How do I increase my Small Email List in order to Generate Revenue with Digital Marketing?

You’ve got a small list of email addresses. Perhaps it’s 20. What have you sent to them? Anything? An email newsletter that contained various links to whatever is going on at your company? If you want to set up an automated email campaign that makes sales while you sleep you’ll first need to clearly understand how to build, segment, and nurture your email list. Your list is your goldmine. You’ve got a small list already and that’s a great start! Thanks to some preliminary work on your part, you’ve been able to collect a few email addresses. Now the key is to understand exactly what to do with them.

Your Lead Magnet

Lets begin with your Lead Magnet. (If the term “Lead Magnet” is unfamiliar to you, then please go back and read this.) If you have given some good, hard thought to your first Lead Magnet and you’re ready to begin adding subscribers to your email list by the hundreds and thousands with the intention of converting them into paying customers, read on.

When you have a very small list (or no list yet) the trick is to begin by marketing the heck out of your Lead Magnet in order to build up a community of people who know your name, trust what you have to say, and could potentially be interested in something you have to sell to them. You see, that kind of traffic will convert into revenue, it’s just that right now you’re only at the beginning stages of building up your digital marketing and sales funnel. If you already have a lead magnet in mind, you now have a lot of power.

What if I told you that I would send you the names of 10 people who are 99.9% certain to purchase your $1,000 product or service? Would you pay me $10 for every person who I referred to you? That’s only a 1% referral fee. Would you be willing to pay me $100 for the opportunity to make $10,000 in revenue? You most certainly would. You’ve heard the old saying “you’ve got to spend money to make money” and that motto couldn’t be more true today than it was 100 years ago. If you want instant results, you are going to have to prepare to spend a little. Not a lot. Just a little. Even if you can only afford to budget $50, something is better than nothing. If you’re expecting to see sales roll in by the thousands, you’re going to have to open your wallet and spend a little more, but with the proper system in place, you’ll soon find out that you’ve only got to spend a little to gain a lot. Lets get started.

Once you have your Lead Magnet fully in place (complete with a Sales page, a Thank You page, and an automated delivery process) you’re ready to market it digitally. Be sure you have a well-thought-out advertisement to accompany the Lead Magnet, because lets face it, attention is definitely at a premium! (To learn more about attention span with digital advertising, click here.) If you fully understand what a Lead Magnet is but you still don’t have your Lead Magnet in place yet, click here to download a Free Worksheet that will help you properly structure your first Lead Magnet. And yes, you are about to start paying money to attract people to something that you’re going to give away for free. Consider the strategy behind it and think of it as an investment. In order to properly market your Lead Magnet, you’ve got to make extra sure that you are targeting the correct audience.

Audience Targeting

If you intend to build a big list, you need to make sure this Lead Magnet is getting in front of the exact people who want to see it. People who are likely to benefit from it. People who need it. Remember, it’s going to change their life for the better. How can you determine who your exact target audience is? Maybe you already know who your target audience is. It needs to be crystal clear. If you need some help, download the Target Audience Worksheet to help you craft exactly who your target customer is. Once you know who your customer is, you will need to research your competitors so that you can really zero in on exactly who your “digital audience” is. The ideal audience size when crafting a lead magnet is between 500,000 and 1 million people. If you’re setting up your advertising campaign and you notice the audience is well over 5 million, then you’re not crystal clear enough about the exact right audience. Audience refinement is an art in and of itself and takes time to perfect, but when the search algorithm places your ad in front of the exact right people who are most likely to benefit from what you have to say, then you’ve got an edge. There are various ways to target based on demographic, interest, job role, behaviors, and even look-a-like targeting based on another list. It’s fair to say that most companies who have fine-tuned audience targeting in place can generate upwards of 100 leads per day.

Audience Refinement

Now that you’ve got your audience targeting ready to go, the key is to ensure you have a plan in place for those 100+ leads per day. A plan. What kind of plan? Well before you start paying money for a digital ad that attracts 100 people a day, you need to know exactly what you’re planning to do with those people. I know, you’re planning to email them. But how are you going about the very first interaction? This is called “indoctrination” and it is essential that you pay attention to it. For example, when someone clicks on your ad, what happens next? Do you have your system in place to ensure you’re honoring your side of the commitment? Are you giving them exactly what they asked for? How are you following up with them once you’ve given them what they asked for?

Lets go back to the compost and garden example. If your Lead Magnet is a video tutorial on how to make compost, is the link to access the video being automatically delivered (emailed) to that person as soon as they enter their email address? Or does the video open upon clicking the Submit Button? There is some strategy around this. If you provide a direct link to the video as soon as someone enters their email address, it’s possible you’ll get people entering fake email addresses. Then you’ve defeated the whole purpose which was to collect email addresses for your list of people who are legitimately interested. This is why many people set up the “thank you page” which then directs them to check their email for the link to instantly view the video or other Lead Magnet. Then if they provided a fake email address, they will not be able to access the Lead Magnet. Secondly, do you have a system in place to measure whether they watched the entire 4 minute video or whether they clicked out after 20 seconds? With these types of metrics in place, you’ll know whether 90 of the 100 people who watched your video today watched all of it or whether it only held their attention for 20 seconds. If they only watched 20 seconds, then what does that tell you? You’ll need to make a change to your video, maybe it’s not delivering exactly what the advertisement said it would deliver? In either scenario, people displayed a digital “behavior” they were either interested enough to watch the entire video, or they were not interested. If they were not interested, can you formulate an opinion about why? If they were interested and watched the entire video, what happens next? A properly configured Lead Magnet will lead your audience down a path to do something else. Perhaps it’s to read another article that you’ve written on a related topic or download another resource. Whatever that may be, your Lead Magnet should logically lead to something else that is useful to the person receiving it. In the case of the Compost tutorial, perhaps the next action is to get the person to read a blog article about where to buy the container. Now you’ve got a measurement of the people who watched the video all the way through and then clicked to learn about where to buy the container. Those people showed more interest than the people who clicked out of the video after 20 seconds. Now your are beginning to build and segment your list into people who are legitimately more interested in composting and those who are not. As you can see, building up your small list is all about paying very close attention to the details of your Lead Magnet.

Once you start seeing the numbers rise and your list is growing, now you can begin to move on to the next step which is nurturing your list. This involves carefully planning different email campaigns that speak specifically to the different categories of people in your list. To learn more about the techniques for creating a good email campaign, read this.

What’s next? What if you have one giant list of people that is not separated into different categories or groups? Maybe you’ve been sending the same email to everyone on your list. What should you do about it? Click here to read more in depth about segmentation.

Interested in getting even more granular and learning more about Email Marketing? Check out my ebook: The Power of Email Marketing