All online businesses can benefit from having more website traffic and more customers. I’ve personally found email newsletter marketing to be one of the most effective strategies that exists, so I’ve created this guide to teach you how to build an email list for your business or side hustle.
It does take time to grow a newsletter list, so I highly recommend getting started as soon as possible. However, once you’ve built it, you’ll have instant access to a large audience that you can direct to any website on demand. This power simply gives you a wide variety of opportunities to increase your revenue and even to grow your audience larger.
See my free, in-depth training course for email marketing here.
Why Use Email Marketing
There are a number of reasons why marketing with an email newsletter list is so powerful. The first is trust. On the internet, there’s a general sense of distrust when you visit a new website. When you can get a visitor to sign up for a newsletter, this gives you the opportunity to build trust with them over time. Simply put, when someone trusts you, they’re much more likely to follow your recommendations and/or buy from you when you promote a product.
Time is another important factor. Your website will usually receive a trickle of traffic spread out over time. Armed with a newsletter list, you can send a large amount of visitors to a single page in a short period of time. This gives you a way to see instant results from your efforts. New content you’ve published can get a quick boost. When you release a product to sell to your audience, you’ll be able to drive many sales in a single day with an email list.
It doesn’t take a lot of work to build this list either – it simply takes time. After you’ve put in this effort and can instantly contact your audience whenever you want, you’ll discover that it opens up a whole new world full of opportunities for you and your business.
List Building Strategies
Even though you can build a list in many different ways, one specific method tends to work better than the rest. The basic idea is to create something free that your audience will want and/or find useful. In many cases, this can be a ebook guide covering a topic that relates to your website and business. By simply offering this ebook for free on your website in exchange for people joining your newsletter, you steadily build your list over time.
A buyers’ list can also be really powerful. By automatically subscribing a new customer to your email newsletter, you’ll eventually have a full audience of confirmed buyers. This group of people will be much more likely to buy from you in the future since they’ve already trusted you enough to buy from you once.
Giveaways are a third strategy that can work really well. This can be done via social media networks or even through the audience of a competitor. Find a competitor that looks to offer a lot of value to their audience. They’ll be much more likely to be willing to take this deal, since it gives them a way to offer something valuable for free to their audience. They simply direct traffic to a newsletter signup page that you’ve created that offers something free to those that join. It’s just like giving away an ebook to your website visitors, except you get a competitor to promote the offer directly with their social media following and/or newsletter list.
Newsletter Basics
Once you have people that have joined your newsletter, what do you do next? In general, you’ll do best when you keep your list engaged and active. I recommend sending them an email at least once a week. If months pass without any contact, a lot of your audience will forget about you, which can make it impossible to build trust long-term.
Automated emails can be set up to be received by new subscribers. This autoresponder series can direct people to visit some of your most useful content, and you can even attempt to sell something to them along the way. Consider someone’s situation when they first join your list. What’s their current level of knowledge and what is their likely goal in the future? You can actually craft a series of emails to be sent to new subscribers that can guide them along through your content to teach them knowledge about your niche. Build up to their end goal with that knowledge, which then puts you in a prime position to sell a product to them that will help them reach their goal.
Besides automated emails, I also utilize newsletters to drive traffic to specific pages on my website or social media pages. I’m going to be talking about these things in much more detail next in this guide.
Selling to Your List
One of your main goals for creating a list for your business is likely to increase sales. Whether you’re selling physical goods, services, or digital products, all of them can be sold with emails. To do this, you just need to create a page on your website to link to with your newsletter. That page should be a sales page for the product you want your audience to buy. Directing traffic there can then drive multiple sales in a short period of time.
I’ve created lists for other businesses of mine that can deliver 100s of sales on a single product in just one day. I believe my record high sales day with this strategy is more than $40,000 in revenue in less than 24 hours! This type of sales power simply can’t be easily achieved through any other means.
Niches are very important when it comes to sales. For example, on this website about side hustles, investing and personal finance, I’ll never try to sell televisions to my audience. Sure, with a large enough audience I might have a handful of people that end of buying some random product that I promote, but it will ultimately do more harm than good. People join and stay subscribed to your newsletter because you stick to topics that relate to a specific niche. Continue to stay focused on that subject with the products you promote and you’ll see much better results.
Boost Traffic & Engagement
Email newsletter lists can be the ultimate marketing strategy that allows you to snowball your audience into an even larger one. This is done through social media networks where you publish content. Maybe I’ve started a YouTube channel for my blog and have started to create and publish my own videos (not doing this yet for this site but may in the future). On it’s own, my YouTube channel would take a long time to gain followers, but combined with an email list, I could supercharge the channel and the videos I publish.
Think about publishing a video on a brand new YouTube channel. It will most likely just sit there without anyone seeing it. Over time, you may end up with a couple hundred views, if you’re lucky. Until you publish hundreds or thousands of videos and build up a large following, your videos aren’t very likely to receive a lot of exposure. You may have noticed that on social media sites, popular content that has a lot of engagement gets even more exposure, which snowballs it’s popularity. This is how content goes viral on social networks.
Hopefully the dots have connected here. Instead of waiting for a YouTube channel and new videos to naturally become popular, you can instantly make them popular by promoting them to your newsletter list. When you can publish a video and have hundreds or thousands of views on it before the day is over, you’re much more likely to receive continued exposure for that video. By using your email audience to quickly boost the views and engagement on your social content, you give yourself a massive advantage over everyone else. This can then lead to even more followers, more newsletter subscribers and ultimately higher revenue.
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