This isn’t the course on list building or marketing management in any way. This is around the content within the email itself. But this lesson really is an important one. So, I wanted to add it in and it’s something that, it took me a while to kind of get my head around and actually do, it’s one of those kinds of bits of advice, that you hear and don’t really fully take on board. And then you do little and you’re like, oh my god, this works. Incentivise people to sign up. So don’t just put a ‘Sign up to our newsletter’ on your website. Okay, that’s fine. You may get people to sign-up, incentivise people to sign up. So, download this free PDF and then a checkbox for people to kind of opt into your marketing at the same time. So, dangle the carrot.
Get people to actually opt-in to access something. So, if you are e-commerce, it could be a 10% discount on your website. So, you are offering a sitewide 10% discount or free shipping on your first order. Subscribe to our newsletter. I’ve seen that quite commonly used. If not, put a PDF together so you could sort of turn around and say, well, actually I haven’t got the content for a PDF. I would argue that you probably do, if you’re an expert in your field, you’ve probably got a bunch of blog posts. Get those blog posts, put them all into a Google Doc, bang a cover on the front and save that as a PDF and then put that as a download on your website. Doesn’t have to be long. Two or three-page, PDF, anything that suggests value and adds value. Name it something catchy. Email marketing checklist.
Email design checklist, email design 101, the anatomy of a perfect email. These are things that we’ve used in the past and it really works. I wrote an entire book called Send Awesome Emails and it’s a couple of hundred pages long. I put that for free even though it took me ages to write. You can buy it on Amazon for $25, but I put that for free as a PDF download on the website. Now, that’s one of the biggest drivers for sign-ups. We get about a hundred sign-ups every day on our website because of the range of resources that I put on there. So, we’ve got about 20 resources, and I put them on the website months ago. I don’t do anything for it now, but we still get about a hundred people a day signed up to our newsletter because of those incentives. Now, if I didn’t have that and I just had a box saying to sign up to our newsletter, probably wouldn’t even get a tenth of that. So, you’ve really got to entice people in to sign up and at the same time, bring them into your email list. So, they’re there, they’ve had something of value from you. So again, they trust you. You are the go-to expert. They like the stuff that you are putting out there. So, when you do drive them to your blog, they’re kind of interested already. So, that’s something that I want you to think about, creating an incentive to get people into your list in the first place, and not just putting a box on your website and asking them to sign-up.
