MBA2195 Q&A Wednesday: How do I grow an email list for my e-commerce store?

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Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Helpful business lessons you can count on every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays I answer a question one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, go ahead and email me over at Omar MBA Net. Today's question is from Sean and Sean asks, hey Omar, been a listener of the show for some time. Got a question for you. I know the importance of growing an email list for online businesses. I have an E commerce store and I'm wondering what are some strategies that I can use to grow my email list for my E commerce store. Most of the courses and the videos that I see are about growing email lists for digital products like courses and training. But there's not much out there for E commerce. Would love any advice. Thanks so much. I got your back Sean. No worries. In fact, there's some killer strategies to grow your email list when it comes to E commerce that I'm going to share with you in today's episode and by the way, if you don't run an e commerce store, you can use these strategies regardless of you can modify them, you can tweak them, you can make them your own. But the most important thing is that you are growing your email list. The cost per leads is going way, way up. Back in 2012, I used to be able to secure a lead for less than a dollar. When I use traditional ads on social media these days it costs over $7 a lead. This is because we're in a gold rush for growing email lists because people are really, really distracted. There's a lot of noise on social media. There's a lot of noise every and the inbox is still sacred. People still read email. So let's grow that list. Let me show you how. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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I can't stress enough how important it is to grow your email list. An email list allows you to build a relationship and build trust with your audience and potential customer and help them make a decision to buy your products and services. But how do you get them on your email list? How do you attract them? Specifically Sean's question how do you do it for an ecommerce store? Well, I'm a big believer in reverse engineering what works on me. So whenever I'm on a website, when I'm on a e commerce store's website and I opt into their email list, I like to figure out what made me opt in, what compelled me to pop in my name and email address and join their list. And let me share with you some of the top strategies that really work. Strategy number one, show a pop up or email capture inviting people to join your email list so they can receive a discount. You can show this pop up only to new visitors and once they have opted in you don't have to show it again. Most pop up software opt in software have this option. Take a look at your email marketing software like Convertkit. I know they do that so that you're not bombarding people that have visited our site before with popups that don't matter to them. They're already on your list. Now what this incentives does is that it says, hey, you may not be interested in buying now, but join the list so that when you are ready to buy, you can get a discount. This allows you to nurture this customer day after day, month after month until they become a customer. But you have no way of doing that if they don't join your email list. And this is why the incentive really is powerful. Now here's the secret that not a lot of people talk about the discount you're going to offer. It doesn't actually matter how much. You don't have to give like a 20% discount or 30% discount. You can actually just say 10% discount or free shipping. Any discount will actually do because right now they might not be buying anything, but something is better than nothing and therefore they'll sign up so they can grab that code. So that's the first strategy, the second strategy, and I saw this and learned this from macpac, which is like an outdoors clothing and accessories brand that's pretty famous, really good quality stuff. I bought a few things from them and I'm on their email list because they use this brilliant strategy. Instead of displaying just a regular price, they have two prices on their products. They have a regular price and a members price. The members price is significantly cheaper, like maybe 20 to 30% cheaper than the regular price. So the obvious question that people ask when they're on the site is how do I become a member? They realize easily with a pop up or some messaging or an opt in box that becoming a member is free. So even if they're not buying now, signing up will give them access to these great prices because they are a member and as a member they get updates and newsletters and latest releases. And it just feels special that you get this special price because you're part of some sort of club. Now here's the kicker. They're not discounting their prices, they're just increasing the price for the regular price. So whatever your prices are today, that becomes your new member price. And your regular price is 20 to 30% more expensive. This is a huge email growth hack because no one wants to pay more and they're willing to give up their email address to get significant savings. Another strategy I saw on Footlocker.com is they have a little button next to a product and it says notify me when this product on sale they also have this feature when they don't have your size. Notify me when you have my size. This prompts the website to serve up a pop up with a name and email address field so that you can sign up to their newsletter and get notifications when things are on sale or when they have your size. Very, very cool by the way. Most of these things are easy to implement. The first one is just simply having a pop up form to give them 10% off when they go to your website. The next one is basically saying hey, they get this price when they're logged in for members. And the third one is a bit of a custom code job, but not that hard and all easily done. With most website builders or e commerce stores like Shopify, you can just go to Upwork and ask for that custom work done for a few hundred dollars. The next strategy is quite brilliant and it's from Ikea. We all know Ikea, that Swedish furniture store that's like a maze as you go through the store from start to finish. But one of the things that Ikea is really known for is its catalog. Now not every city, not every town has an Ikea, so many people order online. But a lot of people actually like the physical catalog. They like to flip through it and IKEA will send it to you for free if you join their email list. Now this costs money for Ikea to send you a physical catalog, but it costs less than how much it would cost them to capture a lead using traditional marketing. So for them it's a win win. They'll also send you a PDF copy just in case you want to just flip through it on your iPad and that costs them nothing to send you. So maybe you want to send them something that helps them through the buying journey, helps them make a choice to go with you that's not too expensive for you to fulfill in exchange to be in contact with them via email.

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So to wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's question how to grow my email list with my e commerce store. Let me share with you one more killer strategy and this is one I actually implemented in my own e commerce business where I sold custom tailored clothing for men and hey I didn't invent this. I actually took it off Amazon. Amazon prime is known for giving benefits for people that are paying for prime movies, music, and free shipping. But I did it with a twist. They don't have to pay anything. They just have to be on the email list to get some benefits to be part of my VIP club. And what does the VIP club give them? Well, it gives them free shipping with any orders above $100. That was kind of a novelty back in the day when I was doing my thing over 15 years ago. It also gives them first access to new releases. So when we have a new style that drops, they get 48 hours of first access. That means they don't have to worry about things going out of stock or not finding their size. Certain pieces that we sold only were available in certain colors for VIP members. So if you wanted this dress shirt in a charcoal, it was only available for VIP members. Encouraging people to sign up so they can be vip, so they can have access to this color of this item. And the killer benefit we gave is five vouchers. One they can use on themselves. They gave them 25% off their next order. The other four they can share with their friends and family. This created a viral marketing loop. So they'd give these vouchers. They were like digital coupon codes to people that they think would love the product and tell them, hey, you can save 25% with my voucher. So start a VIP club and start sharing the love. See, all of these ideas allow you to grow your email list because it's a wow. It's a hell yeah, right? People are like, okay, I'll sign up for that. That seems really valuable. Asking people to sign up just to join your newsletter is just not good enough these days. Incentivize, incentivize, Incentivize so that you can grow that email list and maximize your chances of your visitors that visit your website to join your list. You work so hard to get that traffic. Let's capitalize and convert. Well, there you have it, guys. That wraps up today's episode, today's Q and A Wednesday's question. If you got a question you want to ask, just like Sean did, just go ahead and email me over@omar00mba.net and I'll make sure to answer it right here on Q and A Wednesday. Just let me know if you want to keep it anonymous. I want to take a moment and say thank you to all of our listeners. We just got our Spotify wrapped statistics where Spotify sends us our data and lets us know how well we've been doing this year. And we're in the top 5% of all podcasts on Spotify. We grew over 84% in this past year. Thank you so much for being listeners, following the show and being a part of this community and podcast. Before I go on, I'll leave you with this Always reverse engineer things that work for you. If it worked on you as a marketing strategy, it's probably going to work on your customers. You're savvy, you're up to snuff, right? You're kind of a bit alert and switched on compared to the average person. So if it's working on you, it's a strategy you may want to consider for your own business. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care of.

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