Email List Building: Building Better Contact Lists – GM7

Email List Building: Growing Your Best Asset

[0:00] – Introducing this episode of the Grey Matters podcast: The importance of building your email contact list.

• Email is not exactly the sexiest of applications, but a mailing list is still the most valuable digital asset that an online business can possess. 
  
  

[1:17] – Growing the mailing list.

• Content creators and online marketers who pay attention to, emphasize, and focus on their mail list are the most successful of our breed. 
  
  

[2:57] – Why growing your email marketing list is important.

• When you have followers on social media platforms, those are customers of the social media platforms, not yours. If you, for any reason, lose access to said platforms, you’ll also lose those followers.
  
  
• In building an email list, you are ensuring that the people (or as many of the people as possible) who follow you on social platforms are migrated to your list; this way, they truly become your customers, and you're insulated from any decisions that the social platforms may or may not make. 
  
  
• A big part of your strategy has to be making sure that you provide your community with real value as you move ahead. 
  
  

[7:05] – Aspects of email that make it a very compelling tool for online marketers. 

• First, it's mobile-friendly. Increasingly, we consume so much content on smartphones. Writing an email means you can compose a lot of detail in a very small amount of time and a small physical space.
  
  
• Second, it's very easy to add calls to action in your emails. When somebody is reading your email, they're only reading your email, without the distractions that accompany social media. The chances of converting them to do whatever your call to action is, is amplified as a result. 
  
  
• When your community member is inside of your email, you've created an information cocoon around them. 
  
  
• Email is also very affordable. In order to reach your community on Facebook, Instagram, and other such platforms, you need to pay to advertise and increase your reach. On the other hand, you can easily access and manage your entire community using an affordable, good-quality email list management tool. 
  
  

[10:41] – The best practices for managing your email list. 

• Always be list-building. You always want to be thinking about information that you can share, that draws somebody to your community, and that creates an inviting environment for them to join your mailing list so that you can continue to grow. This is because you're always going to have a certain amount of attrition, no matter what you do. So create opportunities to add value and increase engagement with your community. 
  
  
• Every single email address that you get on your list is not golden, in the same way that everyone is not crap. They're always somewhere in between.
  
  
• Secondly, make sure that you're always delivering value. When somebody gives you their email address, they already represent revenue to you. So as you create your value of your list building content, think about making sure that you exchange that value honorably.
  
  
• Work with a service heart; look at what your community is interested in what they need, and provide that level and quality of value, without any expectations, and without making them jump through hoops. 
  
  

[16:44] – Providing products and content with value.

• Don't be afraid to give away your absolute best content — but also, don’t forget to ask for money.
  
  
• Pay attention to your statistics: your open rate, your clickthrough rate on your videos, and so on. Study them from several aspects, not just the overall statistics, but also the trends from your historical data.
  
  

[19:57] – Email open rates and the industry average.

Resources

• Webinar Wednesday
• Patreon
• [email protected]
• Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk
• What’s a Good Email Open Rate and How You Can Improve Yours – OptinMonster