List building is the most important thing you can do to grow your business next to direct business development (picking up the phone and having a conversation with your ideal client). Why?
- People who opt-in (voluntarily sign up for) your email list have given you permission to stay at the top of their mind. They have let you know that your business, what you have to offer, is interesting enough to them to allow you to visit them in their inbox every so often (once a week is best, in my opinion).
- On average, people must have contact with you, your brand, your product or service, a minimum of seven times before they will make a decision to buy.
- The size of your list goes directly to the valuation of your business, which matters if you ever want to secure venture capital funding or sell it one day.
If that isn’t enough, your list provides you with a captive audience to:
- invite to your events, webinars, and workshops
- join you on your social media platforms (which are viral–meaning when someone interacts with your content, all of their connections have an opportunity to learn about your business)
- share your latest products, services, and/or special promotions with
- inform of your most recent article, book, or blog post
- thank for allowing you to keep in touch
- add your idea here…the list is endless
Strategic List Building
Grow your list with your ideal clients in mind. Its great to have a large list, but if the people on the list are not a good fit with your business, it serves neither them or you to be on your list. If you know who your ideal client is, then you can encourage the right people to join your list and it’s a piece of cake to figure out what matters to them, what problems need solving, and what kind of content will capture their interest and get them excited about engaging with you online.
On your website, make sure your email sign-up is attractive and prominent. Put a sign-up box:
- at the top (above the point someone would have to scroll to see it) on every page in the sidebar
- at the end of every blog post
- even in the middle of a post if it makes sense
- on the About page right after you introduce yourself and describe your business, how you are different, and how you can serve your visitor
Avoid pop-ups (people hate them!) and offer something of value to your visitor if they sign up. We offer an eBook full of information we know our friends and prospects will find useful (and it goes along with this post very nicely as a matter of fact). Don’t have a copy? Get one below:
Five Easy Ways to Convert Website Visitors into Customers today!
(no worries, your email is safe with us)
Make sure that whatever you offer has value and will demonstrate your expertise to those who read it. It doesn’t have to be an eBook, it can be access to a free webinar, a special discount, a free membership trial, etc. The options are only limited by your imagination.
ASK people to sign-up. If you don’t, they won’t. Make it a simple process too. The less information the visitor has to fill in to sign-up the more people will sign up for your list.
In your email, be sure to ask your subscribers to forward to friends and colleagues that might be interested in what you have to offer. Ask for referrals and reward them with a cash incentive. Easy and effective.
And finally, when you send the email make sure it is short, sweet, full of excellent, high value info, and has a catchy headline (subject). Boring headlines = deleted emails.
Will You Do Me a Favor?
Please use the comment section below to let me know what YOU have you done to grow your list. What has worked well and not worked in the past? Let’s get a list of creative ideas going that we can share.
If you haven’t already, you are warmly invited to signup for our newsletter–please do! We follow our own advice and promise to keep it short, sweet, and high value! And, if you like this post, please share it with your friends and contacts using the share buttons below.
As always, thank you for taking time out to stop by!