I love building and running email lists.
Why?
Because they make so much money. Even today, a healthy email list is one of the marketing assets that’s pure gold. With a good email list, it feels like printing money. Or having a marketing laser beam that floods any marketing promotion that I’m doing.
My first question when working on a new business is always: where’s the email list and how can I get it growing?
If I get that right, my job gets a lot easier later on.
First, what email service should you choose? We put together an entire breakdown of our recommended email marketing services here. Switching email tools becomes a major pain as you grow your list so make sure to get this decision right in the beginning.
After you have your email tool sorted out, it’s time to start building your list. I’ve grown multiple lists to over 100,000 during my career, I even got one to 720,000 a few years ago. Check out all my best strategies for email list building.
Ecommerce companies have a few other ways to grow there lists too, check them out in How to Grow Your Email List as an Ecommerce Brand (A Beginner’s Guide).
And if you have a strong Facebook presence, here’s our best tips on how to build email lists with Facebook.
For building email lists, the key is coming up with an amazing lead magnet. A lot of my major career wins came from finding a lead magnet that converted traffic into emails at an absurd rate.
What’s a lead magnet? It’s a freebie, usually a premium piece of content like a nice PDF. People give up their email list in order to get that free, premium piece of content. That’s an entire art and science to creating the right lead magnet.
Running Your Email Marketing List
Once you get an email list going, then what do you do?
It’s time to manage your list and keep it healthy. There’s a lot that goes into this.
Keep in mind that lists decay over time. If a list isn’t kept engaged and active, that list will slowly stop responding to emails altogether.
Go through our guide on How to Write a Newsletter. Also read our tips on How to Improve Email Engagement. That will keep your list nice and healthy.
The most important element to focus on is your subject lines. They have a crazy impact on the performance of any email. Get the subject line right and that’ll make up for a lot of other email mistakes. The best subject lines are here.
Then get a feel for the key email metrics to keep an eye on: 5 Essential Email Marketing Statistics You Should Check Often. That’ll keep you on top of any problems before they become too serious.
When you’re ready for a deep-dive on deliverability, open rates, spam, and everything else, get into all the details here:
Marketing Automation and Drip Campaigns
I gotta say, the major win from email comes from automating everything. Once you know that an email campaign works, use a marketing automation tool to send it automatically at the best time for your subscribers. You’ll get all the extra revenue and conversions without having to do extra work.
Here’s our Definitive Guide to Marketing Automation that breaks down how it all works. Definitely start there.
Marketing automation can get complicated, these articles break it all down:
Wrapping Up
When you’re ready, you’ll also want to start A/B testing your emails. Our Beginner’s Guide to How to Start A/B Testing Your Email Marketing goes through everything that you’ll need.
We’ve also have two cases studies that show you how all this works in practice: