How to Grow Your Email List (Series #3)

Sam Vander Wielen: All right. I’m just gonna go ahead and say it. Your freebies are not working. They’re not helping you to build your email list. That is if you’ve even been able to come up with one that you actually like or that works. But I know you wanna build an email list full of future customers who reply to your emails and say things like, you’re in my head, your emails are the only ones I read. But you’re not here to just hand out freebies to people who will download and bounce.

Honestly, most people just don’t create the right type of freebie or market it in the right way to attract the right subscribers. That’s why people’s freebies don’t work. It’s not that freebies don’t work, but in this episode, we’re going to fix all of that.

We’re going to learn how to build a great freebie that your ideal customers desperately want. We’ll learn how to make sure your freebie attracts people who want to buy what you sell. And exactly what numbers you should be tracking in your business to tell if it’s all working.

Welcome back to On Your Terms®. I’m your host, Sam Vander Wielen, and On Your Terms® is a podcast for online business owners who want to be as present in their lives as profitable in their businesses and since this is part three of this four part series, you know by now I’ve said it a million times, that building a healthy email list full of future engaged buyers is such a big part of being able to be present in your life and to not have to be attached to your phone and chain to social media and being able to still be profitable in your business. That’s why we’re dedicating the whole month of episodes to talking about email.

Speaking of, I just have to tell you that I’m sitting here on a very like, crisp, chilly fall morning, i’m going to Mexico later this week, and I’m, I’m like, yes, I’m very happy about going to Mexico, don’t get me wrong, but it’s like just started feeling really cool and crisp here and all my sweaters are coming out and I’m like very excited about fall, and I’m like, I don’t wanna go, I just wanna wear my sweaters, but it’s gonna be 90 degrees in Mexico, but it, it will be great. But I have to tell you like it’s a Monday morning here and so I’m sitting here getting ready to, after this episode to write my weekly newsletter called Sam’s Sidebar for this week. Usually, I have done it before this week, but we just came out of a promo last week, so I’m a little, a little late to the party. But when we go through these promos, I don’t get to write Sam’s Sidebar for several weeks because there’s a lot of like lead up and invite and webinar invite, and then the sales emails and all that kind of stuff and so I’m just like jazzed to write this email, and I hope after listening to episode two of this series last week, that you’re feeling the same way like and I, or I hope that you get there to this place that I am at, where I’m like, this is the best part of my business between podcasting and email, my writing, my email newsletter it is just like, if, if you can find that thing in your business that you wake up on a Monday morning and you cannot wait to do it, you know you’re doing something right from a marketing perspective.

If there’s something in your business that you wake up on Monday morning and you’re like, I can’t believe I have to do that YouTube episode, please stop doing it, please stop doing it. Because not only does it not work for you, it doesn’t work for anybody else if that’s the feeling.

While I don’t, on the one hand, subscribe to this idea that like, just ’cause you love something, that means it’s gonna work and everyone else will love it. I completely believe that it’s related to the fact that like I put so much more effort into it, I’m more excited about it. I think then that comes across, other people like it and they’re more excited about it. So I’ll just here to say like, look for that thing that you feel like this on a Monday morning.

Speaking of things, I feel like this on a Monday morning about today, we are talking about freebies and if you listen to last week’s episode, part two of the series, you might be like, wait, didn’t you just say that we don’t need to use freebies? Yes, that is true. You can use my easy email strategy to kind of skip the line and not have to use freebies. In order to get people onto your email list. But if you listened carefully to that episode, then you know that the reason you can do that is because essentially your email is the freebie itself. That’s just like how you’re positioning it.

But you would also know that I said several times throughout that episode that freebies are not dead. Freebies still work great. I still use them. I use them like a one-two punch of my easy email strategy, plus a couple of freebies that work really well.

Because here’s the thing, when it comes to freebies, freebies provide value, right? So it’s a great thing, like it is a big deal to ask people for their email and to start having them get your emails and all of that and like people are inundated with email, so it does provide them with some value and it can attract the right person if you do it correctly. Like the freebies that we’re going to talk about today, they should be positioned in a way that the right person hears that and they’re like, oh, I want that and then naturally they need what you sell. It can also convert them faster because not only can you provide a lot of value within your freebie itself, but then because you can also include something like a nurture sequence, you can really walk your future customer down a path much faster that can get them to convert.

Then if that’s the case and freebies are so valuable and can help with conversion, then why don’t they? Because most freebies suck, or the marketing sucks. I see it all the time, every single day when I go on social media, I’m like, why? And like this thing has so much potential, but why?

So in today’s episode, we’re really going to nail down how to build a great freebie and then how to market it. So let’s talk about step number one. What makes a good freebie?

Far and away, the thing that makes a freebie absolutely incredible is that the freebie is what your people want. Not what you want, not what you saw Suzy Q offering on Instagram already and you do the same thing as Suzy Q. So you’re gonna do the same thing.

No, it’s tailored to your customers. It’s tailored to your audience, to their problems, to their worries, their concerns, the things that they are struggling with. By the way, when I say it’s tailored to their problems and their worries and their concerns and what they’re struggling with, things that they’re all struggling with and worried about, and the problems that they have in their language. What they think they’re struggling with, what they think their problem is, not what you think their problem is as the expert, not what you can look through the matrix and be like, oh, they think their problem is this, but really it’s that and so then you start marketing to the that, no, we’re in the this, right? We’re in whatever they think their problem is.

From there, when we start designing freebies that are tailored to them and what they’re struggling with in their own language, everything sort of flows from there. The title, the branding, the tone, the content of that freebie is all in their language or meeting them where they’re at, really speaking to what they’re going through and what they want instead. For example, when I started my legal business, people would literally tell me, I’m just looking for a checklist of all the things I need to start an online business. I created a a checklist called like How to start an online business checklist, right? It doesn’t have to be fancy. It’s literally telling them what they get to do and that it’s a checklist. But I knew that my people in particular we’re specifically looking for a checklist because essentially what was behind that problem was that they felt really overwhelmed and they just wanted somebody to boil down the information for them in a simple checklist, which is what I did.

But then with the branding and the tone and the colors and the pictures. I was really intentional in understanding my person, right? My person is coming to me, overwhelmed, anxious, concerned. They’re thinking about how they have 3000 things to do to start an online business. So I was very intentional in the fact that all of my tone, branding, language, pictures, everything are relaxing. It’s chill, chill colors. You’ll never see red, yellow, none of that stuff. Nothing alarming. Very chill. I’m meeting them where they’re at. I’m helping to already resolve that pain and be like, oh wow, I already feel better just having downloaded this checklist.

Now the next thing that makes a freebie really good is that it relates to what you sell. One of the best things you can do to make sure that you create a really good freebie that also attracts people who want to purchase eventually what you have is to reverse engineer from your product or service to create a freebie. So for example, my main product is the Ultimate Bundle®. It’s a package of online legal templates, DIY, legal templates and online trainings for people to learn how to legally start a business, but also to get all the contracts and policies that they need, plug and play, ready to go, like business in a box, ready to set up, right?

So when I had this product, I was like, well, what kind of freebie can I create that reverse engineers from this? Well, there are kind of five main principles that I teach you, like five foundational things that I teach you inside the bundle of what you need to get set up to start an online business safely and legally.

And so I reverse engineered that and built out a webinar that teaches those five things. Now, of course, in a free webinar, mine’s called Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business, you can take it now. I’ll leave the link in the show notes, but in that webinar, of course, I’m not giving away the farm. That webinar has a ton of value. It gives you so much, there’s so much you can do and just take away from that webinar without having to purchase anything from me. The idea is that it essentially positions me. It’s like, here’s all this value, but I have something else to offer you that will make this even easier.

So I’ve essentially illuminated all of the steps that you need to take in the webinar, and then my product is then what’s like the thing that comes in and it’s like, oh, I don’t have to go and do all that myself. Sam’s done it for me with the Ultimate Bundle®. So like maybe my freebie illuminates the contracts that you need, and then the bundle actually gives you those contracts.

The next thing that makes a freebie really good is one that gives people a quick win or is like very quickly helpful, like there’s some sort of value, there’s something that you can walk away from this freebie with. So oftentimes when people design really big guides or like, I don’t know, some big email list series or video series, like there’s nothing tangential that they’re walking away feeling like they actually implemented. Now, depending on your freebie and your industry, I think there’s a lot of different things that you can do, and maybe for you, this is something that’s as simple as like getting people to actually consume this thing and participate in it. Like maybe you could gamify it.

For example, if you’re running a challenge. Maybe you could gamify it by giving people points for certain tasks that they do or create it like a scavenger hunt is something I’ve thought about recently, like create it like a scavenger hunt that if the person submits like the pictures of themselves, like completing these things to you, they get X number of points and then the person with the most points at the end gets some prize or something like this.

I think like the possibilities are endless. The point here is to just be creative and think of a way to get them involved. Get them to actually consume it and, and complete it and get them to engage with you in some way. Now, of course there’s all the traditional types of freebies that you’ve probably heard of before things like resources and checklists and webinars, PDFs, recipe guides, regular guides, tutorials, like all different kinds of things. Right? And those are all fantastic. They work, I use them, right? The point is they just have to be good, but they work still, and that’s fine. I also wanted to give you a couple of outside the box, maybe freebie ideas that I use that I see other people using that I think are can be really helpful. Just to sort of open your mind to this idea that freebies don’t all have to be PDF guides, they don’t have to be 30 page guides, they don’t have to be hour long webinars. They can also be really easy things that are just helpful. And I think that this list, so that I’m about to share with you is in particular, the place where, if you listen to episode one, where my mindset about all roads lead to the email list comes into play the most often because pretty much everything I’m about to list for you are all things that you could have easily just done, like sent out links, DMed links, emailed links, or done something like that.

But when you’re taking that mindset strategy that we talked about in the first episode of this series, and you’re really looking for email list building opportunities, these are clear ways to do it.

The first is to opt in for a series. Okay, so say that you’re going to do a series called Four Parts, four Steps to on How to Grow an email list series, right?

You could do this as a podcast series. You could do this as a YouTube series. Another way that you could do this is to make it email list. Exclusive so you could make it so that even if you still do it by audio or video, you don’t wanna write it all out. Maybe that’s the case. Or maybe you do, you could have people opt into your email as a way to get this series so you could mark it for a couple of weeks.

Like I have this four part email list building series coming. I’m only sending it to my email list. It won’t be on social, it’s not gonna be on YouTube. It won’t be on my public podcast feed you. The only way to get it is here. You could also turn that series into a private podcast, for example, or private YouTube videos.

When you take this, all roads lead to the email list strategy. The possibilities are endless because you start thinking about like, I could just put this thing out, but it’s super valuable, like this email list series. I probably should have done something like that, right? This email list series is so valuable. It could be a course, and so I think that you have to be really protective as a business owner to think like, what are some ways that I can actually use this opportunity to build my email list?

You can also add on, on the flip side, a content upgrade. So if you did an email list, building series or series somewhere on one of your channels, you can then have a workbook opt-in like I’ve created for this series.

Which, by the way, if you haven’t downloaded the workbook for this series yet, you can click the link in the show notes, but the workbook is gonna be super helpful to make sure that you go along and implement every single thing that we’ve been talking about in these four episodes.

You can also take playlists or best of series, like if you have a podcast or a YouTube channel or even your newsletters or blog posts. Like take four or five on a specific topic and create a, uh, a topic based playlist or lists of best of, and then tell people you can opt in for this. You can use ManyChat on Instagram and say like, comment “PLAYLIST” and I’ll send you this. And you can integrate in ManyChat in Instagram to connect it to, uh, your email list building service like Kit, like what I use and the person actually has to opt in for that. Then they get the link. I’m also a really big fan of video walkthroughs and making them super simple. If you’ve been around for a while, you might remember that last year I promoted, uh, there was a requirement at the time from called A BOI form, and it was a very visual thing. People had to fill out a form. I literally did a five minute tutorial of me just filling this thing out online. And just said, Hey, gimme your email address. I’ll send you the tutorial, and that led to thousands and thousands of new subscribers to my email list.

Now, just like we talked about last week, having all these freebies is great, but then you have to have a really good opt-in page to actually get people to opt into it. So this is very similar to what I talked about for the easy email list opt-in strategy, but I really recommend when you have a opt-in page for a freebie itself to have a visual display or some sort of visual signal of what exactly is like the tangible item that people are opting in to get here.

I recommend having a clear heading that speaks to the transformational benefit or the aspiration that people are going for, that you know, that they want, that this freebie resolves and I always recommend, um, having that opt-in box above the fold, meaning it’s on the upper third of the page, very easy to opt in, have it two fields, first name, email address, submit. That’s it, super, super easy.

You can also have a section on the page about who you are, who it’s for, your social proof, both of this freebie or just you as in general. Like if you don’t have social proof about this freebie yet, then you can use some social proof about working with you or being on your email list or listening to your podcast. Really anything that can help bolster some credibility here. And then last but not least, I always include another opt-in box on the bottom of opt-in pages again.

Now after somebody opts in for one of your freebies and even your Easy email list strategy, they should get a delivery email right away. And when you’re giving away a freebie, the most important thing is that that delivery email gives up the goods right away. We don’t bury the lead. I usually say within the first sentence or two, like, here’s a link to the guide that you signed up for. Here’s the link to the tutorial, or whatever it is. It’s right there upfront, giving it to them right away.

Now in that email, you can talk about other things. You can introduce yourself as a creator. You can say what’s there to expect here? You could ask them for some engagement or next steps, but the point is we just wanna make sure that that email includes the freebie. It’s really important to start establishing trust very quickly.

Okay. From here, we’re going to move into step number two because now that you have a great freebie, we need to know how to position this great freebie in order to get people to actually sign up for it. What’s most obvious is to include a call to action in all of your content for people to opt in to this freebie. But if you’re listening to this, you’re probably like, I’ve done that. It’s not working, and this is probably why. In my experience, the way that most people go about this is that they create content that they wanna create, think they should create based on a frequently asked question, like whatever it is.

And then they plop a call to action to their freebie onto the end of it because they just think, oh, it’s relatively about the same topic, so like, that works, or like for the same person that works, and then they wonder why it doesn’t work.

Here’s why I think that it’s because in reality, you actually have to reverse engineer a piece of your freebie into a piece of content. People go at it from the wrong direction. So instead of creating content and then trying to squeeze your freebie into it, what I recommend is actually looking at your freebie itself and thinking what pieces of content would make the most sense to create for this freebie that would then naturally, like the person who’s attracted to that content, naturally needs that freebie.

So let’s take my free webinar, Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business. As an example, like I mentioned, there are those five steps, right? One of the steps that I talk about in the free webinar are the three website policies that you need to have in your website, one of them being legally required.

So I could do a social post where I talk about the three website policies and it doesn’t have to just be like, what are the three website policies? Like I could do that, but that’s also very on the nose. I could tell a story about somebody’s website policy that I saw and how bad it was, or I could tell a story about like a client horror story that we had about somebody who got sued over a bad website policy or the time that I caught somebody on somebody’s website this, this is a true story. I went on somebody’s website and I was just curious about like where they got their policies from. So I clicked on it and it was mine, but then I looked up whether they were a customer and they were not, and they had actually stolen my website policy. So that was pretty funny. So I could tell that story, like it doesn’t always just have to be the straight up educational, like, here are the three website policies you need on your site, right? It could be unexpected myths or mistakes people make when posting their website policies. Point being, you could create, like I just named, probably like 20 pieces of content that I could have just created over one of the five steps that I teach in my, my webinar, and all of those things could be the independent pieces of content. The call to action at the end of those pieces of content could then be like, I talk about the three website policies you need and how to properly post them in my free legal workshop called Five Steps to Legally Protect and Grow Your Online Business. Comment “CLASS” here to sign up. Now, that would be a natural easy way to get people to sign up for my webinar.

So do you see how that leads into it? So much easier than like me talking about some other random business thing or like talking about, I don’t know, something I don’t cover in my class, like affiliate marketing. Like I could talk about some interesting legal issue with affiliate marketing and then be like, sign up for my legal training.

I don’t talk about that in it and there’s no, there’s no natural lead in. Like I really like saying like, this is one of the things I’ll teach you inside my free training or something like that.

If you’ve created a new freebie or you have one that you have a feeling is pretty good, but if you’re being honest with yourself, you like have not given it your full attention. Pick a month to focus on just one freebie and just go all in on it. Make all of your content have the call to action to this freebie. Talk about it on Instagram stories as many times a week as you show up on Instagram or post about it on LinkedIn or X as many times as you post. Try to commit to it, not only because the repetition and consistency helps, but I actually believe that in the repetition you get better and better and better at talking about it.

And so the more you talk about it, you start essentially like collapsing time to realize like this is actually the real nugget, like this is the thing that’s like working. You also start to pick up on patterns like when I talk about this freebie in this way, people opt in and like when I’m talking about it from this angle, you don’t like, you might start to notice patterns that when you talk to people’s pain points. That really works. Whereas aspiration doesn’t work, and some of you might have the opposite. Some of you might have an, uh, an audience where when you talk to the aspirational benefits that they’re looking for, that works much better for them than like co constantly talking about their pain. And some of you might be in an industry where like they’re not technically in pain or like, that’s not really the primary issue.

So you can start to, I think the more you talk about it, just the more you start to learn and like get your chops under you. I mentioned this in an earlier episode, but like if people understood the number of times that I did pieces of content that were just calls to action to my free webinar, free webinar, free webinar, and I never called it a free webinar, I still don’t, I’m just doing it for teaching purposes here. If you understood just how many times I did that, I think it would blow your mind, but it would also resolve a lot of the mental turmoil that you’re putting yourself through that like you’re repeating yourself or you tried it five times and it didn’t work and it’s like, poof. Hold my beer. I see your five times. Take my like 3000 times probably, I can’t even imagine. I was live or not live. I was on Instagram stories every single day. Every day, like seven days a week for years. And then after that it was like probably four or five days a week, for years, literally having the same call to action, to the same freebie. Just getting better and better and better at, at honing in on this. But it was also because I knew that this freebie was designed the way I talked about in step one. This freebie was built for them in their language to resolve what I knew they thought they were struggling with. So I knew the freebie itself was good and it worked. I just needed to figure out how to get more people to it, which is why the repetition works so well.

People always ask me like, how many freebies should I have? How many is too many? And I just really recommend having fewer freebies that you can actually promote and focus on and test, right? So maybe you have, for example, like an easy email list strategy where you’re going to promote your actual newsletter itself. And then two freebies. I like to play with variety, so that’s why I have a webinar. And then I have like a guide and a checklist. So like something that’s really, really different. So that I try to recognize like there are different people at different parts of the, the stage where they’re like, I am the kind of person who wants to sit down and watch the hour long training.

And then I know that there are people who will buy, who are like, just give me the list and I don’t need to sit here for an hour and listen to this. So I try to meet people kind of where they’re at.

Now. Last but not least, there are a series of numbers that you should track once you’ve set all of this up or if you already have freebies in your business, I want you to set this up so that you can actually track the data of how these things are performing so that we can make informed decisions moving forward about what freebies we should pour more energy into, which ones maybe need some work, and which ones should go to sleep.

The first number that you want to track is the number of people who land on your opt-in page. That’s the full traffic number, right? So if a thousand people landed on this page, that’s your starting number. Then we wanna know from there, out of those thousand people that landed on that page, for example, what were the number of people who then opt-in in?

When you divide that, that is your opt-in percentage. It’s the percentage of people who actually opted in versus the number who actually landed on the page. I also want you to know what your open rates are, so both the open rate of your delivery email, the one that gives them the freebie, and then tracking your open rate throughout your nurture sequence If you have.

I would also be really curious to know what the clickthrough rate, so that’s the percentage of the people who opened the email and then clicked on the link for the freebie, what the clickthrough rate was of your actual freebie in that delivery email. One of the things that I don’t tend to fuss too much about unsubscribes period. Like I, I never look at it for my weekly newsletter. But when it comes to freebies or nurture sequences, the thing that’s interesting about unsubscribes is that if it’s unusually high, you can tell if people are coming, getting the freebie and bouncing. Now, I don’t know that we have any official numbers on this, but I think that the bounce rate there would be higher than a typical email list. Like, ’cause there are just people who come in and get the free thing and they leave. But I think what I would be curious to look at is like whether you could improve it at all to make sure on the front end you’re attracting the right people. Not just the people who need, like the topic that you’re talking about, but the people who also need the next step. Like they, they also understand that you’re a business and that you maybe have the thing to offer that they ultimately need. So that’s what I would probably be thinking about on the backend.

If this series has been helpful to you, I hope that you will do me a huge, huge favor and pass it along to a friend who also needs to build an email list. Post it in a group, share it in your newsletter, share it on Instagram, and tag me in it. And speaking of, send me a DM on Instagram at Sam Vander Wielen, or reply to my email let me know what you learned today. What was the number one most mind blowing thing you learned in this episode that you’re going to implement as a change in your business. I can’t wait to hear from you. With that next week, part four of this four part series. I can’t believe we’re ending it. Next week is a big one ’cause we’re actually going to build out your newsletter.

We’re gonna dig in and talk about all the different sections of your newsletter and what needs to be in it in order for it to be opened, reply to and creating future customers. All right with that, I’ll talk to you next week.

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.