annual deals with these big companies that have been around for a long time for us, like ZipRecruiter's been with us for almost eight years now, is not because we just have great podcast sponsorships, but we insist that email promotion comes with every single one of our podcast sponsorships. That's just part of the package. And so our sponsors are getting such better ROI than they're used to because they're usually just having promotions on podcasts. Well, we're promoting on our podcast, yes. On our social media, yes. But we're also promoting directly to our email subscription list.

6:50And that gets killer conversions. And guess what? Some of our sponsors don't even really know where it's coming from because we're just driving them to a specific link or giving them a specific promo code. They're just like, oh, this podcast sponsorship is working great, where it's really just being bolstered to this awesome effect by our email list that we've really nurtured over the years. And that's why there is a direct relationship between email optins and revenue. And Zach, I want you to give us some specific examples on this. By the way, I want to say, I think that's something you guys do really well.

7:25Thank you. I think that there are a lot of podcasters who just have the podcast and they monetize through sponsors and they don't capture those emails. And I always see that as such a kind of a shame because it's, again, like you're saying, the intent behind a link click is number one, high, and number two, traceable. So you can show that to your sponsors and show, hey, we got all these people from the podcast, We've got all these people from the email. This is very valuable for you. Would you like to pay again? One other little note before we go on to this next bit is one other thing I wanted to say on the asset value of an email list is that it compounds over time.

7:57I have one client, and this is kind of the relationship between email and opt-ins and revenue as well. I have a client who I run launches for, and we've looked at the data, and we find that with each launch we do for her course, about 50 % of the enrollees are, and it's like a$1 ,300 course, 50 % of the enrollees joined the email list within, I'm trying to remember, I think two weeks. And then the other 50 % are from however long. And as you go further back in time, the percentage obviously becomes lower and lower and lower. But nonetheless, each launch, there are people who joined the email list five years ago who bought, people who joined four years ago who bought.

8:36And by continuing to aggregate this asset, it just becomes more and more valuable. So in terms of the relationship between email opt-ins and revenue, it's, I mean, my little notes here is just more equals more. You know, like if you have more people who like you and who get value out of your content, then you have more people who are ready to buy your thing. And it's, you know, it's kind of a simple, straightforward thing, but that's just kind of how I look at it. And I think with some of the A-B tests that I'm running for you guys, for EO Fire, I'm experimenting with intrusivity, which is kind of an advanced tactic that I'm not going to talk about today.

9:20And that opens doors for things like subscriber quality, right? Like if you have something that's really intrusive, the person is maybe not as high of intent. And so you You could argue, okay, well, it's better to have fewer highly engaged people than more lower engagement people. But not to go on a little monologue here, there's this tool. I don't know if you've heard of it. John, have you heard of it? I think it's retention.com. Have you heard of this site? No, I don't think so. IMO, it's pretty dang sketchy. But apparently, if someone has a Shopify store and they have some sketchy terms and conditions that someone checks by purchasing, they essentially sell the data to retention.com.

10:04And then anyone else who uses retention.com, if this person who bought on store A even visits their website, they automatically get opted into their email list. They don't sell it. Yeah, sketchy, right? But here's the interesting piece of data. I was speaking to somebody else who handles funnel conversions and stuff. And they found that the 30-day lifetime value of people who came from that retention.com kind of sketchy thing was not a whole lot lower, at least for a Tripwire funnel, than people. And sorry, Tripwire funnel is a low-ticket product that you sell after someone opts in. The lifetime value was not very much lower for that than for an opt-in person.

10:46So all this is to say, yes, subscriber quality is important. Yes, you should definitely always provide value to your list, not just always be selling stuff. But at the end of the day, more email subscribers equals more revenue. And I'd rather bring in these more email subscribers and then at least give them the opportunity to consume my content. And maybe they won't like it and then they'll stop consuming it. Because one thing that we do that I don't think is talked about a lot, but I want you to touch on very quickly is we really do a very aggressive pruning every three months of our list. So if you haven't opened an email, clicked on a link and done a few other actions in a set number of times, saying 90 days, you're off our list.

11:27Cause that, you know, that's just something is we only want active. So I'd love to get instead of 10 people to come in and then like five of them end up being active and keep, I'd rather have a hundred people come in and 30 of them be active. Cause that to me is a plus 25 on that first example. And at least I'm giving the chance and having the chance to kind of woo those 100 people as opposed to just 10 people that are coming in in an unobtrusive way. So let's talk about that and more when we get back, Fire Nation, from thanking our sponsors. Are you ready to start your year off with increased revenue, faster growth, and record-breaking performance?

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13:18Thought Leader is not affiliated with TED or TEDx, but they're able to get these results because their founder, Taylor Conroy, is a four-time TEDx speaker himself and past EOFire guest. You might be thinking a TEDx talk sounds great, but where do you start? Taylor has put together a free training that's going to teach you how to land a TEDx talk in as little as 90 days. Join Taylor to learn exactly what TEDx organizers are looking for in their speakers, how to write a talk that goes viral once it goes online, and more. Visit thought-leader.com slash fire. Join Taylor for this free training and get your message out of your head, out of your heart, and out into the world where it belongs.

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14:34In two non-clinical surveys, 81 % of customers experienced more calm, 80 % said CBD helped with pain after physical activity, and an impressive 90 % said they slept better with CBD. With over 2 million customers and a solid 100 % money-back guarantee, CBD Distillery is the source to trust. and I have a 20 % discount to get you started. Visit cbdistillery.com and use code FIRE for 20 % off. That's cbdistillery.com, code FIRE, cbdistillery.com. Zach, we're back and I really want you to touch upon that last point we brought up before the break about pruning your email list. Just very quickly though, because we have a lot to talk about, because I want to move very quickly into just the why.

15:17Why do so many business owners ignore email opt-in optimization? They just don't put any focus on it. Take it away. All right. So with email list pruning, basically the idea is that if somebody doesn't engage, which is usually defined, like it used to be defined by opens, but open rate tracking is a little bit more difficult with iOS privacy rollout with the newer versions. so it's usually if somebody has not opened clicked and i don't know if we can track replies but basically if somebody hasn't done something then they get marked as a cold subscriber and often people are sent like typically the way you do it is you would send a sunset campaign is what it's called uh where you essentially give them a few chances to re-engage so it could be a sunset or re-engagement campaign and you're like hey you know you want to be here and then they don't do anything.

16:10You're like, hey, but you know, really, if you want to be here. And then usually the subject line I'll send for the last one is something like, all right, see ya. And like something very kind of... It's over. Yeah. The one consideration here, which you can tell from how I talk, like I'm always thinking about edge cases. I think it's nice. It gets me a lot of info, but it also makes me go down rabbit holes. The one consideration. So as I mentioned before the break, I've been doing some A-B testing for EO Fire with kind of high intrusivity. And we have double opt-in turned on, which is where somebody has to click a link in a confirmation email to say, yes, I want to be here.

16:48If we wanted to, with what John's talking about with aggressive list pruning, we could turn that to single opt-in. But my one concern is that with the intrusivity, the double opt-in rate is much lower than it was before the intrusivity. And unless you're pruning early enough, I would have some potential concerns for deliverability. Like if you have a bunch of really, really low engagement subscribers and the, let's say Gmail and AOL or whatever people use that's not Gmail, I don't know, probably not AOL, they learn that emails from you aren't really getting opened, then they're like, okay, cool.

17:24Well, maybe this isn't actually that important. Maybe we shouldn't put it in the priority inbox. Maybe we should send it to spam, that kind of stuff. So I think that there is a balance between volume and quantity. But I'm with you, John. As a rule, I lean towards quantity as long as we're pruning them and keeping the list engaged. Fire Nation, it's a lot less to really take in when you just understand what this process is. We're going to be going through these four steps in a second. But before we do, Zach, I want to talk about how when you approached us earlier this year, you were sharing how 4Xing our email list growth was totally doable and not just by using these clickbaity headlines.

18:06So let's dive a little deeper there. Sure. And so I would say actually for EO Fire, I don't think I will be able to 4X your email list growth because you guys, you're not doing a bad job actually. It was really nice poking around like the OptiMonster. I was like, you know, of all my clients, EO Fire, their baseline is pretty good. But for most people, it's not. So I've done quite a few conversion audits now, which at the end, I'll give you a link and I can go in for you for free. Ooh, Fire Nation. Yes. But I've noticed that over the course of the past 20 little audits I've done, pretty much every website has a problem in one of these big three areas, which will become the four steps in a minute.

18:50Essentially opt-in form placement, opt-in form text, like the actual text on the form itself, and the lead magnet quality. So the reason the 4X isn't a clickbaity headline is that each of these three categories, when fixed, is usually like a 2X to 3X improvement, like double or triple. And obviously as they stack on top of each other, it becomes huge. So one of my clients, I have 7X'd her opt-in rate and added an extra 9 ,500 subscribers. Another client, I think we're at double, and it's added 300 ,000 extra email subscribers. So obviously these things are dictated by your traffic, but these doubles, triples, quadruples, they are totally doable.

19:34But in the case of EO Fire, like John was telling me in the pre-interview, he's stoked about how I'm doing so far. Stoked. I'm not stoked. It's only a 26 % boost. I'm stoked. But think about if I had had that, for the past eight years or nine years. That's hundreds of thousands of emails. Yeah, and that's the thing that's so crazy. And that's why I wanted to do this interview is that, and this kind of comes back to why people ignore this, which we skipped over, sorry about that. And it's not a fire to put out. You don't feel the pain of people who didn't sign up. You feel the pain of people who ask for a refund.

20:11You feel the pain of people who have some sort of problem with your content, but you don't notice the people who just quietly leave your website. And that, I think what John just said is why I get so excited about this. It's like, that client who I 7x opt-in rate for, that was like five years ago. And she's just coasting on all these free leads that never would have happened. So it's really, it's the long-term where it aggregates. Okay, it's time for the four steps. Yeah, cool. So I know I've gotten a bit nerdy and in the weeds, So I'm going to try to keep things really, really simple. So with CRO, conversion rate optimization, I feel like these four steps are going to make the biggest impact.

20:53And I'll give a little link at the end with some free extra learning stuff. So first step is nail the four key opt-in placements. So I mentioned that this, like, I think if you do only this one thing, it's going to make the hugest difference. So the placements that I look for when doing my audits that are most important, which EOFire, by the way, had almost all of them. The first one is a delayed pop-up opt-in form. And by the way, I like opt-in monster for this stuff. I also like thrive leads. You'll be able to do all of these areas with either tool. So the delayed pop-up. So someone's on your site.

21:33They are there for a few seconds or they scroll 70 % or whatever. And then this pop-up opt-in form comes up. That's one. Exit intent pop-up. It can be, like all these pop-ups can be the exact same copy if you want. And it's probably actually best to start there. So exit intent could be very much like the delayed pop-up. It's just that it gets triggered when someone hovers their mouse to like click the X button. Scroll map. That is like, if you've ever seen one of those huge, ugly, I mean, you've seen one, you've been on EOFire. Huge intrusive forms that like blocks the whole page. That's a scroll map.

22:06And then finally, homepage above the fold. For like 90 % of websites, their homepage gets the most traffic. So having the very top panel of your homepage being an opt-in form, that's going to be huge. So these placements, these are like a really easy way to double and triple. Even if you just have a really non-compelling like, hey, join my newsletter. These like having more placements will make a really huge difference. So that's step one. Nail the four key placements. John, anything before I go to the next one? Nope. Keep it rolling, brother. Cool. So next step, I would say easiest. So these are kind of ranked from like least work for you to most work for you.

22:48So the next least work would be opt-in form 80-20. So to me, most important like 80-20 things for an opt-in form would be having a headline that speaks to the dream outcome and a subhead or body copy that kind of explains how. The biggest mistake I see is like the subhead explains the what and then nothing explains the dream outcome. And this is some of the testing I've been doing with EO Fire and I've been getting great results. But again, John, this is something you did pretty well to start with. But a typical headline I'd see was like, join my email list or download my e-book. Maybe it doesn't even have the name of the e-book.

23:28It literally just says download my e-book. and none of this tells me the visitor what i'm going to get out of that what i really like about john like even john your baseline i'm trying to remember um i'd have to pull it up but but basically john's baseline spoke to the dream outcome which is lifestyle freedom and financial freedom and then the subhead said like get my first three steps which we'll talk more about in a second with lead magnet so uh dream outcome something that's really interesting as a sidebar with one of my clients. They run an English grammar site for Europeans learning English.

24:01And me, as an American, I'm like, all right, let's talk about how if you learn English, you're going to get paid more at your job. And I've tried all of these really American headlines, and none of them have worked as well as things like truly master the English tenses. So sometimes the dream outcome, it might be actually attached to the thing they're trying to learn versus the impact of that thing. And other times it might be the impact. So in John's case, it's like lifestyle freedom, financial freedom. I'll probably at some point test some that would be like spend an extra six hours a week with your kids or something like that.

24:37Like, you know, where it touches your life more. It's the actual outcome of the thing. But ultimately you have to test these things, which is going to be step four because it's maybe not the easiest one. So yeah, so headline, speak to the dream outcome, subhead, explain how, and then keep it short and easy to read, bullet points, bold text, italics, that sort of thing. Low friction, so if you're collecting first name, last name, email, phone number, age, ask yourself, are you actually using any of that data? If not, maybe just collect their email. And then social proof is also a really easy one.

25:12So we got a nice bump for EO Fire when I just included the number of subscribers in the headline. So I changed the headline to be something like join 73 ,000 others building lifestyle and financial freedom, that kind of thing. Step three of the four steps, have a good lead magnet. So the lead magnet is the thing they are signing up for. Great lead magnets are essentially quick, fast to consume, quick shortcuts, quick wins, like something you can just like almost like copy and paste into your life. And it's going to be different depending on your industry. A few examples could be like a case study walkthrough, chat GPT prompts, free email course, worksheet, checklist, scorecard, calculator, spreadsheet, tool, roadmap, first steps, automation, swipe files, or recordings of anything you've done.

25:56Although recordings violate kind of like the quick win and stuff. One note though, is that if you do have something basic and you don't want to create a lead magnet, like let's just say you have an email newsletter, positioning that email newsletter around the dream outcome and stuff. And the benefits of the newsletter is like a nice hack to make a newsletter kind of seem like a lead magnet. So that's one little note. And then I'll go to step four, unless John, you've got anything else? Yeah. Just one thing is Fire Nation. Think about it. When you have like these quick wins, you might be like, oh, but that's just kind of a little bit of fluff.