Email marketing is one of the most effective and efficient ways to grow your business. The good news is, if you’re just starting to build your email list you can do it for free! Some email providers allow you to use their platform for free while you build out your list and only charge you once you hit a certain number of subscribers. Once your business grows and you’re able to invest some money, you can add some more bells and whistles or invest in Facebook ads or Google AdWords to grow your list even more. But if you’re just starting to build your email list, you don’t need to worry about all that yet. You just need to focus on collecting those emails. Here’s how:

Step 1: Sign up with an Email service provider

If you’re just starting out, Mailchimp offers a free account up to your first 2000 subscribers. Now, I don’t recommend using Mailchimp long term, and definitely don’t recommend their paid accounts, there are many other options out there that offer more functionality. I started growing my list on Mailchimp and once I hit my limit, I migrated my list over to Kartra (a no brainer since I also sell digital products), but if you’re not looking to connect to an online store, Flodesk, ConvertKit and ActiveCampaign are amazing options.

Step 2: Create an Opt-in form 

Now that you’ve set up your service provider it’s time to collect those emails! It’s IMPORTANT to know that you can’t just start adding emails in there Willy nilly. Well physically you can, but don’t! It’s bad business, it’s against the law and it’s just not a good look. Not only that, once people start marking your emails as spam, you’re going to have a really tough time avoiding that junkmail box to your legitimate subscribers!

Creating an opt in form and embedding it into your website and into your blog should be the first step to building your email list. Your form doesn’t have to be complicated, simply create a form from your service provider with fields for your first name and email and boom embed it into your website wherever it makes sense for you. You can include it on your homepage, or your services page, or any other part of your website that is a high traffic area. 

Step 3: Create a Lead magnet (aka a Freebie)

A lead magnet (or freebie) is something you offer your audience in exchange for providing their email address. This could be an Ebook, cheat sheet, check list, coupon, mini course etc… Your lead magnet should be of high value to your audience and should contain a solution to a certain pain point. In short, they’ve gotta want that freebie! Your freebie should contain your most valuable content. It should make them look forward to receiving future content from you, hence providing you with their emails. This was the single largest way I was able to build my email list so quickly

Step 4: Drive traffic to your freebie

Once you’ve created your freebie, you’ve got to promote it! What’s the point of creating something that you’re just hiding on your site. Your audience (or potential audience) has to know that you’ve created something they need. Promote your freebie on your social media, and my personal favourite, Pinterest! I’d say more than half of my email subscribers were collected directly from Pinterest traffic.

Step 5: Create a high converting landing page

Once your subscriber has said heck yes! I want that freebie, you’ll need to send them to a landing page to collect it. What the heck is a landing page you ask? A landing page is designed to lead your subscriber to a page where all they need to do is input their email address and collect their freebie. You want to make this page as simple and straight forward as possible. No distractions, no fluff, just get them to do what you want them to do. No navigation menu, no other links, just a sign up.

While you want to keep a landing page as clean as possible, you’ll still want to emphasize why downloading your freebie will be so beneficial to them.

Step 6: Building a nurture sequence

In most cases, people will start building their email lists, but then just leave them there collecting dust. Once in a while when they need to jack up their sales, they’ll pop in to their subscribers saying “hey! Remember me? Sorry for not staying in touch. Well now I need you to buy something”. It doesn’t work with your friends, and it certainly doesn’t work for your email list. People that signed up for your list are your hottest lead at the moment they sign up. You need to stay top of mind right when they sign up. Remember, 98% of people that sign up for your list aren’t ready to buy from you yet, but they’re interested. Don’t ghost them then show up three weeks later. Worst of all, if you don’t nurture your list from the get go, there’s a strong chance they’ve already moved on and forgotten about you. When they do hear from you again they might even report your email as spam, meaning you may then end up in your subscribers junk mail folders instead of their inboxes.

Step 7: Email Your List Regularly (regardless of how small it is)

Once you’ve created your nurture email sequence and primed your audience with all the amazing content they can expect from you, it’s important to email your audience regularly, not only when you want to promote a product. Email your audience something of value – blog posts, videos, or anything your niche will find helpful to address their pain points. We all hate those people that only call you when you need something. Be helpful and give more than you ask.

And that’s all there is to it. Email Marketing is a pretty easy topic, but it’s so often over-complicated by small business owners. So, just try to keep it as simple as possible. And, if you haven’t already, go out there and start building an email list.