Your email list is the most important asset in your business and is critical to building and nurturing relationships with your audience. It is your way of keeping in touch with your prospects, customers, clients, and other people you serve.

Your followers are interested in your work and want to know more about what you have to offer. With an email list, you can communicate with your prospects and customers directly, sending them the information they want. The valuable content you send to your subscribers then establishes the know/like/trust factor that is so crucial to growing a loyal following of people who buy what you recommend.

Since email marketing costs are low or even free, you don’t need to make a huge investment to get started. Some people begin with friends and family on a list but you can do much better than that. In this module you’ll learn the key steps you must take to build your list from scratch, and you’ll set realistic goals for your list building, so you make sure and steady progress.

What is an Email List?

Think of an email list as your virtual contact list. It’s a collection of names and information about people who have subscribed to your list. It is especially important because you have ready access to the information about each subscriber. However, it’s important to use the information only for the purposes you state when asking for that information. This is to protect people’s privacy. Never pass on the data you collect about your subscribers to others. You should feel privileged that people have chosen to share their contact information with you so make sure you look after it.

The information you’re looking for includes:

What Are You Waiting For?

There are a variety of reasons people wait to build an email list. It’s important to understand that there are some mindset hurdles you have to overcome to commit to email marketing.

Here are a few:

Not sure what to write about. This is an important one. You don’t want to send an email just to send an email. It needs to be well thought-out, provide useful content, and include an enticing call-to-action. If you’re not sure what to write about, sign up for emails from your competitors and see what they send out. Better yet, ask your audience what type of information they’d like to receive from you. It’s okay to keep it simple when you’re starting out. Remember to provide information your audience wants, not what you think they want. We’ll be giving you some help with this later on in the course.

Time commitment. It happens to the best of us. We become too busy working ‘in’ our business rather than ‘on’ our business. You can’t expect your business to grow if you aren’t taking advantage of email marketing. Think strategically about where you want your business to go and plan for that. We’ll talk about how you prepare the content of your emails in a later module. That way, when work gets busy, your emails will send on auto-pilot.

How to Start and Grow Your List

When you start to grow your list, it’s okay to start small. You might start with only friends and family who have expressed an interest in your business.

To start your email list, you need:

Review Where You Are with Your Business Now

Before we dive in completely, it’s important to take stock of where your business currently sits in this process.

Take some time and answer these questions:

• Do you have an email list?
  • How responsive is it?
  • How have you collected it?
  • How regularly do you interact with it?
• How will having a list of relevant and interested people change your business and your life?
  • What will you be able to do in your business when you have a targeted list that you can’t do now?
  • How will you be able to help more people?
  • How will it change how you make your offers?
  • How might it help with income generation?
  • When you increase your income, how will this change your life?

Set Realistic Goals for Building Your Email List

To keep yourself accountable and to make email marketing a regular activity for your business, it’s important to set some goals.

You need to be realistic in your goals, otherwise you’ll get discouraged and give up before you really get started. Building a list requires focus, determination, and consistency.

What makes a list valuable? It’s not the size. Big numbers aren’t the goal when you’re growing your email list, unless you are mass-marketing a product. What’s relevant is that you have an engaged, targeted list of people who actually want to hear from you.

How much time does it take to build a list? If you’re setting up an email list from scratch, don’t expect it to reach 1,000 subscribers overnight. Experienced entrepreneurs who focus on the activity of list-building will allow roughly 3 months to get to that point, if they work consistently on driving traffic. Give yourself a timeframe that fits with your available time, set up the systems, and do what it takes to put list-building strategies into action.

Why do you want a list? Examples of list-building goals differ for different types of businesses. It’s important to start by identifying the primary need your email list will address for your business.

You may want to build a list of:

• Potential students for a course you want to teach
• Patients in your practice who you want to retain or educate so they stay healthy
• Customers who would benefit from your new product or service
• Potential coaching clients who need one-on-one help
• Current customers so you can keep them coming back and buying more
• Customers who have purchased your products or services in the past
• Potential leads or business partners
• People who may want to represent your brand or champion your idea
• Customers who have shopped online or in your brick and mortar store
• Highly engaged subscribers who often reach out to you for help

Conclusion

Regardless of the type of business you offer, email marketing is a great way for you to stand out to your audience. By creating an email list, you are connecting with some people you already know and adding new connections to grow your email list. They are eager to receive your emails and will begin to see you as the expert in your field.

If you’re not building an email list, you are missing out on the opportunity to have a list of prospects, customers, and clients who want to know about your products and services.

Don’t let fear or a negative mindset ruin this opportunity to grow your business in a surefire way.