Michael: Hello, and welcome back to HaBO Village Podcast. This is Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And, this is Kathryn Redman.
Michael: And, we go together.
Kathryn: Your fearless hosts.
Michael: Today we're going to talk about building your email list. Now, what I mean by that is, we're going to give you a way of thinking, a model of thinking about how to get more people aware of your company, and that's cost effective so that you can generate more traffic. Here's the problem, you have a company, a product, or a service and you want to talk to people. Now, you know intrinsically and experientially, that the amount of sales you make is less than the amount of people you talk to. Real simple. You talk to a bunch of people, not everybody turns into a customer, some of them turn into, easier said than done, turn into a customer.
Michael: There is a ratio there, right? How many people, let me ask you this question [inaudible 00:00:59], just kind of right now, think about this, how many people do you think you have to talk to to turn into one sale? Is it two people? Is it 10 people? Is it 50 people that you have to talk to to turn into a sale? If you run an online business, something like that, it might be a little different, how many people have to come to your website to turn into a sale?
Kathryn: We have customers that'll tell us literally, if you can just get them in my front door, I will close the deal.
Michael: I will close the deal, they talk like they can close 100%, they don't close 100%. But some of them close really high, because when they come in, they're already super, super warm, they have a need. If you're going to a doctor, and you have a need, and they can diagnose you, they can say, "You will be helped with this procedure." There's a high percentage of people who are going to go, "I have the need, I'm going to do that."
Michael: For you, I want you to think about this, now, if you know that for every one, let's use this as an example, for every one customer, you have to talk to five people? To get a conversation with five people, you need, let's say, 20 people, or 30 people to actually come by your store, or see your ad, or come to your website, or however you run business and however you do it. Maybe you rent apartments, and you're a property manager, I know somebody out there who's listening who does that, now, how many people actually come to your website and look at your apartments before they call and are interested? How many people actually come and look at an apartment before one person actually does it?
Michael: Depending on the market, if it's a really hot market, like it is in our city right now, that could be eight out of 10 people who come to see the spot, grab it, because there's not that many left. Or sometimes it could be 50-50. Think about that. What you need to do is you need to be able to reach more people. That's what advertising is all about. How do you reach more people and make them aware of you, and get them to think of you and get top of mind in their mind?
Michael: Advertising, you have to pay for. If you can draw them in, and then you can turn these people, you can get their email address, convert them into a email list, two things have happened. One, you can send emails to that email list, and you don't have to pay for it anymore. Right? That is a massive savings in the midst of it, because most companies have used advertising, they bring it in, and they just keep paying for advertising to create all their frequency. But if you can create a reason for them to give you your email, we'll talk about that today in the nuts and bolts, then you can email back out, and that list you want to grow. That's why we're talking today about email list. That's why it's so practical, and that's the big picture.
Kathryn: The second reason that growing your email list that way is important, because Michael said there were two. The second is because if you are ... if somebody is actually choosing to say yes to something that you've put out there, if they're choosing to respond, they're opting in, then those are folks that are more likely to be responsive to your information, because they've chosen to receive it.
Michael: Which is huge.
Kathryn: It's massive. It's massive. It takes it from that cold calling type of approach, that cold email, to somebody who's warmed up a little, because they've said, "Hey, what I'm seeing here actually matters to me, and I'm going to opt in to continue to receive information from your company."
Michael: Then, there's another real practical reason why you want to build an email list that comes from stuff on our podcast, why?
Kathryn: Because you just listen to that, how to write great marketing copy, and somebody should be reading the amazing stuff you're writing, because nothing is worse than writing great copy and then, [inaudible 00:04:53] and nobody is reading it. We want to help you find avenues in which to put your amazing content into the minds and hearts of people who care.
Michael: Biggest problem with people writing, doing good marketing copy, and writing content, creating content, is you say, "Who's going to listen?" Let's jump into our nuts and bolts, the very first point of our nuts and bolts of how do you do this and how does this work? Create good content.
Kathryn: Before you get to that, I think one of the things you have to address first is why would I grow ... I don't think [crosstalk 00:05:28]-
Michael: You want to talk about the importance of a list and all that?
Kathryn: Well, just the whole why would you grow a list instead of buying a list? But wouldn't it be just faster to just go out and take one of those great companies that says, "Hey, you need leads, we got those. We got a way, we can give you 1,000, or 10,000, or 100,000 emails, and you can blast your stuff out to the world." Why is that not as effective, Michael?
Michael: Well, you alluded to it a minute ago, and that is that they opt in. Here's what happens. It's when you buy a list, now, in the old days of direct mailing, that was the only thing we had is you went out and you got a list. People were used to seeing stuff over time in their mailbox. But, everybody gets frustrated with stuff in their mailbox, doesn't mean it doesn't work. It just means they get frustrated. When people start getting emails that they don't like, the word they use for it is spam. I'm getting emails-
Kathryn: I think the meat has gotten a bad reputation.
Michael: In Hawaii they're really good at cooking at it, really good at cooking. I mean, if you've ever had spam in Hawaii, [inaudible 00:06:31].
Kathryn: Spam sushi, sorry.
Michael: We digress.
Kathryn: But this is spam email.
Michael: This is spam email, and it's not, it's no relationship to the canned food.
Kathryn: We like them, they're okay.
Michael: But it is, I mean, we all know it, spam really is generically, there's a technical term for it, a technical definition, but generically it's emails that are [inaudible 00:06:51] that I don't want.
Kathryn: That I never asked for.
Michael: I never asked for, and I don't want. Quite often, most of the time, you can say, "Oh, they're also not relevant." Relevance, again, we'll continue to talk about that over and over again, it's key. You don't want to buy a list, and there are some other various super practical reasons, because some people will say, "I don't care, I'm going to bug people. I don't mind cold calling, I don't mind cold calling with phones, I'm hiring a call center, and they bug you at night. Because I know that if I run the numbers, it's going to work." You know what, folks?
Michael: I can't argue with you there. If you run the numbers, it'll work, but if you have a warm list, a list of people who are interested in you and have opted into your list, they will convert higher. For those of you who care, the economics on it, it has been proven over and over and over again, you can make money cold calling people, but you'll make more money, less effort, if you have a warm list.
Kathryn: Not to mention, just on a passion side of things, if you hire a bunch of people to cold call, that's not a very passionate sale job.
Michael: [crosstalk 00:07:58]. I did that.
Kathryn: Getting hung up on 15 times an hour is pretty sucky.
Michael: Or more.
Kathryn: Or more. 100 times an hour.
Michael: I had to hire a dialing rate, and it was awful.
Kathryn: [crosstalk 00:08:08] anyone. It's like rejection built in.
Michael: Okay, here's another very practical reason why you shouldn't buy a list. Many of you don't know this, many of our customers don't know this, there is a regulatory body, basically, out there that is running the email list, emails, and the servers, and kind of regulating it all. The internet isn't just the wild West. If you send a bunch of stuff that gets ranked as spam, actually where you send your emails from can get blocked. Matter of fact, in this day and age, with all the spam filters and everything else, you can get blocked by not doing anything.
Michael: We have a client, they're a fairly large company, organization throughout California, we just recently, in the last 24 hours-
Kathryn: Yeah, I was emailing two days ago, not problem, and suddenly today I've been-
Michael: Everything from our-
Kathryn: Last night, right in the middle of trying to solve a crisis, we got blocked.
Michael: Everything from our domain, everything from HalfaBubbleOut.com is blocked at this company. They're our customers, they've been our customers for like seven years.
Kathryn: We're not sure what happened, but-
Michael: And now we're blocked. But what happens is that process is you can get blocked, and you can get completely barred from sending any emails on the internet if you spam or use dirty lists, somethings like that, and in this day and age, there are people who will [inaudible 00:09:27] all kinds of crapy lists. If you're in Canada, if you're listening to us internationally, this is important, I don't know about other countries in Europe, Canada right now, they have a law in the books, and they have enforced it, that if you send emails to people, unwanted emails, that they didn't opt in for, and they're saying you should double opt in, which means they filled out a form on your website, and then you sent them an email, and they verified. "Yes, this is me and I want in." 1 million fine.
Kathryn: Holy moly.
Michael: $1 million fine. There are over six people who have been nailed with that fine in Canada so far.
Kathryn: [inaudible 00:10:10] down a little bit in Canada.
Michael: It's scary.
Kathryn: It's a huge threat.
Michael: What they're doing is they're using double opt in. So not just saying, "Yeah, you said yes to this list." If somebody tries to sell you a list, and it's not an opt-in, those are just the warnings in the midst of it. All of those, those things are both warnings and a reason you want to have your own list, that's an opted in list, because you're so much safer that way, because as soon as you can prove that they've opted in, filled out a form, given you their email, you can send it, and you have one of those little things on the bottom that says, "Unsubscribe." Then you're legal.
Kathryn: Yeah. It's like being somebody who's giving a lecture, and you have a bought-in list, essentially what you have is a room full of people who chose to be there that you get to talk to.
Michael: Who doesn't like a warm lead? At least a lukewarm lead. Let's jump into the six pieces now, because those are some really good instructive points and tips in the midst of it if you're building a list. But here's the six points that we're going to talk about about how to build that list. The first is create great content. Now, good, great, those are fuzzy terms.
Kathryn: Exceptional, powerful. Compelling.
Michael: Fuzzy terms are bad unless we talk about what we mean. What we mean is, good content is well-written, and 8th grade level is plenty enough for people, you don't have to be anything great. But it is clear, and it's relevant.
Kathryn: If you want to drill into what good content is, listen to that podcast on how to write good marketing copy, because that's all we talk about in that podcast.
Michael: Totally, the whole thing is chock full of great things. Great content. When we talk about content, what do we mean by content? What are different types of content, Kathryn?
Kathryn: It could be a blog, it could be a podcast, it could be what you put in your video. I mean, anything that you're going to publish out on the internet, and send to people, is your content.
Michael: Emails?
Kathryn: Emails, I mean, yeah, we'll probably do a whole session on how to write a good subject line in an email at a later date.
Michael: Maybe another whole podcast just on the subject line.
Kathryn: Not well, maybe not.
Michael: You think there was enough there?
Kathryn: Well.
Michael: We'll see. On emails, just alone, sending emails. The subject line is an important part of that. We're going to talk about those in other episodes. But this content, emails, blogs, podcasts, videos on your website. Anything you're going to publish, you've got to create content. That is the number one thing, and you want it to be good content, which means it's basically well-written and you've proofed it, and you've taken out the errors, and you had somebody read it, you didn't throw junk up, and then it's useful and relevant to the topic, to the customers you have. It's answering, again, good content is answering questions that people are asking.
Kathryn: Yeah. Think about it this way. You know how you feel when you get, let's just use email, when you get an email that's badly written from somebody, it's got errors, or they missed words, or just something, what happens to your level of trust in that person or company? It degrades a little bit. So when we talk about trust around here, we talk about competence and character. When you're reading an email that doesn't demonstrate basic English competence, it is really difficult to trust that company.
Michael: A lot of you have been in business a while, you've had lists before, but you mailed the list, you did direct mailings. It costs us over 50 cents a postcard down to do direct mailing for our clients, we still do it sometimes, sometimes-
Kathryn: I have a couple of Forever Stamps from about three years ago. So I'm feeling I could get a bargain on those, but yeah.
Michael: So, it's expensive. You have an email list, you know, I send that email for the aggregated cost of my email service provider. That's it, and the time I put into it. Good content, we've described what good content is. The next thing is you have to do it with frequency. Talk about frequency, Kathryn.
Kathryn: Sometimes I think we make the mistake of thinking, "If I just put one or two really excellent pieces out there, then that's bound to gain traffic." The fact to the matter is, you have to do whatever it is you decide you're going to do, whether it's video, whether it's podcasting, whether it's blog writing. You have to do it regularly. The regularly is going to vary from one specialist to another, but it used to be, I don't know, five or six years ago, if you weren't blogging three to five times a week, you barely made a dent.
Michael: Especially with organic traffic.
Kathryn: Especially with organic traffic. Now it's maybe worse. But most people can't keep up with that. Whatever you do, you have to do it with frequency.
Michael: Minimum, you're communicating, you're creating content once a week. You're minimum creating content, and you're creating something of value. Something that's relevant, talking about your product, service, how do you help people, that kind of stuff. There's other ways of creating ideas and brainstorming, and someday we're going to do a podcast on the brainstorming ideas for content. But you get the idea. Okay, frequency, that frequency, once a week, because think of it this way.
Michael: Think of somebody that is a business acquaintance of yours, but you don't know them very well. You don't share a lot with them, they don't share a lot with you. You see them two or three times a year, maybe you see them once a month, you have a conversation with them, an actual conversation at a cocktail party, or in a business event, or something like that, maybe twice a year, or maybe you can say, "Yeah, I had a really good conversation with that person two years ago." The depth of your relationship is ... it's very formal, subtle, it's shallow. But the person you have that you see every day at work, you have a better relationship with.
Michael: The customers that you talk with on a regular basis, weekly or multiple times a week, you have a deeper relationship. Over the same amount of time, if I were to say, in six months, if you talked to somebody four times, and you talked to somebody 20 times, which one are you probably going to have more a relationship with? Even if you don't talk deep, the person you see 20 times, and say hello to and how are you doing, and exchange topics about the weather, there's a sense of familiarity and trust that they build with you and you with them. Frequency is really important. The other reason-
Kathryn: Sorry, I was just going to say there's nothing more ... I don't know how you feel about it, but when you go to a website, and they have a blog, and you look on their blog, or their Facebook page, or whatever it is, and they haven't put anything up for four months, or a year, or the last post was 2015, there's a sense in which you just go, "Okay, they're not that engaged." The reality is, part of the frequency continues to say, "I am an expert at this, I can keep talking about it, I'm going to continue to educate you." Whatever it is that you're trying to achieve depending on your product or service, that frequency builds, like Michael said, it builds trust that you're a player, that you're engaged, that you're wanting to solve problems.
Michael: Right. That's important. What happens is also, mentally in the brain, physically in the brain, frequency, the brain says, "Oh, I'm going to pay attention to you." If I've seen you, we've talked about frequency of three times a week if you can, sending emails out and different things like that. But if I'm at least talking to you once a week, that frequency, my brain says, "I'm going to remember who you are." It may take me 10 times to remember your name, really, especially if I'm bad at it, but at some point, I'm going to remember it. At some point you're going to be top of mind, and over time, these type of things happen. Putting out that content [inaudible 00:18:13] frequent.
Michael: Kathryn said something about dates on blogs, most people, they didn't use to pay attention to that. But in this day and age, where content is so important, and content is king, and frequency is becoming more and more common. People are going, "Well," they're checking those dates. That's becoming one of their evaluations on whether you really care about this medium, or is it just something you started and abandoned.
Kathryn: Yeah. And really tied super closely to that is determining what your frequency is going to be. Then, consistently meeting that standard. So if you decide you're going to do something twice a week, then do it twice a week, consistently. If you're going to do something once a week, do it consistently once a week. But whatever it is that you commit to, that consistency over time becomes really critical, in the mix of growing a list. Because the more that you are able to put out regular routine consistent content, the more you will attract and build that online list.
Michael: Yeah. We kind of mixed a couple of points up here, because the next point we're going to talk about is relevance. We sort of talked about that already at some level in creating good content. So let me just review real quick where we are. Number one is create good content, the emphasis there is create. What makes good content leads us into our second point that we touched on, it was make it relevant, answer the questions they're asking. Third, frequency, you got to do this on a regular basis, and we suggest minimum once a week. You can do it with that, but you need to do it.
Michael: Now, you may be saying, "Crikey, I don't want to do this. I don't have time for this." Blah, blah, blah. Do you have time to build your business? Do you have time to get more customers? Do you have time to do the things that will bring a return on investment? If the answer is yes, then you have time for this, because this brings a return on investment, and it is the way business is operating more and more and more in the current day and age. Okay? I just want to encourage you, I know it can be frustrating, I know some of you shaking your heads and you're like, "This is [inaudible 00:20:27]." But you might be at a place where you can pay somebody to do it. Hire somebody.
Michael: Half a Bubble Out actually creates content for many of our clients, we're their content creation, we partner closely with them, we learn their voice, we learn what's going on, we do market research. Then, they can look at it, and manage it at a high level, but we make sure it all happens. You don't have to do this yourself, but you can save a lot of money and energy if you don't have a lot of resources doing this yourself. This is time well spent. Okay, the next one is consistency.
Michael: So you're going to do that frequency once a week, you cannot go, "I'm going to do it this week, and next week, and then I'm going to skip it a couple of weeks, and then come back." Some of you have been listening to our podcast, and last year our podcast was way more inconsistent. I guarantee that if you stuck around through that, you're a part of the minority because we lost some people, we were testing to see if podcasts were really going to be valuable, and if we really wanted to really invest in it. We did, we started seeing results. Now, we're back on a weekly basis.
Michael: But you've got to be consistent, because we say not only ... when I said earlier three times a week, we talk about three times a week 52 weeks a year. You can cut it back to 48, maybe 50, you take a couple of weeks off. But for the most part-
Kathryn: If you all aren't exercising in Christmas break, or anything like that so you're not going to be listening to our podcast, is that you're thinking?
Michael: Or the politics come out, or all the commercials come out, there are so many things that draw other people's attention. But consistency, you need to be there on a regular basis. You know what it's like in relationships, you know what it's like with friends. Frequency and consistently doing it, showing up at the same time all the time, or showing up on the same day, or at least doing it weekly, so you're in their inbox, it's really powerful.
Kathryn: Before we move to the fifth then sixth points, I'm wondering if we need to just address the misconception out there that, you know, we're talking about building email lists, and there is a pretty strong misconception that argues that email is dying. That email is no longer the way to go, that there's much better technologies.
Michael: That's a really good point.
Kathryn: We didn't address that. We didn't address that at the beginning, and so, Michael, I think you should speak to that.
Michael: Let's address in this [inaudible 00:22:44].
Kathryn: If you hung in there until this point with that question, I just want you to chat to that for just a minute, Michael.
Michael: Yes. Very good point. All right, there have been a lot of people who've talked about this, a lot of people think that there's a lot of younger people who go, "I don't use my email. Social media is all I use." Different things like that. There are lots, and lots, and lots, and lots of people who are doing studies and spending a lot of money doing studies in Silicon Valley, in Boston area, which is one of the Silicon Valleys of the East Coast, in the Massachusetts area and all that, that are trying to figure out where to be investing their time and energy.
Michael: Over and over and over again, across the internet, email marketing has the highest ROI by a significant margin. Now, you may hear things from family, friends, younger folks, things like that, millennials that are saying, "Oh, nobody uses that anymore. Nobody uses email." First of all, they don't have a real job. At work, most people are still using. If you're in a normal job, and most people in the country are in a normal job working for a company.
Kathryn: Believe it or not, if you're in college, you still are given an email address and lots of the communication that happens with your college is through the email.
Michael: We have a university in our town, and the majority of what our students are saying coming out of that is, they still have the school email address, even our daughter does. You can't, very, very, very few, it's way the minority of professors are saying, "You can turn your paper in over Facebook Messenger." It's just not-
Kathryn: We had somebody actually figure out a way to submit a cover letter and a resume for one of our clients through Facebook the other day. That was pretty amazing.
Michael: I'm sure. And it's going to happen more, it will increase, but just so you know, we're speaking to email is still ROI, the studies over and over again, everybody agrees, and all the super futuristic technologies and everything else, they believe that emails actually has pretty long lifespan in front of it. Because, well, I could get into a lot of technical reasons, this is our field, trust us, email is still a good deal. It's not going away. When people tell you it is.
Michael: Now, it doesn't mean you shouldn't use other things too, and other channels, and other software, and learn how to use those. But bang for the buck, you're going to get way more money right now here, and if you're going to choose this over social media, choose this 10 times over 10 times.
Kathryn: So, we did a podcast earlier that talked about sort of the power of Facebook, and Facebook video, and that kind of stuff, and ad buying on Facebook. That can sound a little contradictory, Michael, because we've spent a podcast telling them that Facebook ads and video were like the next wave, and they have to do that, how does that tie back to email, for those that are actually consistently listening.
Michael: What's going to happen, okay, so I'm going to get into a little bit more, but this is important, so it's relevant. I'll keep it short. Really short. As we move into the future, multiple channels are going to be important. You have to choose what your first one is, and then when you can afford to go to the second one, you go to the second one and the third one. Advertising online is going to be incredibly important. Paid ads in Facebook and in Google is different than using social media directly. It's a totally different product in Facebook itself. Multiple channels are important. If you aren't going to do anything else, you have a minimal budget, you start with email. Then you add from there.
Kathryn: Just to clarify, even if you had a primary market where you were doing Facebook advertising, the reality is you still have to drive the Facebook ad to something that allows them to interact with your company, so you're still going to be [inaudible 00:26:48] together their email so you can communicate with them. Is that not the case?
Michael: Yeah. Take this example, here's a really concrete one. If I have 1,000 people on my email list, and I have 1,000 other people on my Facebook, that are friends with my Facebook page, my business page, or my personal page. If I send an email to 1,000 people on my email list, 1,000 emails are going to go into their email boxes. If I put a post on social media, and I have 1,000 friends, especially if I'm a business, I will have less than 300 of those. Less than 30%. In many cases, less than 15% of those will even show up on their page.
Kathryn: Yeah. Last that I hear was something like six out of 100, unless you're paying to promote. It's rough.
Michael: That's a big deal. Then, on top of it, then you think about, "Okay, if I put an email in your inbox, it's there."
Kathryn: It's not going away.
Michael: You could ignore it, there's an [inaudible 00:27:52], but if it shows up on your feed, your feed is moving in Facebook. Everything is drifting down. So as soon as it gets 20 minutes old, or an hour old, or two hours old, unless it has a lot of engagement from a lot of different people, Facebook doesn't move it back up. They do move it back up if a lot of people like it, and everything else, and I could see something three days later. But that's like 1%, 2%.
Kathryn: I just wanted to make sure you addressed that, because-
Michael: It's a good point.
Kathryn: ... we can contradict ourselves and mean both things. But it's sometimes important just [crosstalk 00:28:21].
Michael: This is why Kathryn and I do this podcast together. Because of little things like that. Let's move on to five, promoting. It's great to move into that because of what we just said. Recap. Create good content, make it relevant, be frequent, once a week, be consistent, do it every week, you only want to miss two to four times a year, if you can, right. Then, five, promoting. You want to promote. How do you promote your content? This is how we're building an email list. We're building an email list because we're starting to do all this stuff, and it's going to culminate in six, how we actually capture the emails.
Michael: But you're promoting that by buying ads oftentimes. It's a great way to do it. Now, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to push out to your normal email network that you have. You have contacts in your Outlook database or your Gmail contacts, and you have friends, and you could call and, "Hey, I have this product." Or, "Hey, I've got an email, I'm sending out a newsletter, can I put you on my newsletter?" But that's usually a short list for most people. So the next best thing in the world for promoting is buying ads.
Kathryn: To build your list, yeah.
Michael: That's awesome.
Kathryn: I mean, obviously, if you have, whatever your existing email list is, you're going to want to push this consistent great content that you're writing weekly to that email list. That's just going to be really, really important. But when we're talking about building an email list, and you are trying to find those folks that want to buy in, opt-in, then using things like Facebook Ads, even Google AdWords, there's a variety of ways of doing it. But you're really going to want to push that through ad buying online.
Michael: It's a phenomenal way to build your email list. Then, once you start building an email list. Maybe you are person who says, "I have 100 people on my email list." Or, "I have a couple of hundred on my email list." As you're creating content, and you're sending emails out, you're going to promote that content out on that email list. If it's valuable content, and you give people an opportunity to share it, they're going to share it with people. It can happen on social too. But you want to give your ... One of the sources is you're just doing normal contacts, another one is buying ads and reaching people who've never heard about you.
Michael: Another method is reaching out to your existing list, and creating content that's valuable enough that they might share it, and asking them to share it. Those three different areas or places you can promote your content to, that will help feedback and grow your email list. Now, except for the people that are already on your email list, that leads us into, wait a minute. I create content, it's relevant, frequent, consistent, I'm promoting it, I'm promoting and buying ads, how do I get their email?
Kathryn: Really, really important that whatever you're doing, you create a call to action for them to actually do something that will allow you to capture their information and register them as a lead in whatever system you're using to do that. To do that lead capture, you really need to create a landing page, that is specific to the offer, or the piece of content that you are providing, that gives them more on that same topic.
Michael: Yeah. What we're talking about there is you want to capture the lead. You're looking for more leads. These emails are leads that you can communicate with. They're cool leads, they're not hot leads, so you can call them. But they're the place where you can start to nurture them, because they're on your list. So what you want is we create a landing page, that's what we do, and most people are capturing this, and all a landing page is is a webpage with a couple of different things.
Michael: One, it has a form on it that allows at the minimum their email. Oftentimes, it's their name and their email. Why would they fill this out? Because you're offering a piece of content, something that's helpful. In the midst of creating great content, you want to create something that what we call is a lead magnet, it's a piece of content that attracts people to be willing to fill out their form and give us their name and their email.
Michael: Now, if you've never done this before, you're thinking, "Do people do this?" Well, you may have done this, you probably have done this. That's what's happening is, they're putting you on their list. If you've never done this, and this is all new, don't feel bad, it's going on, it's very normal, and it works.
Kathryn: Yeah. So anytime you've gone on the internet, and you've seen an offer like-
Michael: Download this-
Kathryn: ... download 10 ways to lose 10 pounds in a week.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: Or, how to lose 10 pounds in a week. Okay, that's super relevant, and many people would be like, "I really want to know that information."
Michael: Especially January 4th.
Kathryn: Especially January 4th, yes. You go, and you ask for that information. In order to give it to you, it's what we call gated content. So in order for you to get that information, you actually have to give up your email address.
Michael: It's not just free with nothing.
Kathryn: Not just free with nothing. So there's an exchange of value. You're giving them something that they perceive as valuable, and you're gaining their email address, which is valuable to you.
Michael: And to them. They're saying, "This is valuable to me, I'm willing to give it to you, because you like this, you want this. But you're going to give me something in return." It's a simple, small piece of conversion, of transition of value, but it's really important. So, what happens is, and we love to tell six, you create this in the beginning. I didn't want to get to it and cloud it, because it's like, "I'm using all this content, how am I getting these people?" This is the crux of how you grow your, actually capture the email so you're growing your list. Right?
Michael: Now, imagine this, imagine one person a day coming to your website and filling it out. One person a day who downloads this piece of content who says, "This is valuable enough to me." And fills it out. In a year, you have 365 people in your email list that are interested in the content about your business. Because the lead magnet, that piece of content you create, has to be, you want it to be relevant to your company, to your service, to your product. Right?
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: If you're going to build a list, this is your mitt, this is your net, this is how you're going to capture it and then it just continues to add. Then, every time you create a new piece of content, you promote it out on an ad, you try and pull people in, but you also promote your content to your email list, because now you can communicate with them once a week.
Kathryn: Within that email list, there will be a link to the same landing page to go and get the content. Correct?
Michael: Or, when we're creating new content, because we're not creating a lead magnet, right?
Kathryn: Right.
Michael: That might be a little confusing.
Kathryn: Sorry.
Michael: There are so many different types of content, a lead magnet is a piece of content, but it's valued, it's gated, that we don't give away. It's a little bit more valuable than just a generic blog or something like that. It can be as simple as 10 key foods not to eat to lose weight. It can be as simple as here's a checklist you can use in this area of your business, or in this area of your life, and you've given me a form. I don't have to create it, it can be that simple. People select those things. They are willing to [inaudible 00:36:02].
Michael: What happens is, as you continue to reach your audience, and then you have people in your email list, and you can email them for free, and have frequency, it's like having your own radio station, or your own TV station, or whatever, because you can just broadcast information to those people, and then start being relevant to your audience. It's amazing. It's incredibly powerful, and this is, if you know about this, you know that this is the way so much business happens. If you're still new to using internet business and stuff like that, you haven't incorporated these techniques, this is very common, it's been going for a very long time, over a decade, this type of stuff [crosstalk 00:36:45].
Kathryn: Yeah, just being refined and-
Michael: It's kind of a transition of direct mail. Email is like that. But you're not doing it cold, you're doing it to people who've actually opted in, right? So, how to build your email list, we need to come to an end here. First thing is, we told you that you need to be able to reach people, and more people that are warmer, so you can turn more people into customers. You need to reach a bigger audience. You can do this to save money, you can do this to make more money, and you can do this to save yourself some time and energy once this system is going. I know it takes time, but you can, there's the benefit.
Michael: These are six simple things that you can do or you can hire people to do. You can go on Fiverr as one tip, and go out and hire a bunch of people, low cost, just to do one-off things, stuff like that. Hire an intern to write content, or just make sure you do it, and write those blogs, or do those videos, or whatever you want. But here's our major things, because that's the big picture, how to build your email list so that you can get more customers and be more cost effective, hit a better return on investment.
Michael: If you follow these six things, these nuts and bolts, then you can go from where you are in your situation, and improve it. You can have more customers, you can have a better ROI, you can grow. You can do this. This is something that everybody can do. Might be a little hard, you might need some help, you might need to hire somebody to help you a little bit, but this is within the reach.
Kathryn: Well, just so you know, one of the things that we tend to do around this shop is we practice on ourselves. We are our own client, and yes, we're a marketing company, so you probably think we have an edge. But the fact to the matter is, we needed to prove this worked for ourselves as well as our clients. We probably three or four years ago, I think it was early 2013, started writing regular blog content. We grew our online engagement, our online list from like, I don't know 700% or something ridiculous. It really does work.
Michael: It was crazy in the midst of doing it. And we're a company that's growing on a regular basis, and reaching different people. This is one of our forms of content now, and we're pushing it out. When we create this content, you may have heard of us through an ad on Facebook, or one of our Facebook posts, or even our emails.
Kathryn: Anecdotally, we know it's working because even in our own community, we're not always marketing just for our own community, in fact, we have lots of clients outside.
Michael: We market nationally.
Kathryn: But, we have people in our own community who don't even need the services that we offer who are like, "Oh my gosh, you guys are everywhere." All we've done is push regular content out.
Michael: It's very powerful. So we get our list, we build our list, we have more opportunities to have more intelligent conversations, more warm conversations.
Kathryn: And be seen as an expert.
Michael: Yeah. Which allows us to convert more customers, and increase our fees. Everybody wants to be able to increase their price. In some markets, you can't, some markets it's kind of stable and you can't because of competition. There you go, big picture, hope, nuts and bolts, it's possible, you can do it. We want to encourage you in the midst of it, and we just are really thankful. That kind of brings us to the end of today's episode. We're really thankful for you visiting us and spending this time with us, and putting us in your ears. Listening to us in the car. If you would do us a favor, if you would go to iTunes, and you would rate us-
Kathryn: He never lets me do this part, he always does this part.
Michael: You want to do this part?
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: I didn't know you wanted to do.
Kathryn: You know, you do it every time, it's my turn.
Michael: Okay, go ahead.
Kathryn: So, if you found this helpful at all, we would love to have you go to iTunes and rate us, and give us some feedback, put maybe a comment in our blog in response to what you've heard. We'd love to hear what your pain points are. We'd love to know what it is that keeps you up at night that you're wrestling with that perhaps we can address in a future podcast. Because as we're building Passion and Provision companies, we want to make sure that we're addressing your needs and concerns, and that we're doing the thing that we say you need to do, which is actually being relevant. So please communicate with us.
Michael: That was good.
Kathryn: Thank you.
Michael: Well done.
Kathryn: See, you might let me do it again.
Michael: I might let you do it again.
Kathryn: Okay, you're so kind.
Michael: Yeah. All right. You guys all have a great week. Thank you very much. Here's wishing you Passion and Provision in your work, and in your business. Have a good week.
Kathryn: Talk to you later.
