MBA2402 Q&A Wednesday: How do I grow my email list fast?

0:09Heyo! Welcome to the$100 MBA show because your business needs you at your best. That's why we deliver practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And today's lesson is Q &A Wednesday, where 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 Carol, and Carol asks, I want to grow my email list fast. I've been running my online business for about a year now, but my email list growth has been really slow. Can you give me any advice on how to grow my email list faster?

0:45I got your back, Carol. No worries. I'm going to break down exactly what you need to do so you're getting more email subscribers to your email list every single day. I'm going to share with you the same strategy that I use to go from three to four new emails a day to 100, 200, 300 emails a day. The good news is it's actually not complicated. It's very simple, and that's why a lot of people don't do it. They overcomplicate this process. I'm going to break it down for you so you can grow your email list, so you can convert those leads into sales, into customers. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

1:23One of the first things you learn in online business is that the money is in the list. You hear this all the time. And it sounds kind of scammy and shwarmy, and I'll tend to agree with that. But the whole rationale behind that statement is that the larger your email list, the easier it is for you to make more revenue. because you just have more people to contact, more people to market to, more people to make offers to. Now, I'm here to tell you that in theory, this is true. In practice, it's about 80 % true. Why 80 %? Because the quality of your list matters. Who's on your list matters. You want to make sure people are opening your emails, reading them, clicking on links.

1:58You want a good fan base, people that actually want to hear from you. So I'm going to incorporate increasing the quality of your list in this lesson as well. So what do you need to grow your email list quickly? And it's basically two things. It's a two-part system. The first part is your actual lead magnet. Lead magnet is what you offer to your visitor to your website, to anybody that you come across to in exchange for their email address. If you're a coach or a creator, this could be a mini course. If you're in e-commerce and you're selling products, this might be a coupon on their first order.

2:37If you're in the services, this might be a free consulting call. If you're in software, this could be a free trial or a free plan. You get the point. What do you offer to people so that they can give their email address? This is called a lead magnet. The first part is creating a compelling lead magnet. Something that makes them say, hell yeah, I want to sign up for this. This is incredible. I would pay good money for this. That is the kind of lead magnet you need. Unfortunately, I've come across a lot of businesses. I've helped a lot of entrepreneurs. And most people's lead magnets are lousy. They're lame.

3:14They're not compelling. It's not the thing that is going to really move people. It could be like a white paper or a research thing. Even a poorly made cheat sheet or guide is just not going to move the needle. And because it's getting really competitive, you got to just step up your game even higher so you can be different, so you can stand out from the crowd, so you can actually compete with others. Now, we're going to focus on part one right now, but there is a second part to this equation, to creating a lead magnet that grows fast. But let's start with part one, which is the magnet itself, which is the actual value you're giving to the customer.

3:50Let me be super clear. This is probably the most important thing you will create in your business. It's got to be so high value. Why? Because this is what's going to allow people to give you a chance and buy your products or services. If it's not good enough, it's not the best stuff you got. You're not going to win them over. So what you need to do is you need to think about what would your customer actually buy, spend money on, happily spend money on, and create that and offer it for free in exchange for their email. That's really going to allow you to differentiate yourself and really make it easy to convert customers.

4:30We're going to talk later about traffic, but you're going to work hard to get people to your website so they can opt in for your lead magnet. Now, if they get to your website and look at their lead magnet, they're like, oh, this looks kind of lame. Not so great. They leave. You just wasted that traffic and that traffic is something you might have paid for, right? Something that it costs you money. So why are you wasting all that traffic? You need to create something so compelling that as soon as they hit the page, you're like, wow, this is for free? This is incredible. Where do I put my email?

4:59I'm going to give you two examples from my own business. First example is for years, I grew my business on the$100 MBA by offering one of the courses inside of the$100 MBA that's all about idea validation. It's a standalone course that we offered for free. And this is a full video course that comes with a guide that really walks people through how to validate their business idea. I chose this course because I know that people are starting a business, need to know this very well, and it's something that they're going to be interested in. They're going to want to sign up for, and they would pay money for this.

5:28They would go on other course platforms or other websites and pay good money. I'm offering it for free in exchange for email. Super compelling, helped propel my email list growth to another level. Right now, I have a new lead magnet on the$100 MBA, which is actually pretty meta. It's actually a set of templates to create your own lead magnet. Lead magnets are hard to create, sometimes design, come up with. So we created them for you in Canva and we're offering you the templates for free. Whether it's a guide, whether it's a cheat sheet, a checklist, we got four templates inside that you can just basically copy and paste, change your logo, change the colors and make it your own.

6:11This is a huge time saver. And people pay money for these templates. People sell these templates on design websites. We took the time to create our own templates and offer them for free to you. So that's what I mean by compelling. Something that people are willing to pay money. Now, you know your own business. You know your own product services. You know your audience. You need to think about what is something they will be willing to pay for. But I'm just going to offer it to them for free so I can get their email address. So that's part one. One more tip about part one, don't overwhelm yourself and offer several lead magnets.

6:46A lot of businesses spread themselves too thin and they create three or four or five different lead magnets and they pop them everywhere on their website and they hope that that helps them grow their email list faster. In my experience, I find that it confuses visitors. It confuses people. They don't know if they opt in. Does it mean they're opting in again? Are they going to get double emails? My advice is to create one compelling lead magnet and put it everywhere. OK, one compelling lead magnet that your ideal customer would love to have. Focus on that. Drive all the traffic there. And that leads me to part two of creating a compelling lead magnet.

7:19And that is driving traffic. You have a great lead magnet. It's on your website. People want it. Now you got to get people to it. You got to get people exposed to it. So I want to start with low hanging fruit, how you can get free traffic to your lead magnet easily. Number one, your website. Put it on your homepage. Don't bury it in your blog or in your side menus or whatever it is. Put it on the homepage, if you can, above the fold before you need people scroll. Because at the end of the day, if they're coming to your website and they don't give you their email address, there's no way for you to go back and contact them.

7:52So put the lead magnet up and front and center. Again, you could put it in your blog at the bottom of the blog post on the side menu. Link in bio, make your lead magnet the link in bio. Make it the signature on all your emails. Pin it as a pinned post on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Facebook, whatever it might be. It's got to be front and center. Anytime anybody's exposed to your business or your brand, it should be right there so it's easy for them to see it and be like, wow, this is pretty cool. Let me sign up. Go. It should be the first thing they do when they interact with your brand. Capitalize on the traffic you're already getting by putting it front and center.

8:30Next, how else will you drive traffic to it? Well, anytime you have a call to action, anytime. I'm talking about the end of your emails. Now, I know you might be thinking, end of your emails. Aren't they already on your email list? Why would they sign up again? Doesn't matter. Get them to experience this amazing thing you created because they're going to tell other people about it. They're going to forward it. They're going to share it. When you're on a podcast being interviewed, got anything to tell the audience? Yes, I do. Check out my free course. Check out my free template. Here's the link and give it a pretty link, an easy link for them to listen to.

9:01And remember, forget about your product right now. What you want to do is send them here first. People don't buy straight to your product. A lot of people are like, oh, check out my product. Check out my products. Check out my services. No, say, hey, if you want to learn more about me and what we do, check out this thing. This thing that I'm going to give you for free, that is low-hanging fruit, that's so easy for you to sign up for, that's not going to cost you a dime, that you're going to absolutely love, and you're going to really build trust with me through that process. Here you go. That's what you start them with.

9:30Now, if you want to put some fuel to the fire, paid ads. Paid acquisition. Now, paid acquisition can take many forms. It could be typical like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, TikTok, that type of thing. Or it could be advertising on podcasts. It could be sponsoring newsletters. It could be banner ads. My only advice is to stick to online advertising, something that's consumed on the internet. Why? Because it's easy to get somebody who's online to stay online and go to your page where they can opt in for your lead magnet. Outside of online flyers, events, sponsoring a conference or something like that, they're not bad forms of advertising, but it's not really a driver to grow your email list quickly.

10:14Why? Because it's more of a brand awareness type of advertising. Because one, it's hard to measure to see how many people have converted from a certain digital real estate like Facebook ads. number one, because it's hard to measure to see if they converted from a sign they saw at an event or a table or booth that they visited. It's easier to track this when it's in the digital world, when you can track it off Facebook ads. You can track it through clicks on an email newsletter, through UTM links and tracking links, all that kind of stuff. If you want to start somewhere very quickly, I highly recommend Facebook lead ads.

10:48These are actual ads that collect the lead right in Facebook. So they'll never leave Facebook and it's easy to kind of get customers to sign up for your lead magnet there. You're gonna have to deliver the lead magnet in a different way because they're on Facebook, but that's an easy fix. That's the technicality. They can easily work out. I've done a million times and it's fantastic because you can get leads pretty cheaply. You can get people signing up for email cheaply, especially if you have a compelling lead magnet. Carol, I hope that helped answer your question. Two parts, create a compelling lead magnet that people would be willing to buy, but you're giving it away for free.

11:24And two, drive massive traffic to it. Make it the only thing you point people to. And then if you want to put fuel to the fire, put some money behind it. Thanks so much for listening to The$100 MBA Show. If you've got a question you want to ask here on Q &A Wednesday, go ahead and email me over at omar at 100mba.net. If you love this podcast, if you found this episode useful, the best way to support the show is to subscribe or follow the show right now on your favorite podcast app. By doing that, you get our next episode automatically and you tell the little algorithm, hey, this show is all right.

11:54Thank you in advance for doing that for us. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Creating a compelling lead magnet takes time. It takes thought. It takes deliberation. This is a thing that you should invest a lot of effort in. It's really important. You want to nail it. You want to make sure it's great. This is like an artist releasing their first single off their new album. It's going to knock their socks off and make them say, this is amazing. What else does this person have? What other songs are on this album? I want to buy the whole thing. Now, I know we don't buy albums anymore because of our dear friend Spotify, but you get the point.

12:23Make a hit. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll check you in Friday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

12:48Thank you.