It’s true. The best way to improve your marketing is to start doing the things you know you should be doing. One of those things may be getting people’s email addresses. If you are not sure that email is for you, have a look at some of my previous posts: Is email the best way to get clients
But maybe you are just starting. Maybe you don’t have a single email address, and you want to know how to go about starting. The great news is that it doesn’t have to be complicated or too onerous.
You will need just three things (four if you include a ‘can do attitude’ :-), namely, an autoresponder, an email magnet, and traffic. I will explain all these below.
An Autoresponder
You will need some way to store, manage and send emails to all the email addresses you collect. I use an autoresponder called Aweber. The service starts at $19 a month. There are tons of similar providers out there, and I believe there are even some free ones, though I have not used them. Type “autoresponder” into Google and see what comes up. Do some research and find the one that suits your goals and budget. Whatever you do, don’t be an idiot like me who paid for an autoresponder for a full year before I was even ready to capture my first email address – do solopreneurs get distracted much!?.
An email magnet
An email magnet is simply a reason for people to sign up. It could be posts on your blog (so that your readers can stay up to date), it could be a webinar, an ebook, a top 10 list, an email series, a free email series (see an example I did here) or anything that gives someone enough of an incentive to give you their email address). It certainly doesn’t have to be something that you take ages over (don’t write a 300-page ebook that your potential clients may never read), it could be a simple one-page pdf document. All that is important is that it provides good value to the people who give you their email address.
You could also create a page specifically to capture the email addresses (called a lead page) where you detail the benefits they will get from signing up. This is the most effective way of getting someone to give you their email address. There is additional software that helps you create beautiful lead pages (I use the free leadpage programme that comes with Aweber) or you can simply create a page on your website. The great thing is that you don’t need to be technical to be able to create something simple and effective. By the way, in full disclosure, I don’t work for Aweber, nor do I get a commission if anyone signs up off my recommendation. I have used them for a number of years and they have not let me down yet and so I recommend them but they are by no means the best, the cheapest, the flyest, sickest or whatever millennials call it, but they are a pretty good bet if you are starting out.
Traffic.
If you have a website, you should put an email signup form on every page. If you have a Facebook page, direct your fans to give them your email address by putting unique content into email rather than solely on your Facebook page. You should be capturing all your clients’ email addresses when they purchase something or sign up for a webinar etc. If you are a small business and are serious about increasing sales, you should also be doing some paid advertising. On Facebook, you can run a paid advertising test to capture email addresses for as little as £5 a day for 4 days. That is £20 total. Once you run a test, you will know how much email address will cost to get. Start writing to these people and selling to them, and after a while, you will get a handle on how much each email address is worth to you. It may cost £2 to get one email address, but if you get 100 of those email addresses (£200) and make 2 sales of £100 each (£200), you are already at break-even point. And now you have 100 people in your audience to nurture, build trust, and sell more products to in the future.
If it seems overwhelming, it is just because you haven’t done this before. No doubt once you get into it, you will soon be cooking on gas. If not, or you have any questions, feel free to message me at my Facebook page