In this post I want to go over how to grow your email list quickly from scratch. I’m currently growing at a rate of about 20-40 emails per day, and as I continue building everything I can see the rate is going to keep increasing. With the way I do things, there are no paid ads needed to get to this number, as I’ve done everything organically. I want to show you how to do the same!
If you don’t have an email solution, sign up for ConvertKit for FREE here. ConvertKit is the BEST email marketing platform for creators and small businesses.
Why Email?
Email is critical to any business. Email lists are something you own, unlike social media. If one day your social media platforms shutdown you may essentially lose your entire follower base. That’s why you have to start doing email marketing – to stay safe and retain your audience through another means. It also allows you to engage your following more personally.
The main way to grow your email list is to offer a free lead magnet. What is a lead magnet? It’s basically an incentive that marketers offer to their audience in exchange for their email address.
Your relationships with your audience are like friendships – It’s pretty common for marketers to want to tell people to BUY, BUY, BUY. When you’re asking someone to buy, you’re asking them to do something for you. But think about your friendships. Do you always ask your friends to do stuff for you without giving back to them? No! It’s a mutually beneficial relationship where you want to be around each other and you know you have each other’s backs. You have to deliver value to your audience before they start trusting you and investing in your paid products.
How to Grow Your Email List from SCRATCH (0 to 5k+ Subscribers)
The key to how to grow your email list from scratch is to figure out what your niche is and what your audience wants. Figure out what your brand represents and what topic you’re focused on. Then you can start figuring out what your audience needs. You can do this through market research – for example asking people on IG stories is an easy way to get some answers, and just talking to people in person.
My audience likes to learn how to make money passively, travel as a digital nomad, and manage their finances to get to a secure place. So I offer many different offerings. I have about 6 different main offerings so far, including:
1. Passive income toolkit
2. Etsy crash course
3. Blogging crash course
4. Digital nomad toolkit
5. Managing your finances toolkit
6. 21 ways to make extra money guide
It took some time to make these offerings and narrow down on my audience’s needs.
How to Create Your Freebies and Landing Pages
In order to make these freebies I actually used powerpoint for a lot of them. And for the courses I used a combination of:
– Thrive Architect to create my landing pages, recorded videos that I embedded on them
– ConvertKit to deliver the email sequences of information.
Now in order to put up these freebies you’re going to need to create a landing page. The great thing is instead of buying landing page creators you can just create it through ConvertKit – the email marketing solution I use.
So if you look at the below screenshot, all you have to do is go to Landing pages, and you can create a selection of landing pages here.
Here you’ll be able to add your freebie, and whenever people sign up for your freebie you’ll be capturing your email lists.
Marketing Your Freebie
Now after you’ve created this freebie, how are you going to market it and grow your email list? Here are the main ways I do it.
1. I drive traffic on my website through SEO.
I drive site traffic by writing articles on my website and optimizing them in a way to rank them on Google. I currently get about 30,000 page views a month on this website and that came from years of writing articles.
As people land on each post I have an offering embedded at the bottom of each article, and I have offerings at the front page of my website as well as the top bar of the website. You can also try adding a pop up on your website as well as those usually have a solid conversion rate.
2. I put links to my freebie in my YouTube description and pinned comments.
I put specific free offerings based on the type of content I put up on YouTube. You can see them in my description. I also sometimes put the links to freebies in my pinned comments if it makes sense to.
3. I put these links to my freebie in my TikTok bio and my Instagram bio
I created something similar to Linktree in which people are led to a landing page of my links on TikTok and Instagram. My list of links include affiliate links as well as my own products, so I lead my audience to my free crash courses that they can sign up for and learn from.
As a summary, you can drive traffic to your landing page through SEO and social media.
Segmentation
When your audience signs up for your freebies, you also want to make sure you also segment your lists.
On ConvertKit, there is a feature that allows you to segment your list so that every time someone signs up for your forms, you can tag them. So if they signed up for my Etsy crash course I can tag them with a tag of “Etsy”.
In the software all you need to do is click “Automations”, create new automation, and put in the sequence. For example you can put in that if someone enters your Etsy form, you’ll tag them with “Etsy”, and then deliver an email sequence to them.
That way you can personalize your offerings to tagged users in the future. Instead of saying “hey there”, you can now personalize it so that if they signed up for a YouTube tutorial, you could ask them “Hey [name], how is your YouTube channel going?” This feels more personal and makes your audience want to open their emails more.
Conclusion
I hope you guys enjoyed my thoughts on how to grow your email list from SCRATCH! This is exactly what I did to grow to 5k email subscribers fast, and my list is constantly growing faster and faster as time progresses. And if you haven’t yet, I HIGHLY recommend trying out ConvertKit as it has been instrumental to my growth. It’s important to get a good email marketing solution so that you can execute on these funnels and landing pages that I recommended above.
Sign up for ConvertKit for FREE here.
Will you be implementing these steps? Let me know in the comments below!
