LIST BUILDING LIVE: All in on Ads with Chris Orzechowski

LIST BUILDING LIVE: All in on Ads with Chris Orzechowski

Pat Flynn: Hey, it’s Pat Flynn, and you’re listening to List Building Live, our first ever virtual audio summit right here on the SPI Podcast, where each day we release about six mini episodes to help you grow your email list. Why? Because you don’t own social media, but you should own your audience. So each day for three days in a row, we are bringing you people directly from Liz’s and my communities to share what’s working to grow your email list today.

That’s right, no quote, unquote experts or eight-figure entrepreneurs talking about what worked for them years ago, just regular creators like you who are working towards making a living online. Enough talking. Let’s get into it.

Liz Wilcox: Oh my gosh, I can’t believe we got Chris on this. I cannot wait to hear how have you been building your email list in the last six to twelve months.

Chris Orzechowsk: Yeah, thanks so much, Liz. So I have been doing a lot of different things over the past thirteen years to grow my list. And the one strategy that I keep coming back to– So just so everyone has context, so I do a lot of e-commerce, direct-to-consumer marketing. I have a marketing agency called Origin Media, and I also sell courses and coaching, consulting, and books and all other different types of digital products as well, mostly from my email list.

And my email list is kind of like the backbone of everything that we do. So obviously it’s an important asset for me. Out of everything that I’ve done, the thing that I like the best is advertising. I don’t like using the term paid ads. I know everyone uses that term. I just call it advertising because all advertising is…

Paid ads is kind of like redundant. But, um, advertising’s great because people shy away from it, number one, so there’s less barrier to entry. People are always posting content. Now with AI, there’s a million people, you know, who can write decently well enough. So I feel like the feed has gotten a little bit tougher to stand out because now everyone kind of has this ability to just spin up infinite amount of content.

It doesn’t mean it’s a bad strategy, but for me, I am busy. I got stuff to do. I’m hopping on calls with clients. I’m writing emails. I’m developing strategy. I’m doing consulting. I got three young kids at home. I don’t got time to do all that stuff . So what I would much rather do myself is just run ads to any kind of funnel.

Now, I do obviously like book a call funnels and things like that for my agency, but for my email list, what I like doing a lot of times are lead magnet funnels with an off-run thank you page. These are not super-duper hard. They’re actually pretty easy. Obviously, it takes a little bit of, you know, logistical work.

In the beginning, you have to think through, “Okay, what am I gonna give away for free?” And then what is gonna be an offer that’s congruent with what was on the front end? We just built a new funnel. It’s called the Flow Fixer Checklist. This is actually a, a piece of some products that I had. And it’s– I have it right here.

It’s essentially… Oh, right here. It’s essentially like a two-page checklist. And you can print it out if you want to, but it has like thirty-seven ways to make more money from your email flows, and that’s a big pain point that my market has. So what we’re doing is that’s what you get for free, super valuable thing for free that they could actually use and like make money and get an outcome with.

And then on the thank you page, there’s an offer. And what’s cool about these offers is that those offers pay for the traffic. So If you know your numbers and you do a little bit of testing and you have a little bit of ice in your veins, you can engineer a funnel where you’re getting dozens if not hundreds of email subscribers a day completely paid for, and a percentage of those people are actually going to be buyers.

And these things work great because the velocity is insanely fast. A lot of times when people grow their list, they’re like, “I’m gonna do content,” or, “I’m gonna start a YouTube channel. I’m gonna do SEO,” or, “I’m gonna do list swaps or a podcast.” And, like, those things are great. Like I said, I do those, too.

Like, I still do those things. They still work. So I’m not saying don’t do those things. But for me, the velocity is just absolutely insane because let’s say you start spending 100 bucks a day on ads You could get anywhere from, you know, 25 to 70 email subs a day, depending on what your costs are. And obviously as you scale, the numbers might change a little bit.

But not only are you getting that many new email subscribers, Meta is really good, or really all these ad platforms kind of work the same, but Meta is really good at knowing like here’s the kind of people that you’re trying to find. Like they tend to like this stuff, so we’re just gonna keep showing your ad to people who like this stuff.

And what you could do is you could use conversion pixel so that it orients for buyers, right? Because obviously the goal is to make the traffic pay for itself so that your list grows for free. So you can use the pixel and it will fire back data and be like these are the kind of people who bought. Now instead of finding people who are interested in your lead magnet, we’re gonna find more people who are interested in actually buying from you.

What’s cool about this is I have gotten people who have went through the lead magnet funnel. I had a $7 offer on the last one that I did. They bought that, and then months later they would come to me for consulting and pay me a lot of money for consulting. And what I do with these funnels, which makes them work really well, is I load them up with order bumps and upsells.

Now a lot of times people sometimes are like, “Ooh, I don’t know, like I’ll have one upsell maybe, maybe two, but that might be pushing it.” I put five on there . I put like two or three order bumps if I can. I don’t care because honestly, if the math doesn’t work, the funnel doesn’t work. So like nothing really else really matters.

I had a woman one time, she was telling me, she’s like, “You know, I went through your funnel, and I got a little bit pissed because you had five upsells in that funnel,” and I was like, kept clicking through, and I was like, “Come on, man, like what are you doing here?” She was telling me this on her onboarding call for private consulting with me, which is, you know, five figures a year.

So I was like, “Okay, well, you’re here. It worked, right?” So it’s kind of funny. But obviously with ads, the, the things that you need to watch out for is… I say that, you know, I kind of joke around like you need to have ice in your veins, like you really do because what happens is when you run ads, you’re gonna have days when your ads absolutely crush it, and you’re gonna have days when you feel like your whole world is ending.

Like, like you oscillate between like it’s so over and we’re so back within like hours of each other. Like, ’cause there’s days… Like we got up to the point where we were spending like three fifty a day on one funnel, which again is not like a huge amount of money, but we were spending like three fifty a day consistently for like week after week after week after week.

And there’d be days when it’s like, you know, you make two twenty, and then you make one seventy, and the next day you make like one eleven, and the next day you make like 63 bucks, and you’re like, “Oh my God, what’s happening? Like this thing’s dead. Like my whole world, you know, like everything feels like, you know, the walls are closing in.”

And the next day you make like 850 bucks, and the next day you make like 600 bucks. So like you have to look at weekly averages w- with your ads, and like that’s the biggest thing that kind of keeps you sane. And you look at it over the course of seven days and you say, “Okay, over the course of seven days, here’s how much I spent, here’s how much I made.”

Now listen, if you spend $1,000 and you make back nine eighty-four, that’s about break even. That’s close enough as far as I’m concerned. Maybe some weeks you make a little bit over that. But as long as your ads are mostly paying for themselves and you’re getting actual buyers onto your list in addition to all those free people, you know if you have good offers on the back end, you’re going– that’s where your profit’s gonna come from, and you’re gonna have so much more velocity in terms of list growth

Liz Wilcox: I love this so much, and this actually, I did this today.

So I was scrolling Instagram on my lunch break, as one does, and nowadays Instagram has, like, ads when you’re watching stories, right? It’ll have, like, four or five ads, and this one was for get my exact emails for, you know, w- how I sold out my mastermind program. And I’ve been contemplating hosting a mastermind program, and I was like, exact emails.

I would… I’m, y’all, I’m nosy. I’m so… That’s why I host events like this. I’m just so nosy, right? I was like, oh, you know what? Actually- And I even said out loud, “I should buy that,” and I clicked on it, and it’s exactly what Chris said. This lady has got to be having, like, the funnel of her life. She had the four or five upsells, right, or order bumps.

It was, the next was, oh, well, get my, when they book a call, get those emails. I was like, oh, well, yeah, you know, I, I need those. And I almost bought all of them, but I, you know, I’ve been, I’ve been on a budget, and I said, “Oh, you know, my assistant’s gonna kill me if she sees these PayPal charges.” She just told me I’ve already spent $100 on, you know, little funnel freebie a- stuff, right?

So I was like, okay, no. But I went through and I read, and they were all so succinct, right? They were all so apt. They were all so perfect for someone like me. They just went in sequential order of, oh, you know, if you give a mouse a cookie, right? Mm-hmm. Like, oh, well, if you, if you buy this, then you’re gonna need this.

Oh, if you’re gonna book this, then you’re gonna need this. I was like, oh, this lady is a genius. I have got to reach out to her. She’s so smart. So I love, love, love this. Yes, ice in your veins. It’s gonna be up and down, but that’s entrepreneurship. Thank you so much, Chris. I’d love to know, if we wanna get on your email list today, how do we do that?

Chris Orzechowsk: Yeah, you can go to theemailcopywriter.com. That’s one of my websites, and I give you a free copy of one of my books. It’s called Make It Rain, and, uh, that’ll teach you some of my email philosophy and strategies. So it’s theemailcopywriter.com.

Liz Wilcox: Thanks so much.

Pat Flynn: Okay, another great list building strategy from one of our amazing community members.

I just love seeing people find ways to grow that I didn’t even think of. That’s something I’ve always loved about being in communities with other entrepreneurs. It’s just so inspiring and motivating at the same time. If you need that in your list, a group of business peers to help you take what you’re learning here at this event and turn it into real action, come join us inside the SPI community.

Not only will you finally have people keep you accountable, you’ll have all the resources you need to make a living online, not just with email marketing, but content creation and monetization as well. And right now, we’re offering fifty percent off and some other fun bonuses just for List Building Live listeners, and that’s you.

Just go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/listlive and use code 26LIST to grab this special rate. SmartPassiveIncome.com/listlive and use code 26LIST.