#310 – 8 Things We Learned Collecting 241,713 Emails

We’ve spent a long time perfecting our own strategy for email list building. In today’s episode, we share the tactics that we used to collect over 241,713 emails to help you create, grow and manage your own email list.

Make sure you’re ready to collect emails

Make sure you have a solid business model before starting an email list. Decide whether you want to sell your own products or affiliate products, or offer sponsorships within entertaining content.

Learn from other successful businesses. Don’t just build an email list for the sake of it, use it along with social media platforms to share your content.

Master high-converting popups and SEO to grow your email list even faster. And don’t forget to use promos on thank you pages after opt-in to drive sales.

Build a lead magnet that optimizes for clients

Once you’ve decided on your business model, focus on growing your email list and boosting conversions.

If you plan to sell products, create lead magnets around topics similar to your product, target more specific leads, and shape your content to pique your audience’s interest. Basically, word backward from where you want to be.

If you’re aiming to sell sponsorships, build a niche email list and build multiple lead magnets that are close to your main traffic sources. For instance, create lead magnets on using AI for different social media platforms that cater to users in them specifically.

Giveaways are a good way to get started

If you’ve got only 10 subs, it’s tough to get people to join your list or find sponsors. Giveaways are an easy shortcut to your first 1-5k subs.

Go for niche-specific giveaways to avoid freebie seekers, and keep an eye on your stats with platforms like Gleam. You can invest in giveaway tools, but look out for free options too.

Don’t overdo it; stop giveaways once you’ve hit enough subs. Be careful of massive giveaways as they might not only attract people who are actually interested in buying your product.

Go for single opt-in

When it comes to managing your email list, stick to single opt-in.

Only about 80% of customers will go to the trouble of confirming their email address in double opt-in process. 61% of people never finish the double opt-in signup process, in part because most people don’t anticipate receiving a confirmation message. In fact, single opt-in seems to outperform double opt-in for number of visitors, number of subscribers, average number of people opening a newsletter, and average number of people clicking on a link in a newsletter.

Don’t stress too much about list cleaning if you’ve got under 100k subs. Sure, your open rate might go up, but that’s just because your base list is smaller. Tools like NeverBounce can help filter out fake emails, but most tools will automatically unsubscribe bounces anyway.

SEO is the best lead gen

Newsletters might be all the rage on platforms like Twitter, but don’t forget the power of SEO. Most people who run funnels also run ads because they can afford it, but SEO can actually bring more profit to your business.

Rank for keywords where users are likely to be interested in your lead magnet, and add in-content CTAs and pop ups. Tools like SegMetrics to help you track those leads and performance.

Use aggressive pop ups

You probably hate pop ups yourself, but they work. Google said it would crack down on aggressive pop ups in 2016, but that didn’t really happen.

You can be pretty aggressive with pop ups without hurting your SEO. Remember, you’re not your audience, so embrace the pop ups!

You don’t have to go crazy with the copywriting – a good lead magnet and basic description is fine. If people like your free content, they’re likely to opt in anyway.

Implement A/B testing

Tools like OptinMonster have their own built in A/B testing, which is preferable to other on site solutions because it’s all handled within their system, and caching doesn’t mess with it too much. It’s also really easy to build tests using WYSIWYG editors.

Focus on testing things like lead magnets, headline titles, features, and CTAs. Things like button colors aren’t really worth it. Just remember that there will probably be diminishing returns on your A/B testing over time.

Retargeting easily gets more leads

You don’t have to spend a lot on retargeting to boost your opt-in rate, especially at the beginning. Facebook Ads and AdWorks can help you track this effectively.

Retargeting people to a squeeze page is a good way to go. Check out the Authority Hacker squeeze page for inspiration, or you can use tools like WordPress (with GenerateBlocks) or Unbounce to make your own template.