The Original Conversion Copywriter, Joanna Wiebe
Teaches You How to Grow Your Email List

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TRANSCRIPT

Hello, Joanna here from Copy Hackers. What is the number one marketing tactic Copy Hackers used last year and in this our second year to grow our business by over 100% in the course of the year? What one thing do we attribute that growth to… and what does that have to do with a colander, a sieve, and two very sludgy cups of coffee?

The answer is email marketing – and in particular growing and cultivating our lists of subscribers.

We’re going to be talking about email marketing for a lot of this week. We’re going to start today by talking about how to increase the number and quality of subscribers that you have.

When I’m talking about subscribers or about building your list I’m not talking about the emails you collect when a person buys something from you or signs up for a trial of your software. Those emails are what you use to send transactional emails like receipts and product update notifications. You can add some marketing messages to those but you’re rarely engaging people with those emails. That’s not the point with those emails. When I’m talking about list building I’m talking about what Rob Walling talked about the other day and that is getting more people to opt in to receive really cool information from you. You need to have that bait to bring them in. Hopefully, you did go through and write the emails for that drip campaign like Colin Nederkoorn showed you.

Once you get people onto a list you can do a lot more with them because they have opted in, they’ve said, “Yup, okay, it’s cool you can send me relevant information.” That permission alone is really powerful and it’s a big part of increasing the reach of your marketing and your commercial rate.

Now, why would you want to build an email and increase subscribers to that list? Let’s talk about that.

For start-ups and small businesses a lot of the power is in taking those few visitors that we already have and getting them to come back, which we already learned a bit about with re-targeting and that’s really what email marketing is all about.

If can help to think of your site as this big hole, this giant hole and people are coming in and you’re doing your best to trap them. To trap a few of them, to get some of them to stop and stick around and stay with you. But there is this huge hole and they’re all just flooding in and coming through it and shooing out the other side and they’re gone and that’s it and that sucks.

We’ve got a sieve, a colander and these two cups of coffee and they’re not regular coffee, for this experiment they’re filled with [inaudible 00:02:55], not grind but it looks like it, with ground coffee beans. This sludgy disgusting junk represents the people who are coming to your site, your visitors. Let’s pour it through here. We get a lot of run-off. But we also got a lot of [inaudible 00:03:13] leftover and as you can see not that much [inaudible 00:03:18]actually left in the bowl.

Now, let’s take the second cup of visitors and we’ll pour that through here. I can see that a lot runs out and we’re left with a remarkable display of coffee beans all over the side. The sieve trapped a lot more of your visitors, the [inaudible 00:03:47] leftover. The colander let a lot more through.

Now, the idea here, what this is meant to illustrate is that we want to do our best to take that big hole and make it small or overlap criss-crossings over it, really we’re trying to make it so we’re trapping more people. Trapping sounds like a really bad kind of word to use, like … it’s not good, it’s not a good word but the idea is to keep more people around and to do that we have to make those holes that people can sneak out through a lot smaller and that’s the difference between the colander and the sieve. We want our site this big hole that visitors just pour through to start getting a bit tighter.

Everybody who comes to your site is somebody who is a candidate for your list. Everybody, not everybody is going to buy, not everybody is going to share, but unless you are dealing with people who don’t use email then everybody is a candidate to sign up and hear more from you. If they came in through a blog they’re looking for information. If they came in through your mini-commerce site or your sell site they’re looking for something related to the solution that they’re in search of. You can deliver that to them by information that’s dripped out through your email marketing.

You’re going to use your micro-course to do two things. The first thing is to grab visitor attention and the second thing is to give them a reason to give you their email address. That reason has to be something bigger than, “Hey, I’ll send you free stuff.” What I’m really talking about there is your value proposition for your giveaway, for your offer for your micro-course. You need right now, today to figure out the value proposition for your micro-course and then use that to help people understand that they be kind of crazy not to sign up, not to try to get this from you today.

In just a second I’m going to ask you to pause this video, not yet. I’ll tell you when.

In the comments below, yes, publicly, in the comments below I’d like you to post a quick line and it doesn’t have to be genius, that describes what unique and highly desirable about the free thing you’re giving away as bait to bring people in to get them to give you their email address. The highly desirable part of it should be something that’s closer to their benefit, to the thing that your end user wants most.

Take a look at the clock, what time is it? In three minutes, you’ve only got three. I would like you to write down that quick value proposition for the freebie that you got then post it and then come back. Try it. No one’s judging you. You can’t get it wrong we’re just doing an exercise.

Now, great, that’s great, we’re going to put that aside for now. We’re going to talk about nine ways, really quickly because I’ve only got nine minutes total more, already deep into it.

Nine ways to start getting more of your site visitors to subscribe to your list and then your task today, your assignment will be to implement on your site today at least four of the following nine subscription boosters.

Number one. Open with a welcome page, that’s when someone arrives for the first time. A first time visitor, usually you present them with a page that invites them and this isn’t an overlay necessarily, it could be an overlay but it’s not a pop-up. It’s a full-on welcome page.

Option number two, use a pop-up invitation. You’ve probably seen a lot of this, you’ve already seen drip and you may be using that already. Alternatively, you may want to try something like pop-up domination. You may not adore seeing this pop-up invitations when you go to a site but remember we’re not marketing to you and as an FYI when pop-up domination isn’t on Copy Hackers. We see about half as many sign ups as when it is .

Number three. Use a bar at the top of the page above your header. Examples are Hello Bar and Viper Bar by ViperChill, I think. We use that one both of them seem to be great and they integrate with popular email tools like MailChimp.

Number four. Embed an invitation at the end of each blog post. If you’re really aggressive you can do it at other points within your blog post.

Number five. Add an invitation to your side bar right up toward the top of it on your page. If you have a side bar on your blog then use your little widgets, hopefully you’re able to do that, most people who are on WordPress can absolutely do that. You may want to get some custom WordPress work done to make it extra good. But for now we’re just going to worry about getting that sign-up field in your side bar at the top of the page. If you lead with your blog rather than talking about the products you have for sale or the software that you have for sale, you can actually use the opening banner that you might have on your homepage which would have blog post below it.

Number seven. Create an opt-in page. This is a squeeze page like we’ve already seen over the past couple days of PPC and re-targeting. But now you’re going to put it right on your site. It’s not going to be a landing page that’s outside of your site like we see. It’s going to have your navigation, it’s going to have your headers, it’s going to live inside your site.

Number eight is create squeeze pages. It’s really close to what I just talked about as creating an opt-in page except squeeze pages are those landing pages we saw at PPC with the focus being not on selling a product but on getting someone to sign up to hear more from you.

Number nine is off your site it’s add an invitation to any of your transactional emails that you can edit. You might have receipts, you might have emails that are triggered to go out, say a week after someone signed up for something. Things like that add a little box down to the bottom or a little link to go to one of your landing pages or your opt-in page to get people to sign up if they want to learn more about XY or Z.

So, which of those four are you going to implement today?

You can choose … I recommend, because it’s really easy and quick to do … I recommend these four.

Thanks, that’s it for today guys. Now off to do your assignment.