Marc's Blog

Email list building is one of the most important areas of your brand. You’ll get a dramatically more effective response when you send an email to 10,000 people than when you send a tweet (or any social media post) to 10,000 people.

There are plenty of ways to build an email list. You don’t want to master the wrong strategies, but you also don’t want to rely on one method.

For a very long time, I solely relied on Twitter to grow my email list. My efforts paid off as over 10,000 content creators joined my list, but I knew that to achieve monumental growth, I needed additional email list streams.

We understand the concept of having multiple income streams, but we need to understand just as well the concept of having multiple email list growth streams.

I wrote a blog post earlier containing 50 tactics to grow your email list. While the tactics will help you grow your email list, the best tactics boil down to these four strategies.

 

#1: Evergreen Your Social Media Promotion

I don’t manually send tweets about my landing pages anymore. I use ViralTag to put all of my tweets in a cycle.

To not make myself too dependent on Twitter, I also created a posting cycle for Pinterest. This posting cycle was a bit more complicated as I have to account for several boards, but it was well worth the effort.

As a side note, I also delegate my social media growth to other freelancers. That way, I can focus on implementing other strategies and creating more content.

 

#2: Optimize Your Site For Maximum Conversions

If you get hundreds of thousands of visitors, but you have no method of converting them, then you won’t grow your email list. This email list building strategy is a focus on the visitor’s experience and getting them to subscribe.

As soon as visitors come on the blog, they are greeted by a welcome mat designed to get more opt-ins for a free offer. Pop-ups, the sidebar, and the blog posts  themselves get even more opt-ins.

I use ThriveLeads to optimize my blog for generating more leads. It allows me to utilize all of the capabilities I just mentioned and more. AppSumo is another great option as well.

 

#3: Create An Affiliate Program

I am an affiliate for Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever Course. Michael Hyatt has impacted a lot of people, including some of the top players in various niches. When it came time to promote the course, many affiliates jumped on board.

The result?

In less than two weeks, all of the affiliates combined brought in over 80,000 opt-ins. You read that correctly, and I did not type in an extra zero.

That’s roughly 8,000 new subscribers every DAY. Many people would be very happy if that was their month.

Michael Hyatt was able to do it in one day.

I’m not saying that all affiliate programs lead to these types of results, but they will have a big impact on your business.

I grew my email list by over 25% by hosting the Content Marketing Success Summit and Productivity Virtual Summit. CMSS got me past 10,000 subscribers. When you get a team of people to promote your offers, you can reach out to far more people than you could have ever reached out to on your own.

You can use a service like SamCart to create your own affiliate program. When you recruit affiliates, it’s essential to communicate with them through a custom email list and a Facebook Group Page. These two communication platforms will be more than enough to keep your affiliates on the same page for what to promote and when.

Michael Hyatt’s course promotion was a launch which means there was a beginning date and an end date. In addition to running a launch style product launch, you can also run an evergreen promotion so affiliates can set their social media posts in a continuous cycle and constantly promote your landing pages.

 

#4: Use Facebook Ads 

I recommend trying the other three before you give Facebook ads a try. The reason is that you don’t know how well your landing page converts until it gets enough visibility. You don’t want to use Facebook ads for a landing page that doesn’t convert.

You also don’t want to use Facebook ads for a landing page that converts well for getting opt-ins, but the autoresponder doesn’t bring in any sales. Then you’re losing money in the short-term even though you are growing your email list.

With that said, Facebook ads are the dominant player in the social media space. There are plenty of ways to optimize your Facebook ads, but I’ll give you the basic math you need to run a successful Facebook ad.

You’ll need to pick a Facebook ad that is measured by the cost per conversion. Before you run your Facebook ad, you should know how much a conversion is worth to you.

Let’s say you have a landing page with an effective autoresponder. Based on your past results, you know that the average subscriber spends $5 in the autoresponder. If you can convert subscribers at $2 per conversion with the Facebook ad, you make a $3 profit for each new subscriber you get from the Facebook ad.

These are the ads that become successful. It’s not just about optimizing your ad for Facebook standards, but it’s also about optimizing your autoresponder so Facebook optimization is a worthwhile effort.

To take this strategy a step further, you can focus on promoting a webinar. Webinars tend to convert very well from opt-in and sales generation standpoints. When you have a webinar that converts really well, you can even make it evergreen so you don’t have to continuously perform the same presentation.

 

In Conclusion

Email list building strategies are all around us. The only ones that will work are the ones that you meaningfully implement. Of all of these strategies, evergreen social media posts is the easiest to implement. It’s an easy one-off task where you occasionally have to look at your posts to see what’s still working.

Optimizing your site for maximum conversions is similar but can involve more time and continuous testing to get better conversion rates.

Creating and growing your own affiliate program is much more involved, especially in the long-term. However, this approach can yield incredible results. With the exception of affiliate program fees and having a team behind him, Michael Hyatt didn’t have to pay a penny to get those 80,000+ subscribers.

You can run a Facebook ad before you start your own affiliate program. But the affiliate program would help you paint a better picture of what cost per conversion would allow you to make a profit.

What are your thoughts on these email list building strategies? Do you have any strategies for us? Do you have a question for me? Sound off in the comments section below.