Since you’re reading this, you probably already know how important it is to keep growing your email list. Having an email list full of ideal clients can be growth-changing for your business.
When you first set out to grow your email list, you’ll probably run into one of these problems:
- You’ve got all of your email marketing set up with all the right sequences, and you’re sending consistent newsletters—BUT you don’t have enough eyeballs seeing your content and getting on your list.
- You don’t have all your sequences figured out—BUT you don’t want to start sending people to your list until you do.
- You’ve got a freebie that no one’s downloading—BUT you can’t come up with any ideas for what to try instead.
- You can’t write a newsletter or sales email without it taking FOREVER to write.
- You don’t actually see the ROI that comes with email marketing, and you don’t get WHY you need to grow your email list.
Or you might even be facing a combo deal ^^^ of more than one of these problems.
It’s driving you crazy that you can’t crack the code to grow your email list—especially when you hear some of the big names talk about how they’ve got 50,000+ subscribers on their lists and just made 100k+ on their last launch.
Chances are, there’s no one “thing” they’re doing that you aren’t. It’s more likely they just started before you and have had more time to grow their email lists than you have.
So in this post, I’m going to help you shake off list-building imposter syndrome and give you a list of mindset shifts you need to make—so you can start feeling confident in the progress you’re making week to week, growing your email list!
#1. Forget about *having* to pay for ads
Don’t get me wrong, paid advertising is a great way to grow our email list—and IF you have the funds to do so, I highly encourage you to dip your toes into trying it. BUT If you want to grow your email list sustainably, you’ve gotta have a way to reach your ideal clients organically too.
AND let’s not forget that ads are expensive at best. <<< So this isn’t even an option until you start bringing in lots of $$$—which an email list can help you do so…
#2. Don’t worry about having it all together before you can start
When it comes to email marketing and growing your email list, you’ve gotta start from the ground up and get scrappy along the way. <<< That means you’ve got to start before you’re “ready”.
You don’t have to have all the right workflows and sequences and tags and link triggers and sales pitches and and and and….perfect from the start. You need to just get started sending emails and refine as you go.
Now that doesn’t mean that you can’t implement things like a welcome sequence right away (and I highly encourage you to have one sooner than later)—but if you don’t have your welcome sequence set up on day one, it doesn’t matter. Simply set it up on day 7 or day 57 instead. <<< Just get started!
If you wait to build your list until you’ve got all your ducks in a row, you WILL REGRET it. If you’re any of the biggest names in the creative entrepreneur space, like Jenna Kutcher, talk about email marketing, they almost always say that they wish they’d have started list building sooner.
#3. Increase your traffic by creating evergreen content
If you’ve got a traffic problem *high five* welcome to the club (for the sake of full transparency, this is my problem right now). You’ve got all the sequences set up. You’re sending out weekly newsletters like it’s a piece of cake. You just can’t seem to grow your list to more than 25 people.
You can, of course, grow your email list with Instagram. But if you’re like me and don’t want to spend all your day searching for trending audio—only to have 3 people see your post, you’ve gotta create some sort of evergreen-style content.
Evergreen content is something like a blog, podcast, or YouTube—basically anything that’s got an SEO component to it that has a longer shelf-life than Instagram (which is maybe 48 hours if you’re blessed). Pinterest is the caveat to these requirements, but that’s another blog entirely. But that being said, using Pinterest in conjunction with blogs, podcasts, or YouTube videos can be a great marketing strategy.
My favorite type of evergreen content to create is blog posts—as you can probably tell since you’re reading this blog post. Out of the three blogging takes the least amount of tech setup, and I don’t have to be camera-ready to create it. But that being said, if you explain things better talking than writing, you might find that podcasting or YouTube might be easier for you in the long run.
#4. Use templates all day every day
Repeat after me. Using templates to help you write your emails is not cheating. Your competitors are already using them—so if you don’t, you’re going to get left behind. Starting from a template will help you write FASTER so that you can crank out email copy like nobody’s business.
**This blog includes affiliate codes and links.
