Grow your email list: The strategy that got 700 opt-ins in a week!

If you've been Googling "how to grow your email list for free" — you just found your answer.

Jenna breaks down her List Growth Method: a repeatable strategy for consistently adding new email subscribers every month using Instagram and a simple freebie funnel. No paid ads. No complicated tech. No sneaky sales tactics buried inside your lead magnet.

Jenna shares the exact mistake she made building a lead magnet that confused her audience (it tried to do two things at once), and the Saturday afternoon she spent on her back porch that cracked the code — resulting in a nearly 75% opt-in page conversion rate and over 700 downloads in a single week.

Whether you're just starting your email list building journey or trying to re-engage a cold list, this episode gives you a clear, repeatable framework for creating a freebie people actually want to download.

🎉 Get your early bird ticket to Grow Your List!

https://parkdale-republic.thrivecart.com/grow-your-list/?coupon=BIRDIE

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why having just one lead magnet is hurting your list growth 
• The critical difference between a freebie designed to sell and one designed to grow your email list 
• The three-question checklist to know if your opt-in follows the List Growth Method
• Why simplicity beats a complicated digital download every time when it comes to email list building
• How to use a freebie funnel to re-engage cold email subscribers who've stopped opening your emails

The Grow Your List live event is for you if you're:

• An online business owner trying to grow your email list
• Tired of email marketing strategies that feel overly complicated
• Ready to build a freebie funnel that can bring in new email subscribers every month
• Looking for a lead magnet strategy that doesn't require paid ads 

🎉 Get clients from Instagram! Tap here to work with Jenna Harding  inside Magic Marketing Machine!

https://www.magicmarketingmachine.com

✨Tap here to watch a FREE masterclass on “How To Get Clients From Instagram (without wasting hours glued to your phone)"

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/evergreen-webinar-registration/

Tap here to get your free Posts That Sell Template (This caption got us 10 sales calls in 3 hours)

https://parkdale-republic.lpages.co/10-sales-calls-new

Music by Jordan Wood

Hosted by Jenna Harding (Warriner), Creator of Magic Marketing Machine

Transcript

Jenna Harding (00:00)
It's that time of year again, the time when I help you grow your email subscribers. I started getting passionate about this when I found out how much money my peers were spending on growing their email list.

I didn't know that I was some kind of list growth wizard, but I have been growing my email list absolutely for free and I will tell you how. So you can do it too because I teach it now. Also, it's really important that you know my view, what I am seeing right now because my all-star husband has set up outside our living room window a bird feeder. ⁓ a nuthatch just landed.

the sweet charming nuthatch known for its acrobatic tendencies and sparky personality. I'm like probably two meters from this bird feeder and it's just like all day action. We saw red, yellow, orange and beige-ish, beige-ish, beige colored.

kind gross speaks earlier. There's at least a dozen chickadees that I'm trying to befriend. I went out there and held bird seed in my hand and tried to get them to land on me. They didn't this time, but they will.

This is how I am regulating and healing my nervous system, this bird feeder.

back to business. Let's talk about the list growth method. My absolute favorite way to constantly grow my email list. Grow my email list every single month,

using a freebie funnel, but not your average freebie funnel. Okay, so let's break down some of the language that we're using here.

The classic way to grow your email subscribers is to offer your audience something that they then trade you their name and email for. So they give you their name and email, you give them some sort of free resource.

very first lead magnet, it was like 2020, and it took me, man, it took me weeks to put together. It was so formulaic and super strategic, and it was pretty and beautiful, and I made it in Canva, and it took me forever. And then I used that same freebie for years and years and years. I mean, it's probably still floating around out there somewhere.

See, back then, years ago, you could just make one freebie and use it literally for years, but that's not how things work anymore. We don't just have one freebie that we give away.

on repeat for years because you need different freebies for different settings. We need to surprise and delight our audience. People will hear you talk about one thing and say no, and then hear you talk about another freebie and say yes.

If you only have one freebie and one of your followers hears you talk about it and doesn't want it, do they just never come onto your list? Do they just never subscribe? No, you make a new one and you tell them about that and then you go, okay, yeah, now you're speaking my language. So it doesn't just, it's a disservice to just have one. And in my experience, when I keep talking about the same one over and over and over again, they like, they lose steam, right? Nothing like a fresh freebie to reinvigorate your list.

a lot of people will teach freebies that are supposed to directly lead to sales, right? Maybe your freebie tells people your methodology or it introduces your offers or it makes people feel like they're missing a missing puzzle piece and that missing puzzle piece is you, so they should pay you. And this is the approach a lot of people have had to freebies for a long time. And a lot of coaches teach for freebies.

But the problem with that is if your secret intention is to sell someone something, then you are optimizing this thing to make a sale. You are not optimizing it for massive growth potential and massive list growth potential.

You're not setting it up to get a bazillion people downloading it and then building trust with them

and then they fall in love with you and then they see the sales content and wanna buy.

Think about it, last time you put up a sales post on Instagram, how did it perform compared to the other content you put up that week? Chances are the sales content got the lowest amount of views and engagement and comments versus your growth and nurture content, right? And then yet at the same time we think, we can make a lead magnet that's designed to sell something secretly and it's gonna pop off. Uh-uh. That's not how we do it around here.

Hence, my creation of the list growth method. So last year, I released a bazillion, that's an official stat, I released so many lead magnets perfecting my list growth method and coming up with a repeatable strategy that you can use to

create a resource people actually want and that will happily opt into your list to receive and then become little subscribers on your email list.

Last year I taught this entire strategy at a two day event called Freebie in a Weekend and it was so fun and a lot of people made multiple freebies, got hundreds of downloads immediately after they promoted it using the templates we gave them. It was a great two day event but a bunch of people couldn't come because it was on the weekend and they either didn't want to work on a weekend or had their kids or something. So now we're running the event again because it was so successful.

but we can't call it freebie in a weekend anymore because it won't be on a weekend because people didn't like that it was on a weekend. So I'm really grappling with, I thought that name was so good, but now it's gonna be something your list, Instagram. So you'll still be creating an entire freebie and funnel in 48 hours.

but this year, 2026, on a Thursday, Friday instead of a Saturday, Sunday.

and the freebie you create will not be a sneaky sales pitch freebie. You're gonna follow the list growth method. Okay, so.

while I was perfecting the list growth method, I created a freebie that did not do what I wanted it to do, and then in hindsight, I realized the exact mistake I had made. So let me know if you have made this one as well. I started making this resource all about on-camera confidence. I could talk about.

days about how to have more confidence in your content. And then while I was talking about having more confidence, I started to incorporate things like how to set up your space, like how to set up your ring light and stand. because people are always asking me how high to set up their phone stand when they're filming content, and the answer is hip height if you're doing a full body, and basically eye level if you are talking to the camera.

Anyway, as I started talking about stands, I started talking about what to set your phone settings to, like should you be recording in ⁓ 1080p or 4K? And then I started talking about lighting, and I started talking about all of these technical things and what your Instagram settings should be. So

This document that was supposed to be about on-camera confidence became two things at once. It became how to set up your phone and your space to film, as well as have confidence while filming. And while that might not seem like a huge deal, when it came to promoting this opt-in, I realized the problem I had caused.

which is if you don't have a clear promise and a clear result from your free thing, then it becomes very difficult to talk about it in a succinct manner. And you need to be succinct on Instagram, in your promo content, you need to be able to say in a sentence or less what someone is going to gain from this offer.

So then I started to try and simplify what I was saying. And I would have like half the people were opting in for the confidence stuff. And then they were getting all the tech stuff. And they were like, wait, what is this? And then people would opt in for the tech stuff. And they get the confidence stuff. And they'd email us and be like, I think I got the wrong thing. So it became such a mess. And I was glad for it because it reiterated part of the strategy behind the list growth method.

is simplicity. Simplicity in all its forms. Simplicity in the message, simplicity in the title, simplicity even in the tech setup. So then, it's Saturday afternoon, right? I'm on my back porch, hanging out with the chickadees, and I think,

Because I overcomplicated that last freebie, what if I swing far the other way and I try just completely oversimplifying a freebie? How simple can I make this entire process? And can I do it in a Saturday afternoon? And I did. I sat there on the porch and in one Saturday afternoon, I created the entire freebie, the tech setup, the opt-in page, the delivery email,

while I was just sitting there on a couch. And then I was like, OK, I've got this. I have nailed it. And I can now teach this and make it repeatable. The week I promoted this freebie, I had almost a 75 % conversion rate on the opt-in page. And over 700 people opted into it. And it was like, bingo. We don't need to be putting six weeks of effort into our lead magnets.

We don't need to be using like sneaky witchcraft and where we're trying to like secretly convince someone to buy from us in our lead magnets. They can be so much easier. And then let your list do the work. your email list is so valuable. It is such a valuable asset. If you sell to people right away in your freebies,

and they don't feel like they're gonna gain from actually being on this list, of them are gonna leave.

one of the like tenants of this strategy is generosity and over delivering and giving to people right away.

The fact is, a good freebie doesn't give more. It gives less more clearly, which is better for you and your leads and the health of your subscriber list.

Remember when people got so obsessed with quizzes for a while and you could like pay somebody $5,000 and they would build you a quiz? And we all know, like we all know that when you take the quiz, it's going to, at the end, tell you to buy something. Like it's about putting you into a category that you'll resonate with.

You're never going to get to the end of someone's quiz and they go, you know what? You're fine. Don't give me your money. And I feel like that kind of sneaky selling, like it's a turnoff now, right? I don't want to do your quiz just to be told that I should pay you for some sort of transformation. If you're pulling me into a quiz so that I can like find my fun little archetype and what kind of a whatever I am, like it's teen magazine in 2007.

That's so fun, But I don't have that fun anymore doing entrepreneur quizzes because I know at the end you're just gonna tell me to buy something. It takes the fun out of it. I feel like it's ingenuine. Ingenuine? Ingenuine, that's one of those words. Is that even a word?

It's not. Ingenuine isn't a standard English word. I mean, disingenuous. I feel like we might need to make it a word because I use it often. Whoops.

if you're thinking, I wonder if my freebie follows this formula that Jen is talking about or is at least close to it, wanna see if you can you state the result someone gets from your freebie in three seconds? Well, firstly, they should be able to get a result from the freebie and can you say it in three seconds?

Is the format fast for your person to consume? Like if it is a 45 minute webinar, no, that's not fast to consume. The way we built freebies, it's like a really quick read. It shouldn't take them more than a couple of minutes because the fact is people aren't going to give us a couple of minutes. Our attention spans are too broken. And thirdly,

Does your lead gain something from your freebie within an hour of receiving it? If your freebie gives them a six month action plan or something like hypothetical and long, no, that's gonna be a no. We want to know that they could gain something within an hour after reading this. Their life is different, their life is better somehow. All right, so I'll say them again.

Can you say the result someone gets within three seconds? Is the format fast for someone to consume and can they get a result within an hour of receiving it?

is the criteria of a list growth method freebie, the way that I am gonna teach you how to do it at how to grow your list with Instagram formerly known as freebie in a weekend. I'm so bummed that I can't call it that anymore.

will help you come up with your idea, create the resource itself, set up the entire freebie funnel, so like all the tech backend, and I'll even give you templates to promote it on Instagram,

Last year, Some people left and immediately had hundreds of new subscribers on their lists. I am so excited for this event because it was such a success last year.

And because it ultimately saves you so much time, like no more sitting on ideas, no more struggling with tech with nobody to ask questions to. We actually have, okay, let me tell you about the tech.

The way that we set up the tech is we have multiple tiers, T-I-E-R-S, so you can have no tiers, T-E-A-R-S. So basically, if you wanna use tier one fancy tech, tech similar to what I use, it's a little bit expensive, but there's lots of moving parts. If you have a huge list or a huge following, this is probably for you, so that would be the fanciest tier.

but there's also a super simple tier. I believe it uses only free software and we will show you how to set up your freebie funnel and just keep it as basic and simple as possible. So if you're a little bit newer, you're just starting to grow your list, you have a small following, then you can use that version.

I even have my operations manager, Jenna, is coming to this event and she runs a breakout room where people can ask her tech questions if you get stuck on something.

event is every single thing is done by the time we wrap up on day two.

Some people told me last year they didn't come because they didn't have an idea for a freebie and that just made me do like literally the ultimate facepalm because I'm like guys, yeah that's the idea. Like we're gonna show you how to come up with one. we're gonna give you different options. We're gonna show you different ways to ideate a bazillion different freebies. You're gonna easily come up with one.

We also have coach support.

We lay out this step-by-step process to make it as easy as possible for you. But because of that, I've added something else this year, you immediately get to log in and watch

the intro lesson. So you can start right now coming up with your ideas so that you have some already when you arrive on the day And then.

to the event on the day and pitch your idea to a coach and get a little bit of feedback on it and then just like you're off to the races. So some people will be coming up with their idea right there the morning of, but other people, keeners, if you want the lesson and come up with your new freebie idea or ideas beforehand, you can do that too. It works for different brains. I think some people...

kind of freeze at the idea of needing to come up with something on the spot, which I do totally understand. That can be stressful for some people. Some people like that pressure, other people don't. So now we will facilitate both types of person.

here's another really good thing that you can do with the new freebie. If you have people who are on your email list but don't typically open your emails or they're not highly engaged, they're just like, you have their email but you don't have their attention, you can use your new freebie launch to wake those people up. So maybe they haven't been opening your emails and paying attention to what you've been sharing, but

You can slide into their inbox with, I have a free present for you. No strings attached. You're going to get a quick win from it. You're going to get a result within the hour. That is such a powerful way to reinvigorate the people who already showed interest in you before, but may have fallen off a bit.

As you can tell, I'm so passionate about this strategy.

And I know people beat themselves up for how many email subscribers they have or don't have. So I'm so excited to give you the tools you need to grow your list and continue to grow your list for years to come.

Like I said, early bird tickets are on sale now.

I'm so excited to see you there and to help you grow your email subscribers using Instagram.

Grab your ticket and I look forward to meeting you.