George Kao builds his email list without pop-ups or freebies, instead showing sample emails and asking for names and referral sources. He deleted 90% of his list to keep only engaged readers, and now gets 33% open rates and 8.8% click rates, well above industry averages of 20% and 2.6%.
One of the questions I get is, George, how do I build my email list? How do I get email subscribers so that I can communicate more effectively and more reliably to my audience? I think that's a great question and let me give you my advice on this. As you can imagine, I'm going to give you advice that's probably different than what you'll hear from most marketers because I really believe in doing authentic marketing. And honestly, most marketing out there, in my opinion, is not as authentic, not as honest as it could be. So I'm going to recommend that instead of trying to get people to subscribe to our email list by using opt in freebies and things like that. Okay, now that's okay, but let me give you a different way of thinking about it now. Opt in freebies. What is that? That's when someone, you've seen this before, you probably opted in. Someone says, hey, join my email list and you'll get this amazing series of video that'll teach you how to do this and that, right? Join my email list that way or have this amazing free ebook or some other amazing thing to join my email list for. Well, notice this is my homepage, this is my website. You don't see any pop up with join this, join that. And yes, of course, pop ups do get more email subscribers. Freebies do tend to get more email subscribers also. Okay, but let me give you one more reframe. What if our purpose wasn't to get more email subscribers, but instead the purpose of an email list? What if it's to communicate reliably with your audience in a way that you and they really both enjoy? So, all right, get this. No business is trying to really trying to get a bigger email list. What you really want is to have enough clients. Isn't that true? What what you really want is to be able to share a message and impact people positively. Isn't that true? Not to get a bigger email list. I'll tell you this, I used to have a far bigger email list than I do now. I actually manually, I personally consciously cut my email list by about 90%. I actually deleted about 90% of my email list because I wanted to keep just the people who had opened one of my email newsletters in at least the last six months. So I cut out most of them. And I'll tell you, most of my peers, okay, most of the marketers out there have enormous email lists but have tiny open rates and click rates of their emails. It's really sad. So, and then they're Paying all this money to maintain this huge email list that's mostly dead. So I recommend that you build for quality rather than just quantity. Yes, you want to build a quality email list and yes, you want to build it larger, maybe over time, but it's always about the quality of the relationship you have. So instead of trying to get people to subscribe your email list, you don't even need a freebie. If you have one, great. But if you don't, if you don't even have one, I don't even have one. I'm trying to model the most minimal, the most minimal marketing you can do, the most authentic marketing, minimum marketing you do, you could do more than I do, that's perfectly fine. But I don't have an opt in pop up and I don't make it hard for people to find my email newsletter, but I look at my email newsletter as a service of convenience for my audience. If they don't want to miss my best content, they don't want, I don't want them to have to hunt around, remember to come back to my website to try to find my latest blog post or try to remember to go to my social media pages to try to find it. They can get my best stuff delivered either once a week or once a month to their email inbox as a convenience. So they come to my website, they can click on newsletter, alright, and that brings them to a page that's clearly, clearly me. My picture's on there and it says to receive my best content, etc, etc. And I do something also quite unique, which is I give prospective email newsletter subscribers a link to check out what kind of email newsletters they're going to get from me before they even subscribe. Almost no other email newsletter does this. You basically subscribe blind. You think you're going to get this freebie, but you end up getting all this other emails that you didn't expect. So I actually give them a sample of what they're going to receive. And the other thing I do differently, which you may or may not want to do, is I ask for a lot more than is conventionally recommended by marketers. Marketers typically say oh only ask for their email address. The more you ask for, the fewer subscribers you'll get. And remember I say I'm not trying to get more subscribers necessarily. I'm trying to get better subscribers. I want subscribers who really want to be there, who really are going to read my emails, etc. So I ask for not just their email address but their name as well. How they discovered me. These are all required fields by the way. And then I give them the option again the service the convenience of either getting my emails once a month or once a week. Right. So the other thing I do that I also recommend is at the end of your posts on social media where you write something substantial or you record a video at the end of those things include one of these. I always include that at the end of my expertise. My content that's related to my expertise I always include to receive my best articles via email. You can go there and that brings people again brings people here to be able to subscribe. So look at your email newsletter as a convenience, as a serve as a free service to your people and you will build an email list that is more engaged. I my email newsletter gets I know what my industry okay if you want to go to Google and search email list industry averages the first real result besides the advertisements the field the first organic result is by mailchimp, which happens to be the email newsletter subscriber email list software that I use and love have used it for years and love it. And there they show you what the industry averages are. They updated frequently. The first column of numbers is open rate. The second column is click rates. If I go down to my industry, my industry is either consulting or education and training. Different people will say different things about that. So it's either it's basically about 20% open rates and about two and a half percent click rates. Well, my most recent monthly newsletter got a 33% open rate, so one and a half times higher than the industry average and got a 8.8% click rate instead of a 2.63 which is what my peers tend to be getting. So I'll tell you my my way of doing email newsletters does work and it builds a quality relationship with my audience. So I do recommend that you consider following the way that I do email newsletter that if I imagine if everyone did what I did, audiences consumers would feel much better about email newsletters. And of course when I say it's a service and a convenience for your audience, I don't mean that you never sell your product and service through email newsletters. Of course you do. And so for example, you look at my most recent email newsletter, my February one. I give my best recent content and I also sell my upcoming workshop. So of course you can also include your services and your products in there, but do include lots of your free and you know your free and helpful content as well. So I hope that this is helpful and I wish you an authentic and quality relationship with your email subscribers. Be well.
