Show Notes

Lead generation or list building is the core of our business, without leads we don’t have sales. Join me as I chat about the 3 most frequently asked questions when it comes to building your email list in 2022.

Want to Work with Jennifer and her Virtual Marketing Experts Team?

Are you a coach, consultant, or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income, and scale your impact? Connect with me at YourMarketingMatchmaker.com I look forward to hearing from you.

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Hey there. Thanks for listening and welcome to the marketing matchmaker podcast. If you're looking to grow your business, increase your revenue and scale your impact all while staying true to who you are and the people you serve. This is the show for you. I'm Jennifer Tamborski, digital marketing strategists, fractional CMO, and founder of Virtual Marketing Experts. My team and I work with six and seven figure coaches, consultants, and online entrepreneurs who are tired of playing the guru game of one size fits all marketing. They're ready to create a business and marketing strategy that actually builds relationships with their ideal clients creates massive shifts in their business and rapidly increases their revenue. As your marketing matchmaker, I'm going to help you find the perfect marketing match for you. This show will teach you how to reach your ideal client, connect with your audience, build that perfect relationship and generate more revenue. All through a process I like to call dating your ideal client. Now let's go have some fun!

Hey there, welcome back to Marketing Matchmaker. So it is when this episode releases, it will be the end of June last week of June, which means that we are really through the second quarter of this year and more than halfway through the year itself, which kind of crazy. Again, I look up and we are at the end of June, I'm not sure where the time went. And I also know that this year has been really shifting as far as marketing has gone which is why I've spent this past month of June really focusing on what's working right now in the environments that we're in.

And one of the things that we've been talking about is really email marketing. I spent an entire episode last week, kind of diving into a little bit of the weeds of you know, those geeky things that we need to know about keeping our email marketing list healthy and how to do that.
This week I really wanted to dial back a little bit on those geeky kind of how-to's and start talking about something that I think people are kind of still ignoring. And that is list building. I have said in multiple episodes that your email list is your number one asset. Honestly, it is the biggest thing that will help you grow your business to those high six and seven figures.

There is not a business owner out there that has hit seven figures in their business that doesn't have a healthy, robust email list. So this episode we're kind of diving into more of a beginner's look at email list building. Let's start with why you need an email list.

Even in today in 2022, email is still the number one way to sell your product service or solution because social media platforms come and go there was Facebook and then Instagram and then TikTok and then LinkedIn and all of the different things.

And no matter what the newest greatest platform that arises is, reality is is when you're on those platforms, you are still renting space. You are renting your audience because those platforms control how your information is displayed to your audience when it's displayed to your audience and who it's displayed to, which is why email marketing is so critical in business.

There's a lot of ways that you can really grow your email list. And there are going to be some that are more effective and some that aren't, and today's episode, I'm really going to just kind of answer some frequently asked questions that we get. In fact, I was talking to someone today just about their list building, you know, they were getting ready for a lunch and they were asking me questions about when is appropriate to start list building.

Let me tell you a secret.

It was yesterday.

Honestly, the number one thing that you can do for your business is start list building sooner than you think you're ready for. Heck before you're even dialed into who your target market is or who your niche is or what your offer is. Building your email list can really help you to create a base, a audience to sell too. And while you may still becoming, getting clear on those aspects of your business, we all evolved.

We all change our target and our messaging change. As you are building your email list in the early stages, you're still bringing people on who are connected to you. And let's be honest as business owners, especially in the coaching world, people buy you. They're not buying your what's it or who's it. I mean, in the coaching industry, in the online course industry, people aren't buying the, the "what" of your product.

They are buying you and the transformation that you can give them. So the people who are connecting with you and signing up to your, your email list early on may or may not be your ideal client, and they may grow into your ideal client. They may very well be on the same path or journey that you are. And when you finally hit that thing that you do better than anyone else, when you're ready to really go out there and, and sell your pants off, you've got some people to sell to.

So the number one thing to do when it comes to list building is start sooner than you think you are ready for. Jeff Walker always says launch before you're ready. Because the reality is is if we wait until we're ready, we will never get there. There is this fears, these fears that arise, the imposter syndrome that arises, or maybe it's perfectionism or whatever that thing is, that's keeping you from being ready to go out there and really step into your business is going to hold your business back.

So if you start building your list, if you launch before you're ready, if you go out there and step into growing that email list before you think you're ready for it, at some point, that's gonna pay off in the end. Another question that I get often is how many people do I need to have on my email list before I'm ready to sell an offer.

Now, there are actually two different points of view on this, and it depends on what it is you're selling. When you think about making an offer, you have different stages of your business, right? You have the one to one model where you are selling to one person at a time. If that is your current model, you should be selling as soon as you can. And you probably aren't going to be solely selling to your email list. You're probably out there networking and knocking on doors and, and instant messaging and organic traffic, whatever those things are that are creating those sales for the one-on-one product is a great way to get yourself out there.

However, if you are at the point in your business where you're ready to scale, where you're looking to move from that one to one to one, to many model, you know, groups, courses, master is masterminds. Those types of businesses. You're gonna wanna look at your list a little bit differently, and you're really going to want to look at how you can launch into your list and strategically use it in order to sell that one to many model.

Oftentimes I see business owners looking at their list and going, okay, I have a hundred people on it. I only need 10 people for my core, my group, whatever that is my mastermind. I'm only looking to send it to sell to 10 people. A hundred people is enough. I can stop focusing on list, building and start focusing on selling to the list. Here's the problem with that mindset.

First, you never stop list building like you list build every day for the entirety of your business, no matter what is going on, you are always building that list. And the other thing about that kind of mentality is reality is, is only about one to 3% of your list is going to buy from you. So if you have a hundred people on your list, that's like one to three people. That's not enough to fill your group coaching program or your course.

So if you're looking to create a group coaching or a mastermind, or even a course, and only sell to 10 people, one to 3% of that is going to be a thousand people. So you wanna have at least a thousand people on your list before you use your list to launch.

Here's the thing. It is possible to grow your email list in a very short period of time. And we'll dive into some strategies in just a minute on how to do that. However, if you're looking to launch, if you're looking to open your doors to a group coaching program or an online course, or a mastermind or something like that, you want to make sure that you are giving yourself enough time to grow your email list in order to launch, literally just had this conversation with someone today.
We were networking. She's looking at launching a course in about 90 days and she was asking me, you know, when she should start. And if she's actually looking to launch her course in 90 days, she sort of should have started today. That is how you're going to have an effective launch where you're actually going to make money because you, in those 90 days, you push really hard to grow your list. And during that last week of that timeframe is when you're actually selling.

So you want to make sure that between each launch, you're continuing to grow your list. Because every time you grow your list, you have more opportunities to sell to people. So when your list hits five, 10, 15,000, you can easily have 10 to 15 to a hundred people sign up every time you open your doors. Or even if it's an evergreen model, you could have 10 or 15 people signing up a month. I have a client right now every month, like we're adding a hundred and some odd people to his list. Every month, every month, he is selling 15 people into his course opening the every month it's evergreen, which means he's making a good a hundred thousand dollars roughly a month in his overall business.

That is I think the ultimate goal for all of us, right? We all wanna seven figure business. We all want that opportunity to help and change the lives of hundreds of people over the course of our business or thousands of people.

When it comes to planning a launch or opening up a group coaching program, or opening up the doors to a mastermind, make sure that you built in the time to list build properly. The next frequently asked question that I get asked a lot about list building is what is the quickest way to grow my list? So there are a lot of ways to grow your list, tons of them, in fact, and we all wanna know what's that shiny object. What's that newest biggest thing. What's going to just impact my list to the point where I'm getting thousands of registrants a day.

So there are two ways to look at this. You can either look at it as quantity. How many people can I get on my list at a time? And I think a lot of business owners start with this model of, I need a lot of people on my list in a short period of time, because it really gives them that feeling of growth. Like they're growing their list really quickly, which is awesome. And not necessarily how you wanna grow your list, because while you can have a ton of people on your list, quality is really what you want.

You want people on your list that are going to want to buy from you, whether it's immediately or, you know, five months from now, whatever that is, you want people on your list that's interested in what you have and what you're selling, not just freebie seekers. So some of the ways that people grow their list for quantity. And I often suggest that you do both, right? It's not an if or then, or this or that. It is a combination of both because although you're growing your list with quantity, you may get some quality people in there. They just may not be a hundred quality people. They may be five or 10.

Some of the ways that people grow their list with quantity are things like affiliate marketing, or JV marketing, or summits or giveaways. It's those opportunities to engage with other people's audiences. Now, if your giveaway, if your lead magnet is really high value and they connect with it, they may be end up being quality on your list. But most people sign up for these kind of things, the list that they, that you get, you're actually targeting multiple people's audiences, and they've been curated for other people, not necessarily you.

So you may get a thousand or more people on your list, but how many of them are actively engaged or that stay on your list and don't unsubscribe. I know last week we were talking about active engagement and why that is important to your business and to your email list. You want to have as, as an engaged of a list as humanly possible, especially in this new iOS 15 era that we're in.

So having a lot of people on your list that aren't engaged is not going to be effective for you. It's really not gonna do you any good. It is much better to focus on quality list building strategies, those methods that we've talked about repeatedly, those funnels that will really help to connect you to your audience in a way that makes you the expert that makes you the person they look to to get answers from. The best way to do that is really coming up with an amazing opt-in. And I am talking about spending time on your opt-in the same way you would your offer.

Spending maybe as much time on that opt-in as you do that offer really getting clear about who your audience is and what they need to hear and what micro problem can you solve for them in that, whatever your opt-in is, whether it's a masterclass or a webinar or a workshop, or a, a quiz, whatever your optin is, make sure that, that it is quality and that your email sequences, that follow are also quality that you are providing value to your ideal clients.

This my friend is the best way to really grow your email list in a way that creates a quality connection to your audience. And that is the goal. Marketing is all about creating relationships. It's all about connecting with those people who will buy from you time and time again, because that my friends is how you're going to grow your business, increase your revenue, and scale your impact.

Thank You for listening to the Marketing Matchmaker podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love to hear your feedback. Please head over to iTunes and leave a review so we can hear from you. And if you are a coach, consultant, or online course creator who are looking to grow your business, increase your income, and scale your impact connect with me at yourmarketingmatchmaker.com. I look forward to hearing from you.