Get List Quick, Part 1
There are two primary ways* to grow your email list quickly. And I’ll allow a third if you already have a lot of website or social traffic.
The two are paid advertising and affiliate marketing. In part one here, we will look at the benefits and drawbacks of each. In part two we will explore the best practices for doing each effectively. And just so you know, we do a lot of both of these because they work so well.
Growing Your List with Paid Advertising
Let’s get the biggest drawback out of the way: this *costs* money up front. If you don’t have an ad spend budget, this isn’t an option for you.
If you have some spend to get going though, you can run traffic to an optin form and after a relatively short amount of time you get a cost per lead. That will frequently vary about 30% in either direction over the course of a few months, and over the course of a year will often rise slowly by anywhere from 50%-100%. (Note that this is based on historical data in our particular professional marketplace and your results may vary.)
The theory is then that with a good idea of your cost per lead, you can do the simple math to arrive at how much you need to spend in order to grow your list to the size you want it to be…
But as much of a benefit as this seems to be, we rarely recommend scaling in such a simplistic fashion. The reason is that all spending happens in a cashflow context, and the strategic thing to do is to spend as much as you can afford to on any given offer, understanding what that lead will be worth to your business over what period of time.
Growing Your List with Affiliate Marketing
In the professional- and self-development space, it sometimes seems like everyone knows everyone else. This is a good thing for affiliate marketing. We have had a great deal of success simply asking other teachers or organizations who have large followings to promote one of our offers.
Our typical arrangement is that an affiliate will promote a program during a window we request in exchange for either a commission on the sale of the offer (usually 30%; up to 50%) or a cross-promotion for an offer of theirs to our list at another time.
The greatest benefit here is the fact that due to having heard about your offer from someone they already trust, leads from affiliates are generally much more likely to convert than cold leads from somewhere else. And unless you are in a very microscopic market where there is an extraordinary amount of email list overlap, the revenue you receive, even at 50-70%, will be revenue you otherwise would not have received at all so the commission is totally worth it.
The biggest drawback to this strategy is that it takes some social capital to get started and keep going. If you don’t have a connection to someone with a large email list, and if you don’t have a commission or exchange to offer them that would make it worth their while, it will be very difficult to get the attention of the person who manages their email list.
Strategy #3 for High-Traffic Websites/Social Followings ONLY
The final strategy that we recommend is putting a free optin offer on your website or social media. This will only grow your list “quickly” if there are a lot of people there to see it (assuming of course that it’s a good offer). We have seen this work ridiculously well when there is a great deal of search volume for your optin topic too. It can help even low-traffic sites, but is often not worth the investment to set up for the minimal return you will receive.
Part 2 of this article will focus on best practices for each strategy.
*Note: Look, you can buy lists. A lot of folks will sell them to you, “cleaned, validated, up-to-date, etc.” Don’t do it. Unless you’ve recently been delighted to receive a piece of cold email from a service you actually wanted, and you’re in an industry where someone might feel the same way. And even then…there are precautions you should take, and truly, it isn’t usually worth the cost. There is no quick road to excellence. There is no replacement for a solid strategy.
