Kickstart Your Email List with a Lead Magnet

You’re looking to start an email list so you can grow your online business. The one thing you need is an irresistible lead magnet that will attract your audience and encourage them to join your email list.

Let's take a step back for a minute before we get into what all that means.

What's an email list?

An email list is simply a list of email addresses of people who are interested in what you're selling. You can send out emails to this list about what's going on in your business - sales on products or services, business announcements, or new content updates like a new blog post or podcast episode.

Why do you need an email list?

Many new business owners who are just starting out don’t realize how important an email list actually is. The power of email lists is in the numbers - for every $1 spent on email marketing, a business will get an average return of over $40. This is an amazing return on your investment!

Here's a few other reasons you should have an email list:

1️⃣ You can nurture relationships and build trust. By consistently delivering valuable content, updates, and offers to your audience, you build know-like-trust with your audience.

2️⃣ You own your email list. With social media, you're not in control of the algorithm and it can get shut down anytime. But your email list is a connection to your audience that you control and you'll have access to even if social media disappears.

3️⃣ It's cost effective. It doesn't cost much money to send an email your audience. And once your list is growing steadily with ideal customers, it will bring you consistent, reliable revenue, and selling will get easier and easier.

Sounds great, right?

So how do you actually start building an email list?

It typically starts with a lead magnet that you offer in exchange for an email address.

A lead magnet, what is that?

A lead magnet is a piece of valuable content that you give to your audience for free in exchange for their email address. This is how you turn a follower into a subscriber on your email list.

There are lots of different lead magnets. It could be a guide, a checklist, a webinar, a quiz, the list is endless. It should be something that your audience wants and needs from you that helps them solve a problem and gets them a quick win. You want it to be so irresistible that they say, “Wow! I can’t believe she’s giving this away for free!”

Once you've got your lead magnet, the next step is to create a list-building funnel. Funnels are something that confuse a lot of people, but don't get scared off by the word. Let's take it step-by-step.

Your list-building funnel

There's three steps in this funnel:

1️⃣ a landing page with a form where people can enter their name and email address

2️⃣ once they sign up, they get an automated email that delivers the lead magnet to their inbox

3️⃣ a thank you page so your new subscribers know their information was received and what steps to take next to access the lead magnet.

Those three steps don't sound too hard, right? But how do you actually set it up?

The details

You need a website or a landing page where you can add your opt-in forms. Most website platforms and email service providers provide templates for you to use that are drag and drop, making it simple to get up and running quickly.

An email service provider is a service that will allow you to collect email addresses from visitors on your website. It will also make it possible for you to store and manage those email addresses and then send targeted marketing emails to those people.

These days, using an email service provider is mandatory, as they’ll make sure that you’re compliant with current email marketing laws. There are literally dozens of email service providers out there, and ultimately, they all do the same thing: allow you to build email lists and send emails to the people on those lists.

There are true email service providers like ConvertKit, Flodesk, Mailerlite, or all-in-one tools that combine your website and email marketing like Kajabi which would be my recommendation. Any of these tools would work well, so see what works best for your business, or feel free to book a Strategy Session, and we can strategize together.

Check out my previous post all about Kajabi >>

Final thoughts

To really scale your online business, you need an email list of engaged subscribers. And the best way to start and grow your list is with a lead magnet that attracts your ideal customer.

Want to get your list started but don't want to set it up yourself? Get it done for you in a DFY Freebie Funnel.