Sssh – secret content only for our email subscribers!
If you have been following our story, you will know why we started an email list and how we went about it.
The next step is to get people to sign up.
It used to be easier to get people to sign up to a mailing list. You just asked and/or added email addresses you had (if you use someone like Mailchimp you were always supposed to ask permission, but many people took this “asking permission” fairly liberally). Now, people are much more cautious about signing up (and GDPR means you really do need their permission). They don’t want to get spammed…
So you need to give them a reason to give you their email address (and permission to email them). You need to give them something valuable in return. This is often referred to as a “Lead Magnet” or “Opt-In”.
You probably joined our list as a result of a lead magnet (perhaps 9 tips for a successful website download?). If you are a product business you might offer a discount, free shipping or the opportunity to win some of your products. If you are a service based business it can be more tricky. Checklists, pdfs, “how to”, etc are all possibilities. It needs to be related to your business, position you as the expert and ideally feed into the service you want to sell.
Your lead magnet can be a one-off or a series of emails over a few days. The important point is that this is giving value to your subscribers. It is not a sales document. You need to let your subscribers get to know you before you start to sell to them. Even then, you need to be conscious that you give more than you ask. Otherwise, people will not open your emails and/or unsubscribe…
We set up a separate page on our website for our lead magnet. Most people use a lead magnet service. You can use your email provider (eg Mailchimp) or someone like Lead Pages who specialise in this area (yes this is a specialist service!). The key is that the only thing on this page is the opportunity to opt in to your emails and receive the lead magnet. You don’t want your audience to be distracted by any other options.
Then you need to lead people to this page. You can use social media to do this, either free or adverts.