A YouTube talk by George Kao arguing against the common use of lead magnets and conventional email-list-first marketing. He promotes 'authentic marketing' that prioritizes integrity, audience connection, and long-term relationships over short-term list growth tactics; reports his newsletter open rates (52–58%) compared to industry average (~22%) and describes his approach (no pop-ups, transparent archive, fewer emails).
Heard that the most important asset in your business is your email list. Well, I call baloney on that. First of all, the most important asset in your business is your integrity and your practice of creativity, fitness. But let's set that aside. You might say the most important asset in your marketing is your connection with your audience, not your email list. Why do I say this? Well, it's because, have you noticed people can subscribe to your email newsletter and not open it? What is your open rate? Well, the industry average open rate for email newsletters is about 22%. What does that mean? That means out of every hundred people subscribe to an email newsletter, only 22 of them open it for any newsletter. Does that sound like a good connection with the audience? Maybe, maybe not. Some of you, instead of opening my email newsletters, prefer to watch me on Instagram or on YouTube or prefer to read my posts on LinkedIn. It's like that is something when you are, you know, casually checking on social media and you prefer to read your content that way instead of, you know, going to your emails where maybe you're trying to take care of some important things and you don't want to read email newsletters right? Now. Do you see the difference? It's baloney about the email list thing. Now, of course, email list is another reliable way to reach your audience who have subscribed. But here's what I've noticed. Most business owners start their connection with an audience in terms of email newsletter. They start with deception. What do I mean by that? Because they use what's called a lead magnet. Have you heard this? If you haven't, let me explain. A lead magnet. First of all, it's already dissociating from a human relationship. What is a lead? A lead is like, was that a human soul? What is this? It's somebody who might become your client. It's a. Why are you calling them a lead? Why don't you call them a human, a precious potential client or customer? Right? A lead magnet. Now, what's a magnet? A magnet attracts an inanimate object to it where the object has no control. So that's what marketers are teaching you, a lead magnet. You're essentially saying, I'm going to have something to attract you and you have no control. Dear potential customer, whether you join or not. It's ridiculous, right? I instead, I've always. I'm always talking about authentic marketing, which in part is to strengthen the sovereignty and the empowerment of your audience and their genuine desire to connect with you rather than you forcing anything on them. So I don't use lead magnets, I don't use freebies to try to get you on my email newsletter. Notice that, go to my website. There's no pop up, there's no freebie. You just decide whether you want to get my email newsletters or not. And let me tell you what the results have been. My email open rate is double my industry average. Industry average is about 22% email open rate, like I've already said, my open rates are between 52 to 58%. So more than double the industry average on most months. So whatever I'm doing is working well. What I'm doing is what I'm telling you. Right? The difficulty is that using a lead magnet does build up your email list faster, but what they don't tell you is it's not a sustainable relationship over time. So again, they're giving you a short term strategy that seems to work, but they don't tell. They usually even haven't been around for as long as I have. I've been doing marketing since 2009, so 14 years. And really the first six years or so I was doing mainstream marketing. I know all that stuff. Lead magnet funnels, sales funnels, all that stuff. High converting webinars. I did it, I taught it and then in 2015 I switched to authentic marketing. And so since then, I can tell you now, after eight years, it works and makes your life easier and easier in the long run. My marketing now is easier and easier every single year. And truth to be told, I actually make more money every year by doing very light marketing. I lean into my heart. I lean away from persuasion and forcing things, you know, emails onto people. I send fewer emails than most people. Yes, if you send more emails in the short term, you do make more sales in the short term. They don't tell you though what happens after a year or two or, and getting ongoing. If you keep doing that, you keep burning down your list more and more and marketing just stays hard your whole life or gets harder. They don't tell you that because they haven't been around as long as I have usually and they haven't done authentic marketing as long as I have. So that's why I don't use a lead magnet. And notice my email newsletter is very simple. They don't say dear Sally, dear John, whatever your first name is. No, I don't do that. Again, I don't start the relationship with deception. Here's a lead magnet and by the way, you're going to get my ongoing emails that's not what you intended, right? When you join a free webinar or when you sign up for a PDF you don't intend, you aren't looking forward to eagerly the person's ongoing emails? If so, why not just tell you, hey, if you love my ongoing emails, sign up for it. You're going to get one email a month or one email a week. You can look forward to it. Here's the recent issues. I do that on my website. You go to there, you click on the dropdown next to the newsletter, you can see the archive, you see my recent three issues. It's very transparent and this is why I have a high open rate and therefore my marketing people buy my stuff and people buy more of my stuff every year. My marketing has gotten easier over the years and I can have the opportunity to lean into more of my heart, lean into more of my whole creativity. But it's hard for me to teach this because you are looking at the short term strategies and you try them and they do work, they do work, so called in the short term. But then life gets harder and harder for you over the long term. But I can't tell you that unless you are willing to be patient and say, George, how do we be patient? Then lean in to your connection with your subscribers. That's how you can be patient. You can enjoy the connection now and not have to think about money. And ironically, if you lean into the connection with your subscribers, you might actually make more money also in the short term, because when you have a smaller audience, you have the time to reach out to each subscriber and say, hey, thank you for subscribing. Honestly, I'm so grateful. Tell me, what are you looking for from someone like me? Any questions I can answer for you? Right now? I have a bigger audience now. I can't do that anymore. I get subscribers every day. There's no way I have the time or energy to reach out to each person. But guess what? You can. While you have a small, if you have a smaller audience than me, you still have the advantage that I've lost. You can lean into that connection with each subscriber. Right now all I can do is just try to add value to everybody all at once. And I don't have that advantage that smaller audiences do anymore. So right now you still can enjoy that connection while you have a small audience. And then as you get bigger audience, all you can do is lean into your heartfelt content and try to serve them that way, you know. So I hope this is helpful. It's not the usual kind of message you're going to hear about building your email list, but it works. I'm living proof of it. Eight years into my authentic marketing strategy, it's working better than ever. So thanks for watching. Thanks for joining me on this journey, and I wish you well. Take care.
