How to Grow Your Email List (Series #1)

Sam Vander Wielen: You’re doing all of the things that you can think of to promote your freebies and grow your email list, but that darn thing will just not budge no matter how hard you try. You want daily email list growth full of subscribers who want to work with you, and you want a way to reach people that’s more reliable than social media.

You also wanna have a channel in your business where you can make sales even when you’re off for the weekend. Here’s the snag, without an all roads lead to the email list mindset, your traffic leaks, your freebies underperform, and people don’t know why they should join your email list or why your emails matter.

Today, in episode one of a four part series on how to grow your email list, we’re shifting the mindset and taking action on it by clarifying what you want your email list to do for your business in the first place, defining what your emails are about and why anybody should care, auditing your current strategy and metrics like opt-ins, click through, and open rates and training your brain to spotless growth opportunities everywhere.

I’m so excited to talk about this today. And by the way, hi. Hey, welcome back to On Your Terms®. If You’ve Been Around, thank you so much. If you’re new here, welcome to On Your Terms®. This is a podcast for online business owners who care as much about being present as profitable. And if that’s you, this is the perfect episode for you and the perfect series for you because my email list is the number one reason why I’m able to be present in my life and why my business is so profitable. It’s the reason, just hands down why I can take the weekends off, go on vacation without looking at my phone, end work at a nice afternoon hour because I know that I’ve got so much going for me and working in the background that’s leading the right people to purchase my products all the time.

And I have got a couple of people on my email list. At this point, I have over 55,000 subscribers on my email list with my weekly newsletter, Sam’s Sidebar if you don’t get it already, what are you doing? Go down in the show notes, click and sign up. It’s free, but, keep in mind, I talk about legal stuff and I talk about marketing. Okay? If I can do that, and if I can keep people, not just there but engaged, referring it to friends, adding people on, inviting me onto their podcast because of it, all that kinda stuff, buying my book, buying my products, I know that you can too. I feel so passionately about this.

But my email list didn’t just happen by accident. I have prioritized my email list pretty much since day one, but definitely for the last, uh, several years. And I have taken all of the steps that I’m going to teach you, not only in today’s episode, but in all four parts of this email list building series.

So this is episode one. Grab something cozy, pop in those headphones. Do what you gotta do. ’cause this is gonna be a juicy one. All right, let’s grow this email list together. Let’s dive in to part one. All roads lead to the email list.

Running a business or starting a business by yourself and then hiring a team is so similar to what it’s like to like live on your own and then move in with a partner because you just have all these ways of doing things and like you never really have to name it or like, I don’t know, call it out or explain why you like it or anything like that, and then like somebody else moves in and all of a sudden you’re explaining why you over rinse the dishes before you put them in the dishwasher and how you have like a horrible history with things coming out dirty and you just can’t stand it and yada yada. Right?

I feel so similarly, like when I started my business, I became obsessed with email marketing. I don’t know why I never had to explain it to anybody. I just knew that it seemed like a really safe bet, and it’s probably, I don’t know, the Scorpio in me or the lawyer in me or something that was like, it feels a lot safer to me to put a lot of emphasis on growing something that I have a lot more control over than something like social media. And this was like back in 2016 before social media was as much of a dumpster fire as it is now. But I, I really felt very strongly about, about putting a lot of my energy towards this.

It wasn’t until several years later when I started hiring the incredible team that I pretty much have all the same people here today working behind the scenes at Sam Vander Wielen LLC, that I started to have to articulate really something that I was just doing kind of by accident or automatically on the backend.

This is where I started finding myself saying to the team in team meetings, in meetings with contractors, people we hire to bring in to do certain work that I will find myself saying all the time. My approach, my method, the way that this business runs is that all roads lead to the email list. And I just started saying this and adopting it, and the team knows it.

And I just feel like at this point it’s like tattooed on our little business brains to just know that this is the strategy, this is the mindset that we embody here within my company. Because truthfully. Email list growth starts with mindset. It’s not a hack or a strategy. If you skip to the hack in the strategy part without talking about what we’re talking about today, it’s not going to work because it really is a mindset shift. It’s about prioritizing email list growth or your email list in general within your business. You have to make it important. Say that it’s important, say that it’s a focus, and make it a focus in order for this thing to actually grow.

But I’m not one of these like gurus that’s saying like, just close your eyes and think about it and it’ll grow. No, no. It’s not about just closing your eyes and wishing that your email list will be bigger and then automatically it gets bigger, we know that. If we step back and we look at what you do day to day and how you, how you deal with things in your business, is the email list actually a priority? So if we’re saying that we want it to grow and it’s not growing, but we’re not treating it like a priority, it makes a lot of sense to me why it’s not growing.

So there are three steps we’re gonna go over today when we learn how and why to adopt this all roads lead to the email list mindset and how that actually has like a tangible benefit for you and your business. The first one is about owning it and declaring it. Step two is about assessing your current strategy, and step three is all about taking action. It’s the next steps that we’re going to take. Hash out a little bit of a plan before you leave this episode today about exactly what you’re going to do once you’ve decided that your email list is your priority.

Let’s get into step number one, owning it. I actually had this realization several months ago about my podcast, so my podcast has always been my favorite thing to do in my business since I started. Essentially, once I started my podcast, I was like, where’s this marketing channel been my whole life? I just really enjoy it. I, it feels natural to me. I don’t care necessarily like how good I am at it or something like that, but I, I really thoroughly enjoy it. Over the years since I’ve started my podcast, I had my parents die and I scaled back my time in the business, and then I would come back and then I would realize I had gone come back too much, right? And that it was a little bit overboard. And so I would scale back again. My podcast essentially took a hit, like I would go back to weekly episodes and then at one point I bumped up to twice weekly episodes, then I went down again and yada, yada. The story continues.

Several months ago, I had started consistently podcasting again, and at least mentally prioritizing it or saying like, my podcast is really important to me.I really like it. I really want it to grow, right? But when I looked at it and really, I don’t know, had a hard con, a hard internal conversation with myself, I had kind of halfway, I like half-assed the owning it and declaring it part of being like, yeah, my podcast means a lot to me, but I hadn’t really owned it. And even worse, I realized that my actions weren’t consistent with someone who said that their podcast was the thing that they really valued and wanted to prioritize.

So this was like a great example for me where sometimes we can say like, oh yeah, yeah, like email list is important to me. And then you’re like posting five reels a week and you’re doom scrolling and you’re spending all this time trying to figure out how to make YouTube happen, all this stuff.

But if we know that email list growth is important to you. Where does it fall on your list of priorities? How much attention does it get on a weekly, daily, monthly basis? Right? Where does it fall when you go to make your goals? When you go to think about which content to create? Are you putting more time and effort and like even emotional effort into a reel that you hope takes off? Or are you spending that same amount of time and effort into thinking about how to make your newsletter this week really great?

That’s why I think it’s really great to start out by just thinking about how, you know, this is something that you wanna prioritize. You know that you want your email list to grow, but why do you want it to grow? Like, I would really invite you to think about what is it Just like if you were thinking about anything else, if you’re thinking about growing Instagram, it’s like, why? What do you hope that that means? What? What do you hope comes from that? So, with your email list, what do you hope comes out of having more. Part of why I am challenging you to think about this is because sometimes you have a group of people, it doesn’t matter how much, like forget, forget any like objectivity about a number, like 500 people for, uh, an online coach for example, that is a ton. That’s a huge email list because you don’t need to work with a ton of people. If you sell a digital product or a lower ticket product, yes, of course then we need to build a larger audience, but part of the reason why I’m challenging you to think about this is because sometimes we can just get stuck in the growth for growth cycle, and sometimes growth is helpful, but other times it’s like, but you have an email list already. How much are you valuing and prioritizing the people who are already there?

Are you working on delivering the best weekly newsletter that you can? Are you being consistent with it? Are you working on engagement? Are you working on click-through rate, open rate, like, what have you learned about that process? Like there’s a lot to be done with where you are now, with what you have now, so that you get better and better and better at it. So that first of all, that will lead to growth, but also so that when it grows, you actually retain people and convert people and get an engaged audience. It’s so similar to my like future proofing mindset of like, you don’t say, when I build a really big email list, then I’ll figure out how to write great emails.

It’s like, no, you write great emails now and that’s how you build a really big email list. So I wanna invite you to think about like, why do I want this thing to grow? What am I hoping comes from it? What am I not doing that I could be doing now, regardless of the size, regardless of how many people are there to become a great newsletter writer to become a great email list marketer to learn more about this and not just learn and consume, but actually put pedal to the metal and practice.

The next thing I want you to think about is what your emails are really about. I always like to think of the idea of like somebody describing my newsletter to a friend at a party, as if I could, you know, pretend that I was like hovering and um, listening from above, which would be like the best thing for me ever. ’cause I’m so freaking nosy that I would love to be able to hear what everybody’s conversations were and I just find people so fascinating and I love tuning in and people watching, as my friend Michelle says, I notice everything, and this is very true.

But anyway, imagine as if you were hovering above in a non-creepy way and you could hear people talking about your newsletter. What would they say about it? Like, one exercise that you can do is sometimes I think about what do I think they would say about it? Maybe just from like a realistic perspective, like this is how they would describe it, and then I think of it differently to think, how do I wish that they would describe it?

Because maybe there’s a bit of a difference between what your emails look and sound like right now versus what you want them to look like in the future and where you’re headed. Now if in this pretend overhearing conversation, you could imagine that the other person was like, oh, really like why do you think I should sign up? Like, why me in particular? What about it or what about those emails are going to be helpful for me? What would the response be? Why should people get them?

Now if you already have an email list and you’re sending out emails regularly, is there anything that you wish your emails had more of, less of? One thing you could do technically speaking is poll your audience and ask them what they wish they would have more and less of within your emails.

The only time I don’t think that’s a great idea is when you want to change because sometimes like, you know, I could probably poll my audience, for example, and maybe I would’ve gotten data at some point that just said like, just talk about legal, like don’t talk about any other stuff. But I knew that I wanted to expand. I wouldn’t have wanted to just like. Stay there because that’s where people wanted me to stay. So you might have some people in your audience who are kind of back where you used to be or like where you are now and maybe you wanna expand or you’re going to talk about something different. So that’s when polling is not a great idea. If you feel though, like you’re talking about all the right stuff in terms of what you wanna continue writing about. Then it could be a great idea to poll your audience and ask them, what do you wish you saw more of here? What do you wish you saw less of? Is there anything that’s missing? I also like to poll the audience and ask them, like, how would you describe this to a friend?

Like using the kind of cocktail party analogy again, and also what are some like words that they would use to describe, why do they continue to read your email week after week? Like things like that can be really, really helpful for gathering some kind of voice of customer or voice of subscriber research.

All right, now that we’ve owned it and we’ve reflected on what our email list is doing for us right now, or kind of what we want it to do, let’s move on to step number two and assess our current strategy.

There are three things I want you to look at when you’re assessing your current email list, growth, strategy, freebies, placement, and content. And we’re gonna talk about each one in turn. 

First things first. If you’re using freebies, are they working? And when I say working. There are a couple of different things we can look at. For one, we can look at are people actually opting into them? So do you know the opt-in rate? Do you know the conversion rate for the number of people who land on your opt-in page versus the number of people who actually then fill it out and sign up for your freebie?

Do you know how many people download your freebie and then bounce immediately on the first email? Do they unsubscribe after they get your free thing? If you have any sort of nurture sequence or anything that goes out to people after they get your freebie, do you get good engagement? Do people reply? Do you even have an engagement email after that like I do?

Is that working? So this is a good time to look at this freebie assessment. It’s also just generally a good time to look at like, how many freebies do you have? How are they all performing across the board? So is there one that maybe could be cut? Is there one that when you look at the data, you’re like wow, this one’s performing so much better than the other ones, so maybe we could just focus on that instead of spreading your energy and attention across five freebies, maybe we could just focus on the one that’s working. So maybe this freebie assessment part will lead to something. I, I hope you share it with me if it does ’cause I would be so excited to hear about it.

The second thing we’re going to look at in assessing your current strategy is placement. So where do you talk about your freebies or where do you talk about your email list, joining your email list in general? Do you mention it on your website? Is it in your social links or bio links when you’re on somebody’s podcast or your speaking to someone’s group are you talking about your newsletter or are you offering up your freebie as an opt-in? Is it in your email signature? Is it on the hello bar of your website? Like where does this thing live? Because sometimes it can be a really refreshing moment to step back and realize, actually my newsletter or my freebie is just not mentioned that often or like based off of what you just found out about how your freebies are performing, maybe you see that you’re promoting this one freebie that’s not performing really well, but you don’t actually mention another freebie that is performing really well.

The third thing to assess in your current strategy is your content. So how often are you actually promoting and talking about your freebies? Even if you are talking about them, how’s that going? Is there some kind of piece of content, like a style or I don’t know, like a structure to a piece of content that works really well for you to get people to opt in to your email list?

It’s a really good time to assess what’s working and what’s not working when it comes to your content. Maybe part of what’s not working is that you’re not talking about it a whole lot, right? What I see so often in the last eight plus years of having an online business is that so often people will have a freebie or talk about their email list, like I don’t know, a handful of times, and then they’re like, this isn’t working. I’m not doing it anymore, and they just stop. The truth is if you knew how many times. For years, like probably six years straight. I just like on the daily, talked about my freebie, probably my free legal webinar, eventually my straight to my actual newsletter itself as we’re gonna learn in episode two using my, easy email list strategy.

But like if you knew how many times I just did and said the same thing over and over and over, and if you knew how many of those times, probably hundreds, if not thousands of those times, it didn’t work, you would be floored. You’d be floored. The amount of consistency, dedication, repeating yourself that it takes to actually grow an email list, to sell a shit ton of online products to, you know, build an audience, do all that kind of stuff. It’s just, I don’t know. I, if I were you, I would almost be relieved because I just think that people spend so much time looking for some like secret method or strategy or hack or shortcut, and it’s like. It’s not, it’s just literally repeating yourself and repeating yourself one time when it worked, you’re like, oh, when I talked about it that way and then used a call to action to my freebie, it worked.

And then where the real gold is you guys, where the real, real gold is, is that you start to understand why. You’re like, oh, when I do X, Y happens, so I’m gonna do more X. I’m just gonna keep doing X. That’s when you really start to understand the mechanism of what’s working. Like I know for example, that like if I do sort of a story intro to something and really the story focuses on a pain point, and then I say like, that’s why I created this freebie because it’s going to resolve your pain point. And then I just say, comment, you know this word, or click on this link and get this free thing, I know that works. Like I know that’s a really good formula for me and my audience, right? Yours might be different.

The point is, I only learned that through an insane amount of trial and error and trying and trying and trying, and you have got to get comfortable with the fact that failing, that something, getting no engagement, something, getting no clicks, no signups is part of the process. It is just part of the journey.

So the faster that you can adopt that mindset, the faster you can, I don’t know, get outta your own way with like saying, you know, I tried it a couple of times, it didn’t work. It’s like, yeah, so what? I’ve tried things every day that don’t work. It’s like, and I keep going and I keep trying and I try it a little differently.

The difference is I get curious about why it didn’t work. I get curious if there’s something I can do better or differently or just say it a little differently or change the branding or change the, the positioning or all this kind of stuff, it’s all tinkering you guys. It really is just tons and tons of tinkering. Is there a different way? Is there a different type of content? Do you need more story? Do your people need more of the aspirational hook versus the problem hook? Like there’s just a million different directions to go in and the faster you can just, I don’t know, depersonalize it and go into it and be like, I don’t know.

I’m just curious to see how this whole thing works and see. I dunno what one sticks, and then when it does stick, being like, why did that stick? That’s so interesting. I wonder why that worked. And then you start to see patterns between the things that do work, right? So when you’re doing this content assessment, you have to be careful not to make too quick of like a judgment and, and build up a story around it. Like I’ve tried it on Instagram stories and when I talk about my email list, no one clicks. It’s like, it’s not that because you shared about your email list, no one clicked. It might be because of how you shared.

So it’s, it can be just a positioning problem, it can be a wording thing. It can be that you’re not speaking like your customer to your customer. It can be that you’re not really tapped into what their actual problem is. Right? So there’s a lot of tinkering and this takes a lot of time, a lot of effort. I mean time not in, in the amount like that you spend in posting it. I mean like this is a skill that can develop and strengthen over time.

So it’s really important to go in and assess this strategy, but really from this place of curiosity, please don’t let this stuff start to build up and get in your head and create a story. This is why we’re doing it so that we can do things differently and better moving forward.

All right our third and final step today is to take action on everything that we’ve just collected because as much as I love a good mindset shift, and I think it’s so important, it’s really, really important to then follow that up with like, okay, I’ve said that I prioritize this i’ve now looked at some of the numbers. I have a good feel for the data and like what’s working, what’s not working, and based on that I’m going to take some action and make some changes.

The very first thing that I want you to shift, and the first like actionable difference I want you to make is that I want you to start seeing email list opportunities everywhere.

When you prioritize your email list and you say like, this thing means a lot to me because I want more consistent revenue. I want more clients, I want build a community. I want people who I can sell to at any time, no matter what’s going on with a platform or an algorithm. Then, you have to start seeing it as an opportunity.

You have to start making it an opportunity, frankly. So my challenge to you this week, and, and what I wanna hear from, I want you to reply to one of my emails or send me a DM on Instagram at samvanderwielen. I want you to start seeing email list opportunities everywhere, meaning that you go to create your next social post. Well, I don’t know what your call to action was gonna be before, but how about we make your social post call to action joining your email list, whether it’s that they’re getting a freebie or they’re going straight to your newsletter. As I’m going to teach you in next week’s episode, why don’t we try coming at it that way?

In fact, you wanna know a super good secret and way to create better social posts? So if you’ve tried in the past, posting on social, and then the call to action, the thing that you’re asking people to go do is to get your freebie and it hasn’t worked, try creating it in the reverse. Okay? Head into the piece of content that you’re about to create for Instagram, TikTok, wherever. Head into it with the mindset that you are creating this piece of content in order to grow your email list. So you want to promote your 30 day guide. And so with that in mind, what would be a really good piece of content to create, because the 30 day guide is going to be the call to action. What most people do is that they create a piece of social media content and then they’re just like, oh, I should have a call to action to my email list.

So like, I’m gonna make the freebie, the guide, right? I’ll make the call to action to get my free guide, but when it really starts to click, I find like, first of all, you’ve designed a good guide. I have a podcast episode all about this, about like creating freebies that are actually geared towards your audience, so we can drop that in the show notes for you.

But once you know you have a really good freebie and people actually like it and want it, and need it, and it provides them with some quick win, then we can reverse engineer, right? We can reverse engineer and create a piece of content that makes sense for that 30 day guide to be the call to action. It basically, the way you have to think about it is like the piece of content that you’re creating for social is kind of like the little nugget.

It’s like the little appetizer that somebody gets on social and then they’re like, wait, I want more. I want the full entree, right? How do I get the entree? Oh, she’s saying that there’s a 30 day guide, and then it just makes sense that that’s the next thing that they opt into.

For example, I have my Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business, a free legal workshop, right? That’s my, by far, my top performing freebie. It’s a webinar, a free webinar, and so if I was to sit down and create a piece of content, maybe I would create a piece of content, for example, on one of the five steps that I talk about in the webinar. One of the five steps I talk about in the webinar is LLCs versus sole proprietorships, because that is one of the most commonly asked questions. It’s also one of the places where people get tripped up the most.

Maybe I would make a reel or a carousel on Instagram that would be like LLCs versus sole prop. What’s the difference? Right? And I would go through the pros and cons, and then I would talk about how actually, this is something I talk about in more detail in my free workshop called Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business, comment class here to get the link to sign up, blah, blah, blah. So that’s how I would do it. I would think about the workshop. Think about that’s the fact, that’s the thing I want to prioritize. I want to drive traffic there. So what’s a little piece of it that I can pull out to create the content itself?

Do you see how big of a difference that is when you’re like. How so many people just go about this, like creating the content and trying to shove the freebie in to make sense versus going about it in the opposite direction.

That’s one example of where you could start to see email list growth opportunities everywhere. I have a couple of others for you. Like you could go through your website again after you’ve done this assessment and look like where could you fit in maybe a new opt-in. If you say you prioritize your email list, are you prioritizing it on your website? Not just a random link here and there. Is there a bar for it? Is there a hello bar? Is there something that you could add, a section you could have designed? Now, granted, I wouldn’t recommend doing this part unless you already know that your email list is, uh, like a sure thing, like you know who it’s for, what it’s about, why they should opt in. You kind of have a more engaged email list. You would just like to grow it, like you’re just in the stage to prioritize and grow it. If that’s you, then I would definitely recommend having some sort of dedicated section on your website, or even a header tab that says newsletter or something like that, that people could click and then sign up for.

Again, next time that you’re in an interview on a podcast, or you’re teaching in somebody’s group, or you are offering up a free training to someone, use your freebie. Use your email list as the call to action. We’re talking about in this episode that all roads lead to the email list so we are looking for opportunities everywhere. We are saying that we prioritize it and then we are taking action to actually prioritize it.

I also do this all the time when people reach out to me and they ask me if I’ll be a part of something or if I’ll speak at a thing, or I’ll, participate in some like email giveaway or I’ll be part of a summit or I’ll do this or that. I always, because I adopt this, all roads lead to the email list strategy. I always think in my mind, well, how does this help support my email list? And if they’re not offering me something that does help to support my email list, I propose something. So I will often go back to people and say, Hey, in order for me to participate in this, I need this to help support email list growth. It’s my number one priority. What if we did it like this? Could I create a freebie for your audience that’s tailored to your audience? Would you, uh, send this link to all your students? Allow them to sign up. Yada, yada, yada, right? So I’m always looking for these opportunities.

I find that the more that you look for them, the more you find them, and then the more you find them, you just kind of start to get used to it too. So this is definitely a muscle that will grow and strengthen over time.

Now the cool thing is that in today’s episode, we’ve really set you up nicely for part two that will drop next Monday we’ll be talking about my easy email list strategy for growth. So if you don’t like freebies, if freebies don’t work for you, if you’re just sick of them, if your audience doesn’t like them, or frankly, if you just want a really refreshing and way easier way to grow your email list you definitely wanna tune in next week for part two of this four part series, because my email, my easy email list strategy, guys, it’s, I love it. I love it. And whenever I go to give talks in places and I bring this up, everybody’s just like, wait a minute, this is blowing my mind. And then people write to me afterwards and say they started it and it works so well for them and that they’re so much happier because it’s so much easier than traditional methods.

So take the time this week to go over what we’ve talked about today, right? Think about this all roads lead to the email list mindset. How much are you prioritizing it? If you’re owning it, own it. Declare it, write it out. Put a little sticky note on your computer. Give some thought and reflection to some of the questions I posed in part one and step one about, you know, why do you want it to grow?

What do you hope it would do for you? What are your emails about? Why should people care? Do some of that reflection. Do the assessment. To look at your current strategy so that we have some hard data. Be careful. Check yourself on the stories that we start to extrapolate from that data, right? But let’s look at the data and in step three, let’s start to open our mind and look this week at like, where are there some opportunities?

Where are there opportunities within what you’re doing already that you just see like aha moments where you’re like, oh, I can add something about my emails here. Um, and then going on this week, as you have conversations, as you’re chatting in Facebook groups, whatever. Look for opportunities and do me a favor, reach out to me as I said, write me an email, reply to any emails you get from me. If you don’t get my Sam Sidebar email already, you gotta go sign up for that now. But I would love to hear from you to know what like your biggest aha was from this episode, or was there something that you went and caught, like something really easy that you went and found and you’re like, oh, this was such an easy place to add a shout out to my freebie, or some different way to promote it.

I would love to hear from you. I can’t wait to chat with you next week in part two of this four part series. I hope you’re having a great start to the month. All right, talk to you soon.

Make sure you go down in the show notes and click the link to download the free workbook that I’ve created for you for this how to Build an email list series because in this workbook, I’m not only outlining everything that I’m talking about in this episode so that you don’t need to take notes, so you can put the pen down, your hand can stop cramping. I’ve put it all for you in a free workbook. I’ve also added sections for you anywhere in this episode where I’ve prompted you to reflect on something or to keep track of data. I have put all of those sections into a free workbook for you all about how to build your email list. So click the link to download the free workbook now.

Thanks so much for listening to the On Your Terms® podcast. Make sure to follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen to podcasts. You can also check out all of our podcast episodes, show notes, links, and more at samvanderwielen.com/podcast. You can learn more about legally protecting your business and take my free legal workshop, Five Steps To Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business at Samvanderwielen.com and to stay connected and follow along, follow me on Instagram at samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.