A Guide to Growing Your Email List Now
Email marketing isn’t always easy, BUT…
It is effective IF you do it right. First, you need to know:
👉 The best way to capture the attention of your audience AND
👉 How to build and maintain this relationship long term
These questions are answered in the latest podcast episode, and I’m sharing clear, direct tips to help you get it right.
Tune in to learn how you can grow and utilize your email list right away.
CLICK BELOW TO LISTEN!
Show Notes:
Hey, Risers. Welcome to Episode 155 of Empathy Rising. I have been in a really good mood lately, I don't know what it is. Well, I do know what it is. It's being on that healing journey and really deconstructing some patterns and just looking at things and doing some shadow work and then coming out the other side of that feeling pretty good. It's always a roller coaster, ups and downs, and ups and downs. Right now I'm in an up.
The other day, a guy—I guess I didn't even realize this—I was working out, and I started listening to Metallica when I'm working out and Pantera when I'm working out, which is not normally my music of choice. I mean, I like a couple of Metallica songs, but hardcore music like that, (which I know is relative. There are some of you listening who are like, "that's not hardcore", but it's hardcore for me) I don't know, it's doing something.
I was on the treadmill and I had this, like, "RAHHH" song on and this guy couldn't help but talk to me and he's like, "why are you smiling?" or like "What's going on? Why do you have such a big smile on your face?" and I was like, "I do? I don't know. I guess I'm just in a good mood".
It's been a couple of weeks like that. I'm thankful for it. I will take it right now because who knows when it won't be like this. So let me just enjoy this. I'm on that emotional regulation and emotional acceptance journey, and realizing that every feeling I have is just as valid as all the others. Doing a little bit of walking my talk instead of just talking it, which is something as clinicians we sometimes need to practice.
Today I'm going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects, which is email lists. If you are a new listener to me, you will quickly learn that I am one of the biggest proponents of email list building. I'm not a huge social media fan. I have a couple of episodes coming up about social media, and what to do if you don't want to use it.
My recommendation for 2022 (if you do want to use social media) but it's always just a top-of-funnel marketing activity for me. In my prerogative, the real 'meat' of your marketing, the real 'meat' of your business happens via email. We're going to talk a lot about that today.
Before we jump in, I do want to let you know about something pretty exciting that is coming up at the end of May. A few weeks from now, when you're listening, we are going to be having a brand new live training called "Side Hustle Streamlined". I'm sharing my six-part system, my framework. This is how I build all of my businesses.
This is exactly what I'm walking through to build Rooted, my new brand, that some of you may or may not know about, which I'm sure you'll hear about more soon, but it's also the six-part framework that I teach all of my Side Hustle students, everybody who learns from me even in Space Holder we start to explore the pieces of this.
Of course, we take it a million miles further and way, way deeper inside of Side Hustle. This is the infrastructure of everything that I believe about building business, and we're going to go through it live together. It's going to be on May 30th, 7:00 PM Eastern, 4:00 PM Pacific.
This is designed to teach you my method for moving beyond the therapy room. Even if you feel like you have no time, no time to figure it out on your own, and you're like, "just tell me what to do. I trust you. I will do it". That's what we're going to look at.
I always offer replays for things because who knows when we're gonna have session, and even if we don't have session, who knows what we're going to have crisis or who knows when we're going to just want to be at home with our families. A replay is always available, but you do need to register in order to either attend live or to receive that replay. The link to do that is over at Marissalawton.com/streamline, and I can't wait to see you there in just a couple of weeks.
Now let's dive into this idea of email lists. What I wanted to talk about today is that getting email subscribers is just the starting point. We all have an email list goal. I'm really happy with my email list for my therapist business, it's rocking and rolling, it hovers around this certain number, which is just around 5,000.
You might hear other people talk about their email lists and talk about tens of thousands, 50,000, hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I have a multiple six-figure business and my email list is about 5,000 people, and it serves me well. This is because a portion of people come in, and a portion of people leave as well. I'm always churning around this 5,000 mark.
It always keeps the people who want to be here and learning from me where they need to be. The people who know it's not a right fit or not the right time, they're free to go, so that's really what I look at in terms of my therapist email list.
Now for Rooted, I do have a goal of 2,000 on an email list by October because my launch for Rooted will be taking place (for the waitlist) in November, and for my larger audience in December. It's always a good idea to have a goal or an endpoint or a fixed point that's guiding you in building your email list. What we're going to dive into today is the fact that that number of people is just the starting point for your business.
I have several episodes back in the archives about email lists and vanity metrics and how the number of subscribers on your list is just a vanity metric and we need to see those people as what they are as humans and people, and we need to have relationships with them, and so that's what we're going to take deeper in today's episode.
A little bit more about why email lists, before we jump into what you do with your subscribers once they're actually there. The thing about email lists (and I'll do this briefly because if you've been a long-time listener, you've heard me say this a zillion times over) is it's the only asset that you own in your online business.
To put this in perspective, think about (if you're working in person) if you're leasing an office versus owning the building that your audit your office is in. Two very different things. When we're building online presences on things like social media, which is an asset that we don't own (Mark Zuckerberg owns several of them and China owns a couple of others). Whoever owns these social media platforms, it's not us.
When we think about email lists, we own that. I like to make the example of: you could literally download a spreadsheet of all of the subscribers on your list. It'll have their name, their email, and there are a couple of other data points that your email service provider might gather for you. You could print that list off and hold it in your hands. It could be a tangible asset.
You can't do that on Facebook. You can't go to Facebook and download a form within the Facebook platform that gives you a list of everybody who follows you. Facebook's not going to give that to you, Facebook owns that. They're not going to let you have that.
If you want to switch email service providers, let's say you started on MailChimp (if you're on MailChimp, I suggest you switch ASAP), but let's say you're on MailChimp and you decide there's another platform out there that's better for you. You can again, download that spreadsheet and then sign up for something like Mailerlite, which is what I recommend and teach, Convert Kit, Active Campaign, FloDesk, any of these others that are out there, you upload your spreadsheet that you downloaded from MailChimp and you upload it into the new one.
It's not only tangible, but it's transferable. You own that list of people and you can do whatever you want with it, including moving it from platform to platform. If you wanted to move your Facebook audience to Instagram or something like that, you just have to post a bunch on Facebook and say, "I'm moving to Instagram. Follow me over there". Only a portion of them would do it. You would lose people by making that transfer. Whereas with your email list, you take everybody with you.
A couple of other things that make email lists really important for business are that you can make healthy and pretty accurate predictions based on your email list in terms of sales, in terms of signups for events, in terms of scalability, and all kinds of things.
You can make accurate and pretty feasible and pretty healthy predictions from an email list. You can't do that from social. There's the potential upswing of social, if you have a video that goes viral and all of a sudden you double your audience overnight, that can happen. Even the upside of that, even though that's really cool, it's still unpredictable. It's not like you can replicate that and make that happen every time over and over again.
We can't predict growth and we also can't predict sales from social media because somebody might follow you because of one video that you posted three years ago, and then they've never even looked at your account again. There's a real upside to social and we can certainly use it strategically, but it's not as effective for your sales funnel or is not as measurable a piece of your sales funnel as your email list, but as I said, email lists, we own them.
They give us really great ways to have some KPIs (key performance indicators), they give us great ways for us to make predictions on sales and growth and all of that, but building your list is not the end goal. In fact, building your list is the start.
Let's imagine you're about to run a race. Before you got to the starting line, before you got down in those blocks that runners put their feet in, and then they fire off the little gun and then you start running, before you get to the starting line...what did you do? You probably drank a Gatorade or whatever. Probably stretched some muscles. Maybe you listened to, like, your favorite pump-up music or something like that, Metallica, Pantera, which is what it is for me right now.
But even the night before, maybe you ate, (I am not a runner, so I'm just making this up) aren't you supposed to load up on carbs or something before a race or before a big game? You did what you needed to do for yourself physically the night before, you got a good night's sleep, and all of this stuff led you to even get to the starting line.
That's all the stuff of building your email list. The creating the option. The promoting email list or the promoting the opt-in doing the visibility marketing, doing the social media marketing, whatever it is, the people then get on your email list. That's all the stuff that gets you to the starting line.
Once you're at the starting line and the gun goes off and you hit go, that's the stuff that starts to matter in terms of conversion rates, in terms of sales, in terms of relationship with your audience. That audience can then turn into referral sources for you and bring on other people and recommend you to others. Building the email list, and getting the subscribers is all the prep.
It's all the night before stuff and then once you have the email list, how you treat that list is all of "after the starting line" stuff. An engaged list that is built slowly and steadily is going to be way more profitable and lucrative for you in the long run. We don't want to skip this prep just like if you were about to run a marathon or a race, and you skipped all your prep the night before you might be doing alright for the first mile or two, and then you start to be hurting.
That's what it would be like if you built your list too quickly or without the right infrastructure. You may see initial sales, or you might see initial interest in your offers, but that sustainability, that longevity is what's not going to be there.
Getting the right people on the list is only the beginning. What we do with the people after that is what matters. When you treat email subscribers as the endpoint, a couple of things happen. First, we are playing into that vanity metric that I measure that I mentioned earlier. We're only looking at the accumulation of a 'number' of people. We're only looking at growth and just trying to hit goals and hit benchmarks and make that number of subscribers bigger. 250 on the email list, 500 on the email list, 2,000 on the email list and we're not looking at those people as human beings.
Also when you see subscribers as the endpoint, and you're only focusing on that vanity metric, then you're probably not putting a lot of effort into the emails that you're sending, if you're sending them at all. What's the point of building an email list if you're not actually going to email them?
When you start to see this as the beginning of the relationship, when you see the subscriber, getting on your list as the beginning of everything, it flips that around. You're able to see each subscriber as a human, as a person with needs and wants and a unique story and you're able to nurture that person, you're able to send emails and you're able to interact and create a longer-lasting, stronger bond with that person so that when it's time to sell, that person either buys because they're ready or they stick around and they continue to consume your content and they can continue to be part of your community and in your sphere because they enjoy being with you.
They have a relationship with you, which could turn into them buying in your next launch or the launch after that. I think about the lead-up to people joining Side Hustle. A lot of times people are following me. When I was running it for six months, they would usually follow me for two full rounds before they joined. They were following me for about a year.
Now that Side Hustle is nine months, it's changed things up a little bit. I have people joining who have been following me for a while, but I also have people joining who had just come into my audience, but they know if they don't work with me now, they're not going to get to for a whole nother a year.
That has changed a little bit of things, but it still is based on a relationship. People have to have what's known as "know, like, and trust". These are the foundational pieces of marketing. This is why we market, for people to know who we are, for people to like what we have to offer, and for people to trust that what we have to offer is going to get them results.
When people are getting to your email list, they come across you on social, or they're recommended to you by a friend or something like that, that's the "know" piece. Once they get on your email list and they're communicating with you regularly, they're receiving messages from you regularly, even better if they're personalized, depth-oriented, vulnerable, real messages, that's where the "like" and the "trust" factors come in.
It's not enough for just people to know what you do. They need to have a relationship with you and a trust factor with you so that they will join your offer, so that they will buy from you. We need to recognize that email subscribers are not the endpoint. The number of people on the list is not the endpoint. It's just the starting point.
We're going to get a little nerdy here and we're going to talk about marketing and we're going to geek out for a minute, but marketing has two functions. This is not the same as different types of marketing. I have other episodes about that, and I'll be talking about the different types of marketing in the Side Hustle Streamlined event. If you want to know about those, you definitely want to go ahead and register for that.
What we're talking about is the two functions of marketing. The two functions are Lead Acquisition (which is just a fancy word of saying new people, new eyeballs, new people, figuring out who you are and what you do). This is the "know" piece that 'K', the 'K' of the 'KLT' that I was talking about. People who become aware of who you are and become aware of what it is you do, what problem you solve.
Then we have something called lead nurture, and this is the relationship aspect of marketing. This is where "like" and "trust" come in. This is what makes all of the difference in your sales. If we look at it on a continuum… let's give a visual of this.
Let's say we have a line that is a foot long. Imagine there's a whiteboard in front of you and I've drawn a line in front of you that's a foot long, marketing would make up nine to 10 inches of that foot and sales would make up the last inch or two. When your marketing is done well, sales should be easy. If sales are hard, if sales feel like pulling teeth, it's because your marketing has not been effective enough. Marketing is what gets people to the door and sales is what gets people through the door.
When you're talking about lead acquisition, this is the act of getting people in like the first inch of the 9 to 10 inches. It's the people who are signing up to get on the line. They've been floating out there in internet land, just kind of bobbing around and you have captured their attention, and now they're walking on your line.
Lead Nurture is what helps them along that line, what keeps them tethered and grounded to your line without them just like popping back off into internet land again. I really liked that idea. You go out and you capture them with lead acquisition, you capture them with the "know" factor, and then we have to keep them grounded in your space so they don't pop back off into internet land. That is what sending regular emails will do.
We've talked about building the email list, and let's say you've been doing some lead acquisition and you've got, you know, 250 people on an email list, which is a great number for a first launch especially if you're launching a group program. If you're launching a more volume-based offer, like a membership site or a course, you might want to hold out and wait until you get closer to 500 or 500 plus before your first launch, but remember that the end-goal number is not what we're focusing on here.
Let's say you get that 250, and what do we do? What do we do when we have people on our list whether it's 250 or whether it's 2? Those two people could still feel very nurtured from you feel like they're in the right place at the right time. Listening to and absorbing from somebody who can help them, and those two people could buy from you.
There are a couple of different strategies that I like to do. First of all, you need to be emailing your list weekly. I would just get on board with that. If you need some time to wrap your head around that, and if you need some time to figure out how that would look or how that would work or what that would look like, then take some time. Reflect on it. When in my week can I carve an hour out to write an email? You might be a faster writer than me, you might not need a whole hour.
Or you might do a video-style email and record a five-minute video and just send it and be done. You might not need an hour, but let's just call it an hour. When can I find an hour in my week? Do I need to wake up an hour earlier on Monday mornings? Maybe not Mondays because Mondays suck enough already, but let's call it Thursday. Do I need to wake up an hour earlier on Thursday? Or do I have an hour that I am not utilizing?
Well, I was going to say wasting, but I don't want to say we're wasting time, but do I have an hour that I'm not utilizing well? Am I getting home from session, am I freaking somehow figuring out dinner, whether I'm warming it up, whether my husband is making it up or warming it up, whoever's figured out how to feed us. Dinner is taken care of, the children are in bed, and now I'm watching three hours of Netflix. Is there one day a week where you can watch two hours of Netflix?
I want you guys to start thinking about "where can I find an hour a week?" and that's the hour that I want you to commit to emailing. I will say that if you absolutely need to have a frequency, that's a little less frequent, like once every other week, you can do that. I would not go any lower than that. I would not go to a once-a-month email when you have a brand new offer for a brand new audience, it's not frequent enough. Every other week, weekly as best.
I don't even like to give the allowance for every other week because if we give ourselves an allowance there, where else are we going to expand? The bigger the container, the more we expand into that container. If we keep ourselves tight, if we keep it once a week, that's what it is. It's going to keep us on a more direct path, it's going to keep us from slacking off here, which is where we could slack off there. I don't like those words, that word choice. It feels too masculine energy for me, but we do, we need a container and I would really recommend a once-a-week container.
We've figured out how we're gonna find an hour a week and we're gonna commit to emailing once a week. What do we say in those emails? There are a couple of things that I like to send out. The first is always just education. Your audience is coming to you because you know something that they don't. You know how to do something that they don't know how to do, whether that's how to plant a rose garden or whether that's set effective boundaries.
They're coming to you first and foremost to learn from you. I would definitely prioritize emails where you educate. Personally, what I do in my education emails is send out the link to my podcast. If you're creating content in another form via podcast, blog, YouTube channel, whatever that is, you can send them there. What you want to make sure that you're doing is providing proof that you are a person who can help them. That's going to contribute to the 'T', the trust factor. Providing education, proving that you are an authority on your subject.
The other two types of emails that are effective are story emails. Telling stories equals relatability, equals "like", so this is your 'L' factor in your 'KLT'. The two types of stories that work really well—I call these the Frodo stories and the Gandalf stories—one set of story is where you are Frodo. You are the main character. You are the person who underwent the transformation. You're the person who did the thing.
So running with his boundaries idea; When I first graduated and I was at my first job, I had really poor boundaries, which meant that I ended up working more hours than I should have, picking up the slack for everybody else. Eventually, it led me to burning out, but once I put boundaries in place, here's how my life changed. That's where you are sharing your personal journey. You are the hero of the story. You are the main character.
I know that can feel really uncomfortable as a clinician because in our entire profession we've made it so that we are not the main character. We don't shine and we don't stand out. The client shines. These types of stories can be really powerful in establishing a relationship with you.
Gandalf stories are going to feel a little bit familiar because that's where you're telling a story about someone you've helped. You are not the main character. The student, the client, or a member in your membership is the main character and you're only describing their results and how your role helped them get results.
Now, if this is your very first time launching an offer, and you've never done anything like this before, you might not have a lot of Gandalf stores. You may decide to share a client story and change names, or just mention "my client" or "one time a therapy client of mine", you could do that but some of you might be thinking in your head, "not even going to touch that with a 10-foot pole".
You can do this in other ways, you can certainly tell stories about family members. You could tell stories about your kiddos if that feels comfortable. You could tell stories about your partner if that feels comfortable. You can also tell stories about colleagues or the sorority that you were in, or the club or something like that, it doesn't have to necessarily be a colleague and it doesn't have to be somebody who has paid you yet.
It can certainly be an example of, maybe your best friend in high school whose parents got divorced and she was really having a hard time, and you played this role and she achieved this result. They don't only have to be professional stories.
When you have run your group or your offer multiple times or a couple of times, and you do have testimonials and you do have transformational stories, then certainly by all means use the stories of the people who've gone through the program that you are trying to sell but until then think of other ways that you've been influential or helpful, or been like a guiding role in other people's lives. You can certainly tell those stories.
When you do that, when you tell a story and you beef up your "like factor", and you educate which beefs up your "trust" factor, you're now doing nurturing. You're now using the function of marketing known as Lead Nurture. You're establishing a relationship with the people who are on your email list, and that is what moves them closer to buying from you, referring their friends and colleagues, becoming your street team, and shouting your name from the rooftops. That relationship piece is the biggest piece and the biggest factor in your marketing.
I hope this has helped you see why getting email subscribers is only the starting point. Accumulating a number of people is cool, but that's not our end goal and that's not our purpose. Our purpose is to have a relationship with those people. To see the number of people on our email list as what they are, humans, and to have relationships with them.
If you're ready to start learning the different aspects of marketing, lead nurture versus lead acquisition, and how marketing itself fits into the ecosystem of your side hustle, I have something special planned for you. To remind you, on May 30th at 7:00 PM eastern, 4:00 PM Pacific, we're having a live training called Side Hustle Streamlined, your six-step method for moving beyond the therapy room even if you feel like you have no time to do it yourself.
In this training, I'm going in-depth into the exact six steps you need to follow to build a sustainable and revenue-generating side hustle. You'll learn the process that I go through when I'm building out a new offer and the process that I teach my students inside of Side Hustle Support Group.
The link to register for that is Marissalawton.com/streamline, and remember there will be a replay. Even if you can't make it live, go ahead and register because that's the only way that you'll get access to that replay to watch on your own time.
Alright guys, it's been super fun talking about email lists with you. I feel like I could talk about this all day. I honestly didn't even really use my outline. I was just sitting here talking. That's how much I'm passionate about this subject. I will be back with you next week, and until then, keep on rising.
