3 Steps To Growing Your Email List

This is going to be one of those good news, bad news posts, and yes, I’m going to start with the bad news.  I have talked extensively about how important it is to build a list of email subscribers if you want to have an effective sales funnel and a profitable business.  The bad news is that the industry standard for email opt-ins from your home page is somewhere around 2-4%.

WHAT?  You mean to say that if 100 people visit my website, I can only expect to get 2-4 new subscribers?  Well, yes and no.  This is the “average” and since you are a reader of Health Coach Weekly, my goal is to make sure you are well above the average.

So what’s the good news, you ask?  Well, it’s really not rocket science.  nail these 3 things and you will be well on your way to creating a list of people who actually want to recieve your email’s.

Step 1 – Have a Clearly Defined Target Audience

Everyone is always telling you how important having a “niche” or target market is.  This is one of the reasons.  I will use my website as an example.  If a plumber lands on my website, the chances of him (or her) signing up for Health Coach Weekly are approximately 0%.  Sure, they could benefit from lots of the material I share about how to market your business online but I am not talking to them.

However since you are a health coach, when you came to the site (or one of my landing pages), you were probably saying “I have been looking for this type of information”, so I didn’t need to sell you on the idea of signing up.  This is the whole idea behind building a tribe and not marketing to the world.

I would say my website is still a work in progress and many of the things I teach I still need to do a better job at, but even with this, I get around 15% of new visitors to my website that sign up for Health Coach Weekly.  This number in actuality is actually much higher since the opt-in rate on my landing pages for things like webinars is at least double this and sometimes higher.

Step 2 – Make it Easy For New Subscribers to Opt-In

I see so many websites where there is either no place to put my email or no reason I would want to.  “Click Here” to sign up for my newsletter quit working years ago.  People get plenty of newsletter, they need some compelling reason to give you their email.

For you, this will likely be in the form of an irresistible free offer.  Here is another place I see people get stuck.  They spend weeks and months writing the perfect ebook or some 8 video training series as their free gift.  Make it something, short, digestible and actionable.  This can be a free report, video, webinar, teleseminar, something that will make your audience will say to themselves “I Need That”.

Don’t overthink it and spend months coming up with the perfect free offer.  Especially when you’re first getting started, chances are it won’t be perfect.  But imperfect action will beat perfect inaction every time.  So just get started.

Step 3 – Expand Your Offerings

But don’t just stop there. You’re free offers should continue to evolve over time. If you are hosting a teleseminar or webinar, make a gorgeous landing page for that and share it in multiple places. When you post a new blog post, share it and when people come to your website, make sure there is an obvious place for them to get more information.

Have different ways for people to sign up for your offerings, these are just a few ideas.

• Opt-in box on homepage for free gift
• Subscribe form at the end of your blog posts
• Pop-over on your website (many people are opposed to these, but they are very effective), just make sure the offer is for something people want and don’t overuse it.
• Landing page for webinars or teleseminars
• Landing page for an ebook or free report
• Landing page on a custom facebook tab for any or all of your free offers

Focus on Delivering High Quality Content That Your Audience Wants

A mistake I see in the marketing world is everyone talking about traffic and conversions.  While I think these are very important things I also think it is much more important to focus on your tribe as people who want to connect with you and what you have to offer over numbers on the page.  If you do a really good job of that, the numbers will come, but not the other way around.

Once you do have a targeted niche, a great free offer and some landing pages in place, then it is the time to start worrying about the whole traffic and coversion thing.  Getting 100 people to your website when only 2% sign up for your email list will make it very hard to build a business.  Simply increasing this number to say 10% will result in a 500% increase in emails on your list.  This is much easier to accomplish than getting 5 times the traffic to your site.

Everybody is talking about great ways to get more traffic to your website, but in my opinion that is putting the cart before the horse.  Before I knew what I was doing years ago, I had a website that was getting over 100 visitors per day, but less than 1% of them signed up for my email list.  If I had learned these strategies then, I’m sure I would have become “sucessful” much quicker than I have.

If you would like to learn more about how to setup some of these pages for your website, make sure to join me and Clay Collins on a special webinar tomorrow night, Click HERE to register.

Image courtesy of Rob Mader