MBA2042 The 3 Pitfalls to Avoid When Growing Your Email List + Free Ride Friday

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ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.

All right, let's get into the three pitfalls you want to avoid like the plague when it comes to growing your email list. Whether you're starting out or you've been trying to grow your list for some time. And I've been around a lot of entrepreneurs, really successful ones. People that have literally over a million people on their email list. I've also seen entrepreneurs that have far less people on their email list, like 20 people versus a million. And they have a more successful, more profitable business on their hands. How is that even possible? Isn't the more people on your list equal more dollars? Not exactly. And that leads me to pitfall number one, Focusing on quantity over quality. The best analogy I can think of is buying a bag of lemons. Let's say you bought a bag of lemons and you didn't look at those lemons before you bought them, and you're planning to make a huge jug of lemonade. Okay? You go home, you open up this bag of lemons, and you realize 70% of these lemons are all rotten. You can't really use them. You can't even make juice out of them. So you toss out 70% of those lemons and you keep the 30%. You squeeze those lemons and you realize, I only have, like a cup worth of lemonade, not really a jug. Compare that to me going to the Market and hand picking a bunch of lemons that actually look perfect for my lemonade. Perfectly ripe, high quality, organic. I go home, I squeeze those lemons and I don't have a whole jug, but I have like three cups worth of lemonade. When it comes to the number of lemons, when I hand picked the lemons, it was far less than what was in the bag, but 70% of the bag was useless. Now thanks for putting up with this bad analogy, but the point here is that the quality matters because you may not really think about it initially, but having subscribers that are not meant to be on your list, that are not ideal deal, are not meant to be part of your audience, are costing you money because any email marketing software is going to charge you for a number of emails and it's actually better to have less emails that are engaged, engaged people that are thrilled to get your emails versus a bunch of emails that just are duds. So attracting your ideal audience members, your ideal customers, is incredibly important. And you do this by knowing what your audience needs, what they're struggling with, what they want to hear, what content they would love to consume and deliver in a great, fun, entertaining way. Instead, most people, they just say, I'm going to create some sort of ebook with a flashy title, run some ads, get people to grow, go and grab that ebook, and they don't even read the ebook, let alone even enjoy it if they do decide to read it. But worse off, you're just attracting a bunch of people that are looking for a freebie and you just basically try to lure them onto your email list without even thinking about do I actually want them on my E list? Are they the kind of person that will eventually be the perfect customer for me? So this takes a bit of thought. And most entrepreneurs when they get started, they don't take the time to do this. They don't actually describe who's my perfect customer, who would be ideal. If I had a thousand of these types of people, I would be super happy and my business would be thriving. Okay, you actually described who they are. Well, what do they need? What is a good starting point for them? Maybe it's a mini course, maybe it's a cheat sheet that will get them an instant result. Or maybe they got some burning questions and would love to join you on a live event or webinar where you can answer their questions. Giving your ideal customer they actually need will attract quality email list subscribers. So quality over quantity, that's number one. Number two, too many opt ins. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this on so many creators and coaches and course owners and creators websites. There's so many ways to join the email list. An ebook here, white pages there, a PDF download here. And the right column of their blog is filled with different kinds of opt ins and email boxes. This is incredibly confusing for your new visitor. It also makes it hard for you to nurture that particular audience member because you got to create all these different sequences and different follow up emails for each opt in because it's got to be relevant, right? And this makes it very difficult for you as the creator to manage and maintain all these opt ins. And then to top it off, they put a popup, an exit intent pop up to distract or to even annoy your visitor. You need one high quality cornerstone content to give as an opt in. Okay, you gotta find what is the best thing I can give my customers and make that the one opt in, the one call to action that I send people to to join my email list. You might say, but Omar, I got all this other content I created as opt ins. That's fine, you can give it to them when they join and you can even say it on the opt in. So let's say your best performing opt in is a one page checklist. You have other checklists and cheat sheets, but on your opt in page, on your opt in form you could say download my one page checklist and get all my checklists and cheat sheets when you sign up and you can literally just deliver it to them when they sign up with an automation in your email marketing software, focus on making that one thing very appealing. Sell it to them with a really nice graphic or a nice page. Sell it like it's a product, whatever that is, whether it's a cheat sheet or a free course, a webinar, whatever it is, make sure you put the effort and then just focus on making sure that everybody that goes to your website, if they don't buy your product, they at least opt in. You make it that attractive in software, a free trial or free plan is that one opt in. That's what we do over at Webinar Ninja. Our whole job is to get people to try us out with a free plan and that's how we grow our email list. One opt in. All right, third pitfall you want to avoid and this is a big one and a lot of people drop the ball here and it's all about nurturing your email list. You work so hard to get a quality audience member to join. You worked so hard on that opt in that got them to join. And then you don't have any plan on how to build a relationship with them. It's like you met them at a party, you really hit it off and you really enjoyed their company. But then you never followed up with them. You never call. You never asked for another opportunity to talk to them or to go for coffee or whatever it is. Whether this example is romantic or platonic, it doesn't matter. The point is that you have to build the relationship. And many people, they get lazy. They do the bare minimum. They maybe send out a newsletter once a week to them and say, hey, here's a newsletter. Now you're part of the newsletter. People want engagement, so invite them to an engagement activity, whether it's a Q and a webinar. Maybe you're doing something like a Q and A on Twitter, where it's just asynchronous. Or you could just literally ask them a question in the email that you send them with an automation. Just say, hey, what's your biggest struggle right now? Why did you join my email list? What is one thing you would love me to help you with and reply to them when they reply to you? Go back and forth. That's going to be worth gold. It's going to take you 2 seconds to reply and every time you do that, you're going to have a subscriber for life that is going to open every single email when they see it come in their inbox. Nurture your audience. It's a privilege to have somebody who actually signs up to your website, gets on your email list and is interested in what you have to offer. Sometimes you're going to have to do things that don't scale when you're growing a business. This is one of those times.

ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll, ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people to wrap.

Up today's lesson, the three pitfalls you must avoid when it comes to growing your email list. Number one, focusing on quantity over quality. Number two, not having one strong opt in. You need one strong opt in. Don't create a million and distract your visitor and annoy them. And number three, not taking the time and making the effort to nurture your audience. There's a lot of automation you can do to nurture, but there's gotta be engagement throughout periodically, even if it's just once a month. Now I want to give some closing advice before we announce Freeride Friday's winner at the start. Growing your email list can seem like a very slow slog. And that's okay because you're focusing again on quality. Okay? And I remember getting my first thousand subscribers took some time, like well over a year. But then something happens. It gets easier and easier as you grow. If you're focused on the quality of your content and creating a great community of good people, what happens is they start sharing it with other people. They start telling people about your website, about your blog, about your content. And you'll find going from 1000 to 2000 is a little easier than getting to a thousand and 2000 to 5000 gets easier. But even as you grow, you got to prune your email list. Make sure you only have quality on your email list. Quality subscribers. So every year, at least once a year, I like to email my subscribers people that have not opened my emails recently and say, hey, do you want to continue getting emails? If you do, please click this link or reply and let me know. If you don't, I'm going to kindly and gently remove you from my email list in the next 30 days. This gives them enough time to reply and get a heads up. And by the way, when they reply, that's amazing. And this tells email clients that people go back and forth with you and they'll see this as a positive signal. To make sure your emails go into the inbox. Not promotions, not spam. That wraps up today's lesson. I hope you found it interesting, helpful, useful. If it did, let me know. Leave me an Apple Podcast rating and review and tell me what you love about the show. By doing so, you enter Freeride Friday, which we're about to announce to win a free ride to one of our programs. Let's see who won this week's free ride. And the winner is Christopher Coker. Christopher says five stars. Great podcast. This podcast is awesome when you only have a few minutes. It's quick but always relevant and always leaves an impact. Excellent job. Thanks Christopher for that amazing review. Your mission is to email me over at omar@100mba.net so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to Easy course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co or you can win it free. Leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review to enter our weekly random draw. Christopher just won it for free and he'll be building his course and be guided from A to Z in this course that I absolutely love. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. When you're growing your email list for a year or two, monitor your unsubscribes. How many unsubscribes you're getting compared to signups. Unsubscribes means in my book that the person signed up and changed their mind. It's not what they're looking for. That means I'm attracting the wrong people. I need to change the way I'm attracting people or what I'm offering. Or even maybe it's time for me to survey my audience and see what they think of my content, what they like, what they don't like, what they like to see what they want to learn about so that I can start providing better content for my audience. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. I'll check you on Monday. Until then, see you there.

ADP knows Anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work. From HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.