Why Your Email List Isn’t Growing (+ how to fix it)

If your email list isn’t growing, I can almost guarantee you that it’s one of these four mistakes, if not more that you’re making that’s costing you email list subscribers. And even worse customers. I’ve built an engaged email list of over 47,000 subscribers that reply to my emails, buy my products and refer my newsletter to other people in my industry.

And that’s why in today’s episode, I’m gonna help you fix the four most common mistakes I see when people are trying to grow their email list, but it’s just not working. In this episode, you’ll learn why even if you’re sharing about your freebie, nobody is downloading it. Where to look for some easy email list building opportunities that aren’t PDFs or complicated downloads or videos.

Why the way that you’re sharing your freebie might be the reason that nobody is downloading it and how to easily find more email list subscribers like the ones that you already have, which is a lot less work. And if you wanna follow along and go even deeper on all of the mistakes that we’re gonna go over today on building your email list, go ahead and download The Ultimate Guide To Building Your Email List. It’s a free guide that I’ve created for you. In the free guide, I’ll teach you how to build your email list and fix these most common mistakes. So let’s hop into the first one.

Mistake number one, your freebie sucks. Okay. I’m sorry to say it, but it just, it might be true, like your freebie might suck. A lot of times people create freebies because of two things. One is that they see other people offering a similar freebie, so in their niche, so they just go ahead and create the same freebie and think that that’s going to work great for them too. Or two, you create a freebie because you think it’s a good idea, or you just think it’s the way that whatever you talk about should be packaged. You create that freebie and start promoting it, but then no one’s biting. So it could be that your freebie itself is actually not a good freebie, or it could be that the freebie is not packaged correctly. It could be, you know, it doesn’t have a great title, or that you’re not even explaining it in a way that makes it really enticing for other people. So don’t worry about it. We’re gonna dive into all of that throughout all of today’s episode.

So if you are worried that your freebie might suck, here’s the deal. Your freebie has to be a no-brainer, what I call a no-brainer freebie, which is exactly what it sounds like when other people hear about your freebie. It has to be a no-brainer that they’re willing to start getting marketing messaging from you to drop their email in and get this free thing in exchange.

Oftentimes the best way to create a no-brainer freebie is to create one that you know is going to offer a quick win or a solution, solve a problem for your ideal customer or the person who you want to download this freebie . If you really focus on this freebie being actually helpful, you’re going to get a lot more people to download it than just creating a freebie because you see other people in your space offering A PDF so you create a PDF. What about it could you like put a unique spin on? How can you offer something different? In fact, I would even challenge you to look around your space and see something that is not being offered that you know would make a great idea. It would be really helpful. Solve a quick or easy win for somebody, and that they would just be like, I want your freebie, send it to me.

So your little homework for mistake number one is that I want you to step back and be honest with yourself. Did you create this freebie for you? Because you thought it was a good idea, did you create this freebie because you saw it already being offered, or did you put some time and thought, and maybe even some research into this freebie that you know is a no-brainer freebie for the right audience.

Mistake number two, and the reason that your email list might not be growing is that you don’t share your freebie often enough, if at all. And if you do share it, it’s that you don’t share it consistently or clearly. That’s probably the biggest mistake I see in the online business industry. A lot of times people make the mistake of creating a freebie, popping it on their website or putting a link to it on social media, and then kind of kicking back and relaxing and being like, where is everybody? Why isn’t everybody showing up? It’s kind of like you planning and hosting a party, but you never sent out any invites, right? People aren’t just going to magically show up to your party.

Here’s what I want you to do. I want to challenge you to try sharing about your freebie- every single day. Let’s say for 30 days straight, right? Let’s see what happens to your email list. If you share about your freebie or every other day, you switch, which one you share about and you share about this freebie consistently, right?

No matter what kind of piece of content you’re creating, whether it’s a YouTube video, a podcast episode, an Instagram post, anything you’re creating on your website, have a call to action for people to sign up for your email list. In fact, I often create content. With that in mind first, right, so I think first, okay, I want to promote this freebie because my goal is always to build my email list. What piece of content can I create that naturally lends itself to my freebie or my opt-in, right? I think oftentimes people create content and then they try to squish a, a piece of, like a freebie into it, right? And they kind of do it the wrong, in the wrong direction. So instead, I wanna invite you to reverse engineer your content for the next time you’re going to plan your content, think about what all the freebies you wanna promote and what kind of content would naturally lend itself to that freebie being the call to action. Now, here’s the deal. Just sharing about your freebie every single day like if you’ve shared about your freebie every day for 30 days, it wouldn’t just magically grow unless you’re really good at it.

The thing that I think you get out of the practice of sharing this consistently is that you get the reps in to learn how to talk about your product or your freebie or whatever it is, right? It’s not always just about how often we share about this thing, but it’s actually about how you explain it. People need to know what it is and what’s in it for them. Remember what we went over in mistake number one? This has to be, a no-brainer freebie that provides some quick win or solution. So when you are sharing about it consistently, are you accurately or in like a really compelling way conveying to the person listening or reading?

Why they should download this thing? What are they going to get out of it? What’s in it for them? Right? So I think that one of the biggest benefits to sharing about your freebie consistently is that you will get better and better with time on what actually works. Because you’ll share something and you’ll hear crickets, and you’ll be like, oh, that didn’t speak to people, even though I thought it would. And then other times you’ll share about something. And it will really speak to people and it will take off. It’s also a way that you can test out which freebies speak to your audience. So I think sharing often and getting your reps in when it comes to talking about your freebies is a great way to learn how to build your email list even faster.

Now, in terms of how you share about your freebie, whatever kind of piece of content you’re creating, I typically follow the problem agitate solution framework. When in doubt, just come back to the simple PAS formula. It’s super easy for you to just introduce the problem that you know that your ideal customer is having. Sometimes we agitate a little more by going a little deeper. I’ll explain with an example in a sec, and then you can position yourself, your product, or right now your freebie as the solution, as the thing that’s going to bring them closer to whatever they would like to resolve.

Okay, so let’s take this free legal guide that I have that thousands and thousands of people have downloaded in the past. When I present this on something like Instagram, for example, I would probably pitch a problem to the person who’s viewing my Instagram stories or seeing my post by saying like, I know that legal is so overwhelming, so complicated, and you’ve just wanted to stick your head in the sand and pretend like it didn’t exist.

Okay, that’s the problem. I would agitate it even further by going, but yet, sticking your head in the sand, have you woken up at 3:00 AM in a cold sweat, wondering if your business is gonna crumble faster than a deck of cards, right? Because I’m really painting that visual for the person that like I know my ideal customer very well. And I know that my ideal customer is very nervous about the legal stuff. They’re very nervous about what could happen to them or their business if they didn’t get this stuff in place. And so I know from my research and from paying attention to what they’re saying, that they are literally waking up in the middle of the night worrying that their business isn’t legally protected.

So they’ve tried putting it off because it’s overly complicated. They worry that it’s expensive and boring. They worry that it’s too early for them, but yet they’re being woken up in the middle of the night and worrying about it. And so that’s why then I would pitch my solution of saying, that’s why I created this free legal guide for you that easily walks you through step by step exactly what you need to do to legally protect yourself and your business. No more waking up at 2:00 AM you can finally sleep through the night with a sigh of relief knowing that you’re protected. Like that’s just off the top of my head of kind of going through that problem agitate solution framework.

Okay. Mistake number three of why your email list isn’t growing is that you’re not looking for easy email list building opportunities that maybe even aren’t freebies or complicated webinars or funnels. Things I love but don’t always need to be involved. Okay, here’s an example that happened just the other day, so people are always asking me questions in my dms, in my inbox about like. Small business taxes, or how do I pay myself? Thinking about how I pay myself is probably one of the top questions that I get. And I’ve done podcast episodes on this, on my podcast, On Your Terms®. And so we’re always, you know, um, writing them back and saying, here’s this episode, here’s that episode. So the other day I had this idea of like, Hey, these are really popular episodes.

These are also really common questions. A lot of them have the general theme of money, right? For small business owners. Why don’t we put that into a Spotify playlist, and the next time people ask us for this, we send them this link to actually opt in to get the playlist right. I also thought I would set up a ManyChat dm, which we did on Instagram the same day, and if anybody DM me the word money on Instagram, then it would say, “Hey, what’s your first name?”

They’d put in their first name. “What’s your email?” They put in their email. I have many chat integrated with ConvertKit or Kit that I use to build my email list. So it automatically imports that person’s information into my email list on Kit, and then we immediately DM them the link to the money playlist. So there was no gatekeeping there. I just made them opt into my emails in order to get this easy playlist that we put together for them. And on the playlist, they then get an episode, um, about small business taxes, about how to pay themselves and about business expenses and some of the things that are most commonly, you know, mistaken for business expenses that aren’t actually expenses.

So it’s a great playlist, and I was so surprised the other day I shared this on Instagram and it was like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Like my dms were just blowing up with people opting in for this playlist. So there’s a perfect example where like, this didn’t have to be a complicated PDF, it wasn’t an hour long webinar. It was a super simple playlist, you could do this with maybe a secret podcast. It could be a quick video. There could be all kinds of resources that you could create for people. You don’t have to make it complicated.

One of my other top freebies that was super easy to put together is an email walkthrough. So when the beneficial ownership information thing came down for business owners to be, you know, legally required to file last year I went through and filed my BOI form in real time and recorded myself on Loom doing it. So I filled it out. I was talking you through the process. It was a five minute video. We had thousands. Thousands of people opt in for this video. It solved a huge problem for them. It was a very quick win that solved a huge problem. It was easy to explain like, Hey, you’re gonna watch me a lawyer, fill out this BOI form in real time so that you can file yours for free. All I’m asking for is your email.

Do you see how that hits? Like my checklist, it’s a no brainer. It was designed for them. It’s easy to explain and it wasn’t complicated to make. I looked for an easy email list building opportunity.

Before we move on to the final mistake, I also wanted to encourage you to think about this when you’re creating content that you might be creating content with, just the hope of getting more engagement or getting a lot of comments or a lot of views.

But if you have your own business, I would encourage you to approach every piece of content from a place of how this can support my email list growth?

So the other day, for example, we’re getting really close to my debut book. When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy coming out, we were thinking through what we want to ask people to do in order to enter to win a signed copy of my book, and I thought of an easy email list building opportunity. Have people opt into Sam’s Sidebar, my weekly newsletter, which you can get down in the link in the description. And once they do, they’re entered to win a signed copy of my book. So like, again, easy doesn’t always have to be a big thing.

Mistake number four is not looking for shareable opportunities or using referrals to build your email list. Like most things in your business, if you only ever focus on growing your email list and not nurturing the people that you already have there, you’re missing a huge opportunity for growth. If your emails are really good, people are going to want to share about it, whether it’s with their friends or on social media, or sharing a link to it in the course that they’re in. At the bottom of my weekly email, Sam Sidebar, I actually include an easy referral link so that if anybody forwards my email to a friend or shares it somewhere, people can easily click the link that’s in that email to add themselves to my email list.

In the past, I’ve also used referral software at the bottom of my emails where I’ve encouraged my email list subscribers to refer my newsletter to a friend, and then offered up a series of like prizes or additional free content, , that is private and gate kept somewhere if they were to refer it to a friend.

And every time, you know, they refer it to one person or five people, 10 people. The prizes got better and better. You could also ask an online business friend that you have or somebody else who’s in a similar space as you, but doesn’t have the exact same, you know, offering as you to do a newsletter swap or a newsletter mention or even mention one of your freebies if you think that freebie is already doing really well. So if you already know, hey, people are downloading this, they’re loving it, they’re getting a quick win, then use those stats to pitch it to somebody else, to ask them to include it in their newsletter or share about it on social media.

So let’s recap and fix these mistakes together. Okay. Number one, we are going to make sure our freebies are a no-brainer. They offer a quick win or solve a quick problem, and we’re easily communicating that in the messaging around our freebie.

Number two, we’re sharing our freebie consistently, and we’re practicing sharing it often, but we’re also practicing positioning it as a problem, agitate and solution framework to our audience to get them to opt in consistently.

Number three ,we’re looking for easy email list building solutions. We’re looking for quick wins of things to, of ways to add people to our email list, not making it overly complicated, or creating a web of emails and funnels all the time.

And four, we’re looking to referrals and companion audiences to help us build what we’ve already got going.

If you haven’t yet, make sure you get my free ultimate guide to building your email list. It’s a free guide that I’ve created for you to solve all of the mistakes that we’ve talked about in today’s episode. And if you like today’s episode, I’ll make sure that I link down the description, an episode I shared where I shared my top three strategies. I’ve grown my email list to over 47,000 subscribers.

Next week, it’s gonna be a really fun and unique episode because next week we’re gonna sit down and have a little coffee talk, as they would say here on Long Island. , a little coffee talk to just chat the night before the book wedding, because actually when you’re listening to next week’s episode, it will be the day before my book, When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy, comes out to the world. I have so many thoughts and emotions and I’m so nervous and so excited, but I’m so excited to sit down with you and just share some behind the scenes, some raw, honest thoughts about what it’s been like to run my own business while trying to write a book, getting a book, big five book deal, the whole thing.

So I look forward to chatting with you next week on, On Your Terms®.

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 @samvanderwielen and send me a DM to say hi.