.png)
Everywhere, people are saying that an email list is the way to go if you want people to lend you their ears, wallets, and / or time.
That's a lot of people looking at their emails, right? You can't find that level of attention on no social media platform.
It is, semingly, one of the better ways to reach clients so why not try it out? I have been meaning to start building an email list for a while, and have something currently in the works to kickstart it next week (keep and eye out!). In the meantime, I have compiled all of the best notes I have collected so far on how to started with building an email list. Hopefully, they help you get started with this as well and give you a clear, helpful plan with how to get started bulding an email list. We'll see in another few months what my results from this are!
This is like picking a country where you want to build your house, or the platform on which to host your website—make sure to set yourself up for success and pick the right platform for you to make things easier and more efficient in the long run.
📪📪📪 Here are three of the more popular email marketing platforms:
Flodesk is a 'design-first' email platform created with the intention of being simple and intuitive to use. It offers a great email editor, good analytics reports, incredible templates and it really is easy and intuitive to use. Setting up email sequences and automating your emails is fairly easy to do and overall, Flodesk covers all of its bases well, giving you access to everything you would need to get started with building your mail list.
You don't even need a website to use Flodesk which may be a huge bonus for some.
I love the pricing as well which is a flat rate of $35 per month REGARDLESS of how many subscribers a month you have. You have a 100 subscribers? It's 35 dollars a month. You have 100,000 subscribers? It's STILL 35 dollars a month. Not only is that significantly lower than other platforms for a small list, but it's just an awesome bargain for larger lists and what really sold me on Flodesk in the end.
Flodesk doesn't include as many advanced features such as a better ability to segment lists, more complex workflows and very complicated funnels which may be needed for a larger business. Still, it does really offer a lot and for a great price as well—I'd list this is as my top choice so far.
Convertkit (recently renamed Kit), has been another platform at the top of my list. They have a creator focused platform which is good for building creative and fun emails. It has a good ecommerce function for selling digital things such as pdfs and other downloadables, and good automation and landing page building features.
The things that made me hesitate to sign up for Convertkit was mostly its steep pricing, which I think is way too much compared to other similar platforms, and its email editor which is fairly simple and easy to use, but I don't like how little option it gives customization and design-wise.
A very well known platform that is still widely used. Personally, I elected to NOT use this at all because of the way it counts its subscribers. You pay per contact, not per unique subscriber. That means that you pay for each contact you have saved whether they are subscribed, duplicated in other lists, unsibscribed, or inactive. You have to pay special attention to your list to make sure, the costs don't start adding up too soon, unlike most other mail marketing platforms, which just count unique subscribers. I don't like this way of pricing at all, and Mailchimp's other upsides aren't good enough to get me to pay for this.
Nevertheless, you may choose to use it for its realitve ease of use, good email editor, analytics and automation and integration. Still, the prices are a tad too steep for what it offers.
Put your sign-up form all over your website. On your homepage, your blog, each individual blog post, all the other pages—have it visible on every page. Multiple times. As long as you don't have a form before every paragraph, it won't be too much. You could even put it two or three times on each blog post.
There is also the option to make it a sticky element such as a footer or sidebar that doesn't move when you scroll down, and you can also make an additional sign-up form that appears as a pop-up on the page.
Make it visible and use colors with good contrast. Remind people that the form is there, what they will get from it, and that they can sign up there anytime.
Okay, so you have a sign-up form, you have an audience that may want to sign up, but what will you actually be sending?
Too many emails purely about sales and offers, and you'll start getting marked as spam and getting unsubscribers left and right. Emails that are too boring or too vague won't do well. Too few emails overall and the unsubscribers will be many.
So what can you send that people will want to read?
Here are some ideas for emails:
An email list can be a huge asset, but only if you do it right. For it to work, people will have to open, read and enjoy your emails. One of the ways to achieve that goal is to deliver high-quality emails and be consistent with it.
People prefer to have certainty and being consistent with your email will help you keep more of your audience. Write out high-quality emails and send them consistently, so your audience will have something to look forward to from you every week.
To be more consistent without stressing over this each week, plan and write your emails in advance, so you have a few buffer emails in place and only need to write an email for the next week or the week after that. It gives you more time to prepare and think over your emails without stressing out a ton.
Make sure, however, to not send too many emails.
Be consistent with your emails and send them once or twice weekly, maybe even once every fortnight, but perhaps don't start emailing people daily.
This is something I have been hearing many, many times while reading up on this topic and fair enough—I certainly can't remember when I last signed up for a straight and dry 'newsletter'.
My email inbox definitely does not need more spam and what could that newsletter possibly offer me that I will be happy to fill up my inbox with? It's incredibly vague, giving few clues as to what I will really be recieving, and a bit of suspicion and caution is generally the better policy there.
But if I see a guide that looks incredibly interesting or potentially very useful to me? Yeah, they will be getting my email that time. It's not a huge price to pay for something that looks like it could be pretty valuable to me, and I can always unsubscribe afterwards if it turns out my inbox just starts getting filled up with clutter.
Clearly, they've got something good going and it does make sense too. So put on your thinking cap, and decide what you could offer your audience for free that will also be valuable to them. Set clear expectations about what your audience will be getting and show them that it really will be some very valuable stuff that they don't want to miss out on. It will certainly help to get more people on your email list and have your audience lend you a willing ear.
That's it for now!
I hope this helped you start thinking about how you could build your own email list and gave you some useful tips and advice.
Currently, I am working on setting up my own email sign-up forms and building something that I can offer at the door. Check in a week or two to see how things are going!
In the meantime, these blog posts could also be useful to you:
.png&description=Starting a mail list? 5 things you need to consider - ){kind=link}