019 The Secret to Building an engaged Email List (and how to do it quickly)

Welcome back! This is part 2 of a 2 part mini series on email marketing sparked by a question I asked my Beyond The Clinic Business Community on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/groups/beyondtheclinicbusiness) back in July. 

Today, we’re diving into the essentials of building your email list—quickly and full of the right subscribers who cant wait to work with you. 

Whether you're just starting out or looking to refine your strategy, this episode is packed with valuable insights to help you grow your list effectively.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Sarah gives practical strategies for attracting the right subscribers to your email list. People who actually want to be your clients or buy your thing.

It starts with having the right lead magnet thats strategically aligned to your paid offer. Sarah shares two of her own lead magnet mistakes so you can avoid them too. She also covers various methods for list building, including utilising your website, social media, collaborations, and paid advertising. Sarah wraps up with actionable tips to evaluate and improve your lead magnet, ensuring it attracts subscribers ready to engage with your content and services.

Key Takeaways

1. Strategic Lead Magnets: How to ensure your lead magnet is strategically aligned with your paid offerings, providing a valuable but not exhaustive introduction to your services.
2. Website Conversion Optimisation: Use opt-in forms strategically within blogs and across your website to capture leads effectively.
3. Social Media Integration: Leverage social media to promote your lead magnet, using engaging content that resonates with your audience's pain points and desires.
4. Collaborations: Join up with friends, colleagues and business besties to collaborate and benefit from sharing audiences.
5.  Paid Ads: Consider using paid ads for faster list growth when your budget allows.

Thank you for tuning in! Don't miss next week's episode, where I'll share behind-the-scenes insights from a social media experiment revealing why many struggle to grow on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. 

If you found this episode helpful, please leave a review. 

And if you'd like my strategic support in helping you grow your business, let's chat. Your can book a discovery call here: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/

Episode 018 Struggling with Email Content? Here’s What to Write https://ww

Mindset Programme Waitlist: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/mindset-waitlist

Freedom Formula: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/freedom-formula
Website: https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

The Master Plan - Discover the 22 steps you need to take (in the right order) to build a successful business so you can earn enough to live the freedom lifestyle you dream of. https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction & Series Overview
• 3:17 The Importance of Growing Your Email List
• 4:32 Understanding Lead Magnets
• 6:26 Common Mistakes with Lead Magnets
• 8:12 Successful Lead Magnet Stories
• 9:57 Strategies for Building Your List
• 11:32 Website Optimisation for Lead Capture
• 13:02 Leveraging Social Media
• 14:32 Collaborations and Networking
• 15:57 Paid Advertising and Final Tips

Transcript

Beyond the Clinic EP19

[00:00:00] Sarah Almond Bushell: Welcome back, my friends. Welcome along to part two of my email marketing mini series. And this week, we are going to go through how do you even get people onto your list in the first place? So my goal is to give you strategies on how to grow your list remarkably quickly with the right subscribers and not just any subscribers.

[00:00:25] Sarah Almond Bushell: And I also want to let you in on a couple of the big mistakes that I see my colleagues making with their lead magnets. And these are mistakes that I have made too. So this episode, it follows on from last week where I taught you the overarching strategy of email marketing. And it was in response of that question, what do I write about in my newsletters to my email list?

[00:00:52] Sarah Almond Bushell: Because what you write depends on what you're trying to achieve. And there are.. Three types of emails that you need to be sending out to your list in order to be strategic and in order to be purposeful. So if you haven't listened to that one yet, I highly recommend that you do I chose list building for today's episode off the back of that question that I asked in my Beyond the Clinic Business Facebook group where I asked, who he is.

[00:01:20] Sarah Almond Bushell: email marketing, because after some back and forth conversations, I discovered that most of my colleagues, not all of them, but most of them actually had very small email lists. Now when I say small, I mean less than a thousand subscribers. And actually, you know what? It's very hard to market your business in the online space when you With such small numbers and that is because the conversion rates are actually quite small.

[00:01:50] Sarah Almond Bushell: So today I want to give you a bit of a boost so that you can kickstart your email list growth because email marketing honestly is the foundation for having an online business and it runs alongside everything else you do like social media or SEO and blogging and it's what buys you that time freedom because once it's all set up And it's working.

[00:02:14] Sarah Almond Bushell: There's actually very little additional work for you to do. Whether you're brand new and starting from scratch or whether you've been using email marketing for a little while, I know that there's something in this episode for you. With that said, let us dive in. So let's start with a bird's eye view.

[00:02:36] Sarah Almond Bushell: Your content, which could be your social media content or your blogs or your videos or your podcast episodes, whatever you choose to create, that is the mechanism that attracts people towards you and your business. And once they're there and they're consuming your stuff, you need something to help them take that next step and become an email subscriber.

[00:03:02] Sarah Almond Bushell: And so your lead magnet is how you do that. So the purpose of social media is to actually get people off social media and onto your email list. And the purpose of your blog is to get people off Google and onto your email list. And it's the same if you've got a podcast or you have a YouTube show. Your job is to attract people with this content and then guide them to taking that next level of commitment by joining your list.

[00:03:36] Sarah Almond Bushell: So your lead magnet, it's pretty special, isn't it? It's got a very important job to do. And actually when you get this wrong, one of two things happen. So number one, your list growth is very slow. Or number two, your list is full of people who do not want to buy from you. So a good lead magnet leaves people thinking, My goodness, they could charge for this.

[00:04:04] Sarah Almond Bushell: Or gosh, if this is what I get for free, just imagine what their paid stuff is like. But a good lead magnet needs to be strategically aligned with your paid product or your service. And this is where most people make their mistake. So I'm going to share with you two stories. Both are mistakes that I have made in my business and I'm sharing these with you so that you don't make them as well.

[00:04:31] Sarah Almond Bushell: So when I first learned about digital marketing, I did everything by the book. I knew my ideal customer inside and out. I'd done a ton of market research. I was in the baby weaning space and I knew that these mums and dads wanted to know what the very best, Most nutritious food was for their babies. And so my lead magnet was exactly that.

[00:04:54] Sarah Almond Bushell: It was a PDF download called Baby Superfoods. And you know what? It went down a storm. People were signing up to get it every single day. I was absolutely delighted. But then, when I went to sell them my first course, which was called Baby Nutrition and Weaning, No one bought it. And that was because they were already weaning their babies.

[00:05:19] Sarah Almond Bushell: They didn't need my course because they'd already done their research. They'd already bought the books and learned from someone else. So can you see here that the lead magnet seemed relevant to me, but actually it wasn't strategically aligned with my paid offer. But my mistakes didn't stop there.

[00:05:39] Sarah Almond Bushell: Another lead magnet that I created and a mistake that I made was following the advice of quite a famous online marketing guru who said, make your lead magnet better than your competitor's paid offer.

[00:05:58] Sarah Almond Bushell: Now, I misinterpreted better for bigger. So what I did was I created a course. I created a get ready for weaning course because I'd made my mistake and I knew I needed to target these people before they started weaning. So this free course was going to be it. It was five modules. It was free of charge.

[00:06:21] Sarah Almond Bushell: And again, everyone loved it. It was so successful that I even ran ads to it and my lead cost was so low. It was costing me about 23 pence per lead, which for anybody who knows about paid advertising is unheard of. And of course my competitor was charging money for something very similar in the form of a live masterclass.

[00:06:46] Sarah Almond Bushell: And so you'd think that later on, when I went to present my weaning course as my paid offer, people would be lining up to buy it. They'd received so much free value from me, they were definitely thinking, gosh, you should charge for this. But guess what happened? When I offered my course, they said, oh, no, thank you, Sarah.

[00:07:10] Sarah Almond Bushell: We're still working through your free stuff. What I'd done is I'd given away too much for free. I wasn't strategically aligned again. So the key really is finding the sweet spot with your lead magnet. You want to give them a win, but not too much. You want to make it relevant. So it complements what you plan to sell later.

[00:07:33] Sarah Almond Bushell: And actually what it needs to do is get them thinking so that They have more questions, which ultimately leads towards your paid offer being the solution that they need. I want you to think about what you know about your ideal client and that's a really good place where you can start the conversation with them, where you can Give them an easy win.

[00:07:59] Sarah Almond Bushell: You do need to know their pain points. You need to know their frustrations, their fears and anxieties. You also need to know their hopes and their dreams and their desires and their goals as it relates to their problem and how you can help them. Have a think about what you offer that would help ease their pain or fulfill a desire.

[00:08:21] Sarah Almond Bushell: But remember, It's just a quick win that you give them that leaves them wanting more and not giving them the whole solution. So my lead magnet that works really well now taps into my client's anxieties around their child. I work in the fussy eating space and they are unsure if their child's fussy eating is typical or not.

[00:08:45] Sarah Almond Bushell: or just a phase, or actually, is it something a little bit more worrying that they need professional support for? It's a quiz. It asks a series of questions that are weighted, and it guides them to a result. Your lead magnet can be as simple as a PDF download, or it could be as complex as a quiz, and believe me, quizzes are very complicated to make.

[00:09:09] Sarah Almond Bushell: But, if you can use your face, and your voice in your lead magnet, that connection between you and your potential customer will be a lot stronger. And so on my quiz results pages, I have videos for that. Other ideas for lead magnets that do extremely well are things like masterclasses and short video series that build Day by day, one on top of another.

[00:09:35] Sarah Almond Bushell: And I've got those in my business as well. So it's this strategic alignment that will make sure that you've got the right people on your list and not just a list of freebie hunters. Okay, so moving on, now you know what makes an awesome lead magnet, I want to talk you through how you build your list.

[00:09:57] Sarah Almond Bushell: I wish that phrase of build it and they will come was true, because if that was the case, we wouldn't need to do very much in the way of marketing, but unfortunately that isn't the case. And so as business owners, we need to work hard to capture the attention of our ideal customer so that we can present our amazing lead magnets to them.

[00:10:21] Sarah Almond Bushell: So here's some of the ways that you can do that. So the first one I think is Pretty obvious, really, and that is putting your lead magnet on your website. If you write blogs, and your lead magnet complements the content of your blog, it makes sense to embed an opt in form within the text. You want to have it after a few paragraphs, but not right at the top and not too far down, because when someone has popped a question into Google, they expect to be able to get their question answered.

[00:10:53] Sarah Almond Bushell: But they often don't read all the way to the bottom. So you can add your lead magnet opt in to as many blogs that it happens to be relevant for. And if you think about it, most people are using their phones to access the internet. And so having an embed form or a button within the text is a really good idea.

[00:11:14] Sarah Almond Bushell: But also, just in case people are using computers, you can have an opt in for your lead magnet on the sidebar as well. And I actually put my most popular ones in my footer, so it's available there on every page. Next up is social media. Again, fairly obvious, but if you use social media as part of your marketing strategy, then you definitely want to be promoting your lead magnet there.

[00:11:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: The key with social media content is to create stuff that stops the scroll. Contrary to popular belief, tips and advice don't do this. And as a side note, this is how you end up with an audience full of other healthcare professionals following you. So instead, what you want to be doing is reflecting back you.

[00:12:03] Sarah Almond Bushell: your ideal customer's pain points, their worries, their frustrations, their goals, their desires, their dreams, the things that we've just talked about. And you do this in a very specific and tangible way so that they can relate to your posts. So around about 70 percent of your posts should reflect this and should provide Value or help.

[00:12:28] Sarah Almond Bushell: And at the end of these, you can have a subtle call to action in the form of a PS. For example, in my business, in the Children's Nutritionist, I might share a story about a child who was a picky eater and all the different tricks and tactics that mum did to try and get them to eat. Then I might give a tip or a piece of advice and then share the results of what happened when Mum implemented that piece of advice.

[00:12:55] Sarah Almond Bushell: And then at the very end, I might have P. S. Not sure whether your child's fussy eating is just a phase or something more worrying? Why not try my free quiz and find out? And then I can set up an automation with a tool like ManyChat so that when people comment the word quiz, I can send them directly a link to it as a DM.

[00:13:18] Sarah Almond Bushell: So that's around 70 percent of my posts. The other 30 percent are actually promotional. So this might be something a little bit more direct, like picky eater or problem feeder. If you're concerned that your child's fussy eating might be more than just a phrase, the quickest way to find out is by doing my free quiz.

[00:13:38] Sarah Almond Bushell: Text quiz below and I'll DM you the link. So I'll have a combination of those story, value based posts for them. Quite a soft call to action and then some more direct ones as well. Okay, moving on. Number three. Another way to get your lead magnet out in front of lots of people is through collaborations.

[00:14:02] Sarah Almond Bushell: So this is where I might be asking my friends, my colleagues, my business associates, people I might have met at events even my family members actually. to share my league magnet for me. So if it's a friend or a family member, they likely will, and they'll probably do it via social media or texting their friends, or even they might send a link via an email.

[00:14:25] Sarah Almond Bushell: But with colleagues or business associates or people who I might have met at a networking event, or What we might do is a collaborative event together. So this could be something like a podcast interview where I might be sharing lots of value to their audience or an Instagram live together where we can chat about the topic and entertain and educate their audience about the subject that, whatever it is that your lead magnet is about.

[00:14:52] Sarah Almond Bushell: And then you mention your lead magnet. And they will often share that link directly for you as well. These are really effective because when somebody else's audience trusts that person already and you come in as a guest, that automatic trust extends to you as well. So these are really effective.

[00:15:15] Sarah Almond Bushell: Now, my fourth and final Strategy for you is paid advertising. And actually it would be remiss of me not to mention paid ads because all of the strategies that we've spoken about so far are free, but they cost you in terms of your time and they cost you in terms of your energy. So if you're someone who doesn't have the time or energy, or actually you'd prefer to use that time and energy on something else, you can exchange it for a fee by using paid ads.

[00:15:48] Sarah Almond Bushell: So a few years ago, I trained with the amazing Salome Shalak in running Facebook and Instagram ads. And I still work with her now, actually. She's one of my mentors, but she is a phenomenal marketer with an amazing brain. And one of the things that. I learned and have applied consistently in actually both of my businesses is the power of Facebook and Instagram ads.

[00:16:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: So you can run ads that ask the algorithm to go and find your ideal client online. And get them to opt in to your lead magnet. And when you do that, you can grow your email list very quickly. And of course, the quicker you grow your list, the quicker you can begin to run sales campaigns and the more clients and more money that you're going to make.

[00:16:42] Sarah Almond Bushell: And unfortunately, All of those organic or free strategies take time, years even. And so I always advise my client to take advantage of paid ads as soon as they can afford it in their business. And you don't need a lot of money. Around 35 a week is what you need to spend to get started with paid advertising.

[00:17:07] Sarah Almond Bushell: All right. So I think this brings us to the end of this video. It's been quite another meaty, strategic episode, and now you know how to build your list quickly and effectively with the right people who are lined up to buy your services. And you also know the mistakes to avoid, and you've heard my story, so you can avoid those mistakes too.

[00:17:30] Sarah Almond Bushell: And if you've listened to this and think, gosh, I need a bit of help with my email marketing strategy, then I'd love for you to drop me a line and let's chat. My DMs are always open on Instagram. So come and find me there at dietitians in business. So my action step for you at the end of these two episodes about email marketing is to have a look at what your lead magnet is and evaluate it.

[00:17:56] Sarah Almond Bushell: Is it the right lead magnet for your ideal client? And I'd also love for you to critically appraise what you're doing on a day to day basis to grow your email list and decide, is it enough? Join me next week for a behind the scenes episode where I'm going to tell you about an experiment that I've been running on my social media, which has proven to me the real reason why most of us struggle.

[00:18:23] Sarah Almond Bushell: to grow on Instagram and Facebook. So that's it for another week. I hope you've loved this week's episode of the Beyond the Clinic podcast. If you have, I would love for you to leave me a review on whichever podcast player that you use, as it's this that helps us get pushed out to more and more listeners, and then I can help more health professionals.

[00:18:45] Sarah Almond Bushell: with their businesses as well. And if you like what I've been teaching so far, you'd like a little bit more help from me in building your business, then my diary is open to you for discovery calls. I want to help as many dietitians and healthcare professionals as I can to love their work, to appreciate the joy of being their own boss, and to help more people at the same time.

[00:19:11] Sarah Almond Bushell: If you want to chat through how I can support you, head over to sarahalmondbuttle. com and you can book a free Zoom call with me there. Bye for now.