How Do I Grow An Email List Of Potential Customers, No Tire Kickers?

0:00Who knew Walmart business could help a thriving office motivate their employees? Pamela knew. She uses Walmart business to get the assortment of items her team needs at the prices she loves. As the office manager, it's my job to make sure my team stays on top of their game. I can get the basics like cleaning supplies and paper towels, but what they really care about, snacks. And she can get everything they need when they need it. Greg loves wheat crackers, Brenda Crave sour candy, and Max, oh boy. He needs protein bars and milk and applesauce and turkey. It's Walmart, built for your business. Who knew?

0:28When did work become so much work? The meeting about the meeting, the hundreds of files to find one insight, setting aside the things you want to do for the things that pop up. Your workday's gone. But what if the insight surfaced itself? Or you could ship the deck without the distractions. Gemini Enterprise helps you get that done. It's AI that knows your business with agents that take stuff off your plate. Make work less work with Gemini Enterprise from Google Cloud. A big email list filled with tire kickers is worse than a small email list filled with buyers. Today's Q &A question comes from Fabian and Fabian asks, how do I grow an email list filled with potential buyers?

1:12I love this question because it's a great question. You're aware, Fabian, that not all email lists are created equal. Most people that are chasing a large email list are trying to increase the size of their email list and they neglect the quality of the list. And I'm here to tell you, Nicole and I have built multiple businesses off the back of quality email lists, especially with our software company Webinar Ninja. We're going to share a lot of examples and I'll show you what actually works when it comes to building a list of potential buyers. Nicole, thanks for being here and helping me here on Q &A Wednesday.

1:45Hey, Omar.

1:52Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Hey, if this show has helped you in any way, leave me a quick review wherever you listen to podcasts. This helps us reach even more people who need the same no-fluff practical business advice. It literally takes a few seconds, but it makes a huge difference. Thanks for being a part of our journey to help others on their journey. Nicole, back when we were running our software company, Webinar Ninja, before we got acquired by ProProfs, how much did our email list matter?

2:30I remember it was everything. Now, you definitely took the lead on this. I learned so much about what it means to have the right email list and all the moving parts of your CRM and your email list. You definitely took the lead on this. And I know that we had copywriters on our team that wrote each weekly email. We sent multiple emails. I know you're going to have a ton of information because it was pretty much what drove most of our sales, right? A thousand percent. And my number one tip, if you take anything from this episode, is whatever you offer your audience in exchange for their name and email address, your lead magnet, your bribe, whatever you want to call it, this is what's going to allow you to increase the quality of that subscriber.

3:15So whatever you're putting out there attracts a certain type of person, a certain type of demographic, a certain type of buyer. So it's a signal. It's sort of like you're putting out in the world, hey, if you're this type of person that's interested in this, then you're going to join the list. So if they join the list and then you're unhappy with them, it's probably because your lead magnet or what you offer them for free is not attracting the right type of buyer. Okay. You're going to have to, this is one of the things I had to understand and learn so much about email marketing. All right. And you said lead magnet, Maybe a lot of our listeners and audience knows what that is.

3:46And you said bribe as well. So what is a lead magnet? It's a piece of value, something free that you can offer. This could be a guide. This could be a cheat sheet. This could be a template in exchange for their name and email address. So basically, you're offering value for free. So people could say, hey, I want to learn more about these people. I want to get this free guide or this template. So I'm going to give my name and email address so I can get that sent to me. And now they're on the email list. they're going to continue to get emails from you, whether it's your newsletter, your offers, whatever it might be.

4:17So the lead is the person that's eventually going to be hopefully the buyer, the customer, correct. Customer. So back in Webinar Ninja, our number one lead magnet was actually a paid thing. We offered a program called the Automated Webinar Challenge. Remember that? Yes. I remember how much you invested in that and how successful that was and how many people came mean through that challenge? Yeah. At Webinar Ninja, we started with just live webinars. And then soon we launched a new type of webinar called automated webinars, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's you have a webinar that's a recorded video that people can watch and they can then see your offers, all that kind of stuff and buy your products off that automated webinar.

4:58So it was kind of an up and coming. This is a circa 2016 is an up and coming kind of trend. And what we did is we created a program, a 30-day challenge, where they can create their automated webinar with, of course, our software. And we would show them step-by-step how to do that, how to write the email copy, how to create their landing pages, how to follow up, how to make offers, all that kind of stuff. So what was great about it is it was a 30-day challenge. So our free trial was 14 days. So they would sign up to use the software, implement what they learned in the challenge. and therefore they would continue to be a user once they saw results from their automated webinars.

5:34Yeah. Challenges is something that I've realized really works for people. I think especially people that are on the fence. I've seen it work in the fitness industry, gyms, obviously in our case with the software where you wanted them to get a result. We've really got those people who are like, do I really want to do this? Let me try. And the challenge kind of gave them that timeline and that deadline to implement and then eventually, yeah, get converted to being our customers for a longer term. That was really powerful. But I also remember that we had an email opt-in box pretty much everywhere on our site, right?

6:12Like at the end of every blog post that we posted. Do you want to speak to that? Because I do think like the challenge was one thing that we did as a lead magnet, but didn't we always have that opt-in box everywhere else? Yes. I'm going to talk about that in a moment, but I do want to just quickly say, just dissect a little bit. Why did that challenge work so well? Why did it attract the right buyer? Well, because it was very specific. It was like, hey, if you want to run an automated webinar, I'm going to show you how to do it. And I know that you can't do it without software and I'm the software provider.

6:45So it was a good match. I'm not getting somebody who's just like thinking about it. There's somebody who's actually willing to do the work. They're willing to invest money to learn how to do this, but also that they're not just like, hey, I want to make more sales. And they're not interested in webinars. This is somebody who's really interested in running a specific type of webinar, automated webinar. So the more specific, the better, because it's going to attract a little bit more of a targeted customer. Now, you mentioned that we had a lot of opt-in boxes. Our goal at Webinar Ninja, if you hit our website, is I want your email.

7:14I want your email. All right. I'm not going to let you go without my without an email. So we had opt in boxes of the bottom blog posts, like you mentioned. But we also had like if they visited for the first time, we give a little pop up where they get a discount code. So for the first month on Webinar Ninja, we also like split tested extended trials. We had a free trial, which is an opt in in itself. They get to use the software for free for 14 days. We just wanted to make sure that if anybody landed on our website because they found through SEO a blog post or an article or they learned about us from a competitor or a comparison site that they didn't leave without putting their email address.

7:51Now, the reason why I did this is because once they leave your website, there's no way to contact them. There's no way to give them an offer. They're gone forever. So if you can give them even something of extreme value, something that you would sell so they can leave their name and email address, this would allow you to then follow up with them, invite them to your next sales webinar, invite them to take on a new offer that you have, a new product. They're in the loop. You have a direct contact to their inbox. And we always say that your inbox these days with social media and all these things that we've thumbed through the feeds, those are very easy to ignore.

8:22But your inbox is something that you have to deal with. You have to check it. You have to archive it. You've got to do something. Right. And I want to just go back to what the thinking behind the bigger picture strategy is. We make the assumption that when they're visiting the website, they're interested in, in our case, it was webinars, but they land on your website, whatever business you're in, you understand that someone's likely to be interested. And then our thinking was to capture their email was to then not just send them sales offers. It was to educate them, to provide them with more information.

8:52and really that's like the bulk of our content was always very educationally kind of driven and so that then through that education then once an offer was made to you know there's a discount we're running a sale or we're running you know black friday or something then it's like a no brainer because they've already like learned to trust you and gotten some stuff from you in the past so that's kind of like the bigger strategy and thinking around it isn't it that you don't just take their email and then you never reach out to them with anything because I think a lot of people do that don't they yeah a lot of people kind of ignore their subscribers so two things that you kind of remind me of number one the question is like how do I have a list of buyers well you have people visiting your website especially your home page is the most visited page on your site your opt-in box where they give their name and email address for whatever you're gonna give for free should be in the hero section in the top without them having to scroll it has to be like prime real estate.

9:49This is where you got to use it because you can't guarantee they're going to scroll. You got to make sure that they see that as soon as they hear your page. That way you capture them before they leave. Number two, when they sign up, we made sure that we had an onboarding sequence. Basically, they're free. They're not a new user, but they're a new subscriber. So we had basically a way to nurture them the first seven days. We would give them really good content. We would give them courses, videos. We would highlight some of the features that we had with that, like it's a bit of a soft sell. Like, hey, did you know that Webinar Engine does XYZ?

10:20Especially being software, you know, people are shopping around. It's good to highlight these things as a comparison shopping. And with any product or service, you have competitors are going to look at other people as well. So if you're a top of mind and you're giving them, you know, an email a day or maybe email every other day and giving them something of value, they're going to start thinking about you as a serious contender for their hard earned dollar. Yeah. And that's, I think what I learned was how strategically we did that, not in the strategic, like in a, oh, that's like, this is in a manipulative way.

10:51We were really invested in teaching people what we thought was the best practices when it came to webinars and just to help them make that decision. Cause I've seen so many, I don't know about you, but I land on so many new websites now where that pop-up comes up. Like you're saying, it should, you know, a place to put your name and email should be very like a, you know, top of the scroll. I see it now everywhere with pop-ups and most websites, maybe they're most e-commerce websites. We might have to talk about different business types. The first offer is get 10 % to put your name and email so that you'll get 10 % off your offer, 15 % off some sort of discount, right?

11:27Which I'm like, okay, I don't know. I'm curious to hear what you think about this because I might not be ready to buy right away. And so many times that email has gone to the promotions tab or spam. So I'm wondering if there's a better strategy, because if I don't get that discount code or I'm not ready to buy, and then I never really hear from this company again, is that really effective? Like, is that putting me on a list? And am I going to be a buyer eventually? Are you saying that you signed up for the discount or no? Well, yeah, I've signed up, say I've put my name and email for the discount, but then they haven't really followed up with anything else.

12:04No, they need to follow up. Everybody's got to follow up. Once you're in, you have to have that onboarding sequence because again, you got to be top of mind. They got to make sure that they see your name and your company in their inbox. They understand what you offer. The buyer doesn't know your business and your offerings as much as you do. So it's good for you to have a sequence where you kind of showcase, hey, we have these types of meals. Did you know that our average meal has X amount of protein in it, blah, blah, blah. So whatever it might be. I believe, especially in e-commerce, people are not generous enough with that opt-in discount.

12:35Why do I say that? Because I know how much it costs to acquire a lead. Like if you ran an ad on Facebook to acquire leads for your company off cold traffic, it's gonna cost you a lot of money per lead. It's gonna cost you 30, 40, 50, sometimes$100 per lead. This is not customer, this is a lead. So why don't you give a generous offer? Like say, for example, your average product is$50. Why don't you give them$50 gift certificate? Here's$50 gift certificate. And they get to see your product for free. Or maybe you give them something a little bit less, like a$30 gift certificate. And then they have to spend$20 or something.

13:08And they have to pay for shipping. That's fine. But the point is that that would really wow them. And you would get the email. Yeah. Maybe I was a bit in a roundabout way trying to get to a point. Like I suppose for e-commerce is the best way to get those people on an email list and make sure that their buyer is not tire kickers. Just a discount. And then that's one question. And then what is maybe a better way, a more guaranteed way to get people who would be likely buyers, not tie kickers for, say, I don't know, professional services and consulting or tech and SaaS? I guess we spoke about tech and SaaS through the example.

13:42I think it's very important for business owners to know the data. So if you look in your dashboard, look at your Google Analytics, and you have noticed that it takes three visits for somebody to buy, then maybe you want to offer this discount after the second visit. You don't have to be the first time they hit the website. You know, you can do that through cookies. You could figure out like how many times this IP has hit the website. So this is a good way. And then the first time we offer something different. Maybe offer like a buyer's guide. We used to do that. We have a comparison guide between the other softwares that are out there for webinars.

14:13That way, like, hey, we know you're shopping around. Once you take our guide, it shows you the pros and cons of all our competitors and you can decide what is best for your needs. Today's episode is supported by Rosetta Stone. I absolutely love Rosetta Stone because it's helping me learn Italian faster than I can ever imagine. Why do I want to learn Italian? Well, who doesn't love Italy? But of course, Nicole's family is Italian, and I love to have some quick Italian conversations with her mom. And Rosetta Stone just came out with Rosetta Stone Sapphire, their biggest launch in over a decade. One of the coolest features is chat missions, which turns conversation practice into a game.

14:52With chat missions, you're put in interactive scenarios and given three objectives. A mission to accomplish, like asking how much something costs, ordering a cold brew coffee, or getting a Wi-Fi password. Along the way, you get real-time corrections and feedback to help you sound more natural and confident. It's a supportive way to build confidence before putting your language skills to use in real life. I've been using Rosetta Stone for over two years, and I actually can have some small Italian conversations with Nicole's mom now. Just the other day, she asked me, when are you traveling? And I said, dopo domani mattina, which means after tomorrow morning.

15:25She was incredibly impressed that I was able to answer in Italian. How could you put a price tag on a happy mother-in-law? If you want to take your language skills to the next level, don't wait to try Rosetta Stone Sapphire. The$100 MBA show listeners can get 20 % off the Rosetta Stone Sapphire subscription when they sign up today. This gets you access to Rosetta Stone Sapphire in 25 languages. I've helped literally thousands of entrepreneurs grow their business. And the one thing I've seen that separates the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones is the skill of delegation. Those who can delegate grow.

15:58That's why I'm happy to have Upwork as today's sponsor. When I was scaling my software company, Webinar Ninja, I used Upwork. It's where I found highly skilled freelance professionals. My first hire was a part-time CTO. This person helped me build my whole tech team. When I was starting, I couldn't afford a full-time CTO. so I got just enough help to keep me growing. At Upwork, you can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can hire with confidence and get started quickly. And with Business Plus, you can access the top 1 % of talent on Upwork. With over 170 ,000 freelancers holding five-star ratings, you can hire with the confidence that comes from hiring someone with a verified track record.

16:42It's free to sign up, and posting a job is so easy. Do what I did over 12 years ago and what I continue to do. Visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-O-R-K.com, Upwork.com. Okay, so those are the lead magnets. And then I think you want to talk about how do you make sure that you don't just build a list that's just, you know, it's growing in numbers. But it's not actually a good quality list. Like, how did we prune that list? I know that you were really big on this, constantly making sure that our list was clean.

17:25So there's two things here. There's like, how do I track the right person through the lead magnet? And then also, how do you prune? So let me do the first one. The first one is really about what is that lead magnet about? And a good way to create a very effective lead magnet is to understand who your best customers are and what were their motives to become a customer. So it's good to analyze, to talk to your customers, to interview them. We talked about Deploy Empathy by Michelle Hansen, a great book on this topic. But this is going to allow you to give you a blueprint to attract more people like your best customers.

17:55So, for example, we have a guide on the 100 OMB website called The Escape Plan. And it's basically people that are really in pain. We understand that people have nine to five jobs that they hate. We call it an escape plan because people feel like they're in prison. So the point is, is that, hey, we want people that are really frustrated in their current situation. Why? Because I know from experience and the other people that I've talked to that have been a part of the 100 MBA, you need somebody that is really inspired and frustrated of their situation to take that leap of faith into becoming an entrepreneur, because they got to be in a situation where they're like, anything's better than this.

18:32And if that verbiage of that wording attracts that type of person, I'm going to get somebody who's an action taker is willing to pay$100 a month to join our program or even just to listen to our podcast consistently. And that would be a perfect fit. So understanding who your best customer is and understanding how to word your lead magnet to track them using the same pain points that that person had, you're going to win. I think you just said it. It's really the pain point that you've got to address and it's got to speak to it. Maybe some people hold off giving something that is probably like, oh no, this is going to actually be in the content.

19:05I don't want to give everything away that's going to be gated, you know, behind like it's going to be something that I charge for. But really, the way that you're going to get someone who's super interested is directly speaking to that pain point. Yeah, I really believe giving your best for free. Really, what people are paying for is either convenience or access to you if you're a coach or just something that's a service or a system done for you. So really, the information, the best information should be out there in your marketing. And to your point about pruning your list, every email marketing software has some way to score your contacts or your subscribers.

19:41And you'll know based on the score, if they've opened your emails, they've clicked any links in your emails, they've replied to your emails. So one of the things that we do a lot of is we ask our subscribers to reply, especially in the early days when they join our list, because a reply is a good signal to Gmail and the other email providers that this is not spam. Let's put in the inbox, not the promotions tab. This is actually a correspondence. So something like, you know, what's your biggest challenge right now in your business is something we ask and please reply. I read every single email.

20:11I try to reply as much as I can. But the point here is that, you know, you're getting them to take action. This will increase the score. Now, if no one's taking action, say, for example, they're on your list for a year, I'd like to prune the list at least once a year and you could just unsubscribe them. You don't have to have someone on your list that's not actually opening your emails, reading your emails, clicking on links, somebody that's just dormant, they're not actually consuming the content. So they're not really being nurtured. Does that hurt your deliverability if you've got too many dormant people or you're the score?

20:41It doesn't hurt your deliverability as long as they don't hit spam, but it's hurting your wallet because you pay for every subscriber, like the plan that you're on. Like if I have, let's say 50 ,000 subscribers on my email list, and then after I prune them, it's like 35, but they're all quality. I'm going to pay less every month for my email subscribing service. There's no reason I'm paying for people that are not, they don't want to be served, don't want to be helped, and it's okay. Another quick tip I want to give is you want to capitalize on the fact that when somebody subscribes to your email list, they are the hottest they'll ever be.

21:13They are the most interested they'll ever be. They've just been on your website, they've been shopping around, they're looking, they're interested. They're going to be most compliant then. That means that you want to ask maybe to take a survey, a quiz, or apply to an email like I mentioned. And maybe you can get them to read a blog post that's really going to orient them and understand what you actually do. And maybe some case studies. This is when you got them the hottest. So capitalize on those early subscribers, meaning that you should have an automation in your email list. So when they subscribe, don't wait three days.

21:44You could just literally give them an email immediately that gives them value, that asks them to take some action of some sort. One of the things that we do when they subscribe is say, hey, thanks for being here. Reply with your biggest challenge in business. In the meantime, here are five episodes that we recommend. Get them to listen to these episodes. They're taking action and they're more willing to take action when they're new on your list. Yeah. And taking action also means that they'll end up in their primary inbox too, right? If you get them to click. Yeah. Clicking helps. Replying is the most powerful thing.

22:16But even just opening the email more than once is a signal from Gmail. If they go back to it and read it or whatever it might be. I hope you're enjoying the show. So if so, hit subscribe so you continue to learn here on the$100 MBA show. We have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. We talk about why people that are sharing their revenue publicly is absolute BS. It's actually not good marketing. It's not helping you in any way. It's actually just kind of boosting your ego, making you feel good. What should you do instead? That's what we discuss in the episode. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it when it comes out.