MBA2350 Q&A Wednesday: How do I grow my newsletter?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show. Pump up the volume if you want to build a better business with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. I'm also the co-founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started back in 2014. And today's episode is Q &A Wednesday. On Q &A Wednesdays, we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. Today's question is from Bruce. And Bruce asks, how do I grow my newsletter? I want to increase my email subscribers faster and get people on board.

0:45Would love any advice. I love this question because newsletters are incredibly valuable. In fact, there's a lot of businesses that get sold for millions of dollars that are purely just a newsletter. This is because attention is money, right? Attention is very valuable in the marketplace and having a newsletter of subscribers that are opening up emails and reading your newsletters week after week or month after month is very valuable. just as a business in itself. Now, obviously, if you're growing your newsletter so that you can be able to sell your products and services, that's even better. But how do you do just that?

1:21How do you make sure your newsletter is growing, that your subscribers are growing, that they're opening your emails, that it's actually something that's blowing up? Well, that's what we get into in today's lesson. I'm gonna give you some practical strategies to get more people onto your newsletter every single day. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. If you want to succeed in anything in life, it's going to require some focus. It's going to require some dedication and some concerted effort. The same goes with your newsletter. And I start with this because if you want to grow your newsletter, you really need to make sure that it's the only thing you are worried about.

1:59And I really like this strategy because everything can come after that. A lot of people, when they design their website, for example, they're trying to get people to take too many actions. whether it's a sign up to their newsletter or to download this thing or to buy their product or to listen to their podcast or watch their videos or whatever it might be. You're spreading your efforts thin. My opinion is get them to sign up to your email list. Get them to sign up to your newsletter. That should be the only call to action. Why? Because once they're on your newsletter, you can then ask them to do the other things like buy your products, watch your videos, listen to your podcast, whatever it might be.

2:37But when somebody is visiting your website, you don't know if they'll ever come back. So you want to make sure that you capture that email and get them onto your newsletter. Having said that, is your website designed with that in mind? Are you making it the only call to action, not the main call to action, the only call to action on the website, especially the homepage to get people on your email list? This means before I scroll, before I go anywhere on your website, as soon as I land on your homepage, there should be an opt-in box to join your newsletter. It should be front and center. It should be your navigation.

3:12It should be the thing that people have to see before they do anything else. It should be at the bottom of every blog post. Sign up for a newsletter with an opt-in box. It should be on the right column of your blog post. It should be the call to action in everything you do. I'm talking about everything, meaning that when you tweet out a tweet storm, for example, or a thread, the call to action at the end shouldn't be, follow me, it should be sign up for my newsletter. The link in your description on your social media, on your Instagram or your Facebook, should be a page where they sign up to your newsletter.

3:45A simple page. A great example of all this in practice is a site called Exploding Topics. It's actually a software that helps people track trending topics that are happening on the internet. This is a SaaS business, okay? But their main focus is getting people on their newsletter. Their newsletter is one of their biggest drivers of sales. It's right on the homepage. It's in the navigation. You can't miss it. It's pretty much the only thing you could do. Think about any time you're telling somebody to do something or go to your website, replace that call to action for signing up to your newsletter.

4:15So in addition to making it very clear on your website, on your homepage to sign up your newsletter, I would create a dedicated landing page or what's also called a squeeze page where they can't do anything else. There's no navigation. There's no way to go to a different page. In fact, there's no scrolling, okay? It's just the page that says, hey, sign up for our newsletter. This is where you're going to get in our newsletter. Here's the box, name and email address, done. Why? Because you want to send them to a very simple page so they just focus on that. And they do that and they're on your newsletter.

4:44That's it. Once they're on your newsletter, once they're on their email list, you can then market to them, nurture them, give them more content, give them blog posts, all kinds of stuff. But without the email, you pretty much don't have them. Now, when it comes to the topic of pop-ups, some people hate them, some people love them. People that love them, they love them for a reason. They convert. They just do. They actually get you more subscribers. Whether it's a time pop-up that shows up after a certain period of time on the website or when you scroll, the data shows that pop-ups actually do get you more subscribers.

5:17Now, you may not like that experience. I know a lot of websites that don't have pop-ups that do just fine. And that's just a choice you need to make. It doesn't mean you're going to hinder your success as long as you have a clear call to action to sign up for your newsletter on your homepage. And I would even argue every page, like on your blog's homepage, on the bottom of your blog post, the top of your blog post, whatever it might be. This could be an alternative to using pop-ups. Now, I'm a big believer in double opt-in. What double opt-in means is that when somebody signs up for your newsletter, they're not automatically added to your email list.

5:52They have to go into their inbox and confirm they want to be on your email list and then they're opted in. This is kind of standard practice to make sure you're on the up and up, but it also makes sure that you have real good subscribers that are interested in your content. It means that your email list is going to be better. You're going to have better open rates, better click rates, all kinds of stuff. You also want to make sure that in this process, you're GDPR compliant so that you're making sure our friends in Europe are happy. The other thing I would like to add, if you want to have really good open rates, that's a great technique, which is the welcome email.

6:25As soon as somebody opts in, they confirm their opt-in, send them a welcome email that's short and sweet. Say, thanks for joining us. This is what you should expect. When somebody opts in, this is when they're the hottest, meaning the most interested in what you have. So you want to capitalize this on welcoming them and giving them some instructions so they can know what to expect. Say, hey, you'll be getting a newsletter every single week or on Fridays or on the first of the month, whatever it might be, let them know when to expect your email so that they're anticipating it. And then give them a quick call to action, a next step by saying, hey, you might be interested in this blog post, in this video, in this article, in this thing I created for you to get them to consume some content and a way for you to build trust with this audience member.

7:13Don't hit them with an offer, They just met you. Give them some more wins. Give them some more great stuff so they can love you even more. If you want to invest a little bit of money in this, growing your newsletter through paid ads is an option. And the good news is that paid advertisement for emails is actually not that expensive, especially if you're going to collect the emails on the platform itself. My recommendation, because I've used this before and have experience, is to use Facebook's lead ads. This means you're collecting the lead on Facebook. They don't actually leave Facebook. This makes it much easier for you to convert and to track conversions because if you know all the different pixels and things like that in iOS 14, changing the game where you can't know if somebody converted or not, if they leave Facebook, this is not a problem with Facebook lead ads because they're opting into your list via Facebook, on Facebook.

8:04Now, the way Facebook lead ads works is that you run an ad talking about what they should sign up for, in this case, your newsletter and why. Maybe you have great tips. Maybe you have great content. Maybe you help them out with some awesome videos. Maybe you give them strategies that are not available anywhere else. Whatever it is, you have an ad for that. They give their name and email address and then it gets added to a database in your Facebook account, your Facebook ads account. At this point, it's your job to make sure that that database is merged with your email marketing service, whether you're using Zapier to move over those contacts or you're doing it manually.

8:40The point here is that you got to make sure that you do that connection, but the cost per acquisition, much less with Facebook lead ads than for you to run an ad to your page on your website. Even that squeeze page we talked about, it's going to be much less expensive to do for Facebook. I grew my email list and my newsletter using Facebook lead ads before. And at some point I was able to get my conversions down to two and a half dollars,$2.50 per lead. It was pretty amazing. That means for$1 ,000, I got 400 new subscribers to my email list. Pretty, pretty good. But even if you're not going to go the paid route and you're just doing normal social media marketing, posting to social media, make every time you post your call to action, join my newsletter and get XYZ.

9:26Here's the link and send them to your squeeze page. Another little trick that I learned from my buddy Noah Kagan over at sumo.com is just change the signature of your actual email. You know, the emails that you correspond people with. I'm not talking about your marketing emails. I'm talking about your Gmail or your personal business email where you have your name and your title. Put a little hyperlink and say, join my newsletter. You're sending emails anyway. People are seeing your emails. Go ahead and make sure that they sign up by just putting a simple link. It's a little small thing, but it can make a difference.

9:57Last, and of course, not least, you could definitely join or use some sort of referral program. I know that ConvertKit has an email referral program, newsletter referral program, like a creator network where you do an exchange where you promote one creator and they promote you. That helps you grow your email list or your newsletter. Another way to do it is referral marketing. There's tons of tools out there. You can go ahead and Google it, email referral marketing tools. I know there's one that's very popular called UpViral. If you're a publication or you're in the Shopify store, you should check out Gather, Gather app.

10:32You can find that at gathercustomers.com, run by good friends is and Rachel. And these tools really help you create some viral marketing within your newsletter. So as your newsletter grows, your subscribers refer other subscribers or potential subscribers to join your newsletter and they're incentivized. And it's kind of fun and interesting and it kind of snowballs after a while and does a lot of the heavy lifting of growing your newsletter for you. Well, there you have it. Thank you so much for asking your question, Bruce, for Q &A Wednesday. If you've got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net.

11:05I'll make sure to answer right here on Q &A Wednesday. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, do it right now, whether you're on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or Overcast, or on every podcast app or tool you're using, just hit subscribe or follow right now to get our next episodes automatically and to get access to over 2 ,300 episodes in our back catalog. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Peter Drucker says what gets measured gets managed, meaning if you're focused on growing your newsletter, If you're measuring it, you're taking a look at how many you're getting every day. It's your sole focus on making sure that's what people are doing on your website and on your calls to action.

11:42It will get managed. It will do well. But don't spread your efforts thin by trying to do too much at one time. Capture the email first and then you can go ahead and ask those people to check out other things that you have on your website. Thanks so much for listening. I'll check you on Free Art Friday, Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

12:06We'll be right back.