AP 0845: How Do I Grow My Email List with My Email List?

AskPat 845 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn:  Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 845 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from Glenn, but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is DesignCrowd. Hey, if you're stuck for ideas on how to develop your logo, website, or business cards, you can connect with creative minds around the world with DesignCrowd.

It's a website that helps businesses like yours crowdsource custom graphics from over a half million designers worldwide. Doesn't matter what you are, a dentist, accountant, photographer, DJ, you can get the perfect custom design every time or your money back. Check them out, DesignCrowd.com/AskPat to learn more and download your free guide to outsourcing great designs, and also get $100 off your next design when you enter the promo code “AskPat.” All right, now here's today's question from Glenn.

Glenn: Hey Pat, this is Glenn. I appreciate everything that you do, I have a quick question about growing my email list. I have about 30,000 people on my list. They're engaged, it's a good list. I've grown it primarily through doing JV Webinars over the past couple years, and that's done well. But what I'm thinking is I want to grow my list by using my list, and I wonder if you have any suggestions for that. I mean, maybe word of mouth referrals, or doing some contests, or something like that. Anyway, that's my question, how do I grow my list with my list? Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Hey Glenn, thank you so much for the question. Also, congratulations on growing an awesome and engaged email list. I think doing it through JVs is a very smart way to go about it, JVs being Joint Ventures. What Glenn has done is he's partnered with people, probably building relationships along the way obviously, and then doing webinars for them, or things like that. So that people will not only just get on his email list because they're registering for the webinars, but more than that, they're seeing him, and they're building a relationship with him live, and in person. Usually it's that way. You can also prerecord these things as well, but that's a great way to go about it. Congratulations Glenn.

Now, how do you grow your email list, with your email list? Well, you have a few options here. Number one, and the easiest way to do it, is to just make sure you're emailing your email list every time you come out, or a lot of times when you come out with brand new content. Content is what gets shared, right? You already have this list, send them to the new content that comes out. What's going to happen is a lot of them are going to share it, and you're also going to hopefully ask them to share it as well in those emails that you send out. When they share it, new people are going to come by, new people are going to subscribe, and then they're going to get your next email that's going to ask them to share this new and upcoming piece of content that you have, and the cycle just keeps going.

That's the easiest and quickest way to grow your email list. It doesn't matter how many people you have on your list, you should be doing that. Secondly, you can run contests. Contests are great because people are on your email list, and because they have basically told you, “Hey, I'd love to hear more from you.” You know that they're excited about what you have to offer. If you have a contest to kind of stir things up a bit, it really brings it home for the idea of actually populating more people into this email list of yours. The way the contests work, is they have to be setup in a viral sort of fashion. Meaning, people will register, or enter the contest, and they get more entries as a result of sharing it.

There's a couple of tools that can help you do this. If you have a WordPress website, I recommend a plugin called King Sumo. I've done a couple contests in this way, and you can see because the numbers tell you exactly how many people are brand new to your list, or how many entries there are versus how many people there are. You can tell that, yeah, people are indeed sharing it, and that's a great way to utilize your email list to grow your list even more.

The other plugin, or it's not necessarily a plugin, but it's more of a web application that you can use, is called Rafflecopter. That one is useful, especially if you don't have a WordPress site, you can still use that one I believe. That's King Sumo, that is by the guys over at App Sumo, and then Rafflecopter. You can utilize your email list to announce those contests, and just get things fired up and going right away.

Then finally one thing you could do is create a free giveaway that you're going to be giving away to other people, to not just your email list, but it's a free giveaway, such as an ebook, or a checklist, or it doesn't even have to be very huge, it could just be a single page PDF sort of quick start guide to a product that you just came out with, or perhaps a checklist related to a process that you just shared on your blog, or podcast, or video. You can give that away to your email list, and when you do that, don't just send them the file.

The thing is with your existing email list, it's nice to not have to get people to sign up again to get something, right? Send them to a landing page where they can download it. When they do that, you can also give them a call to action to share it to brand new people from there. In a similar way to the contests, it really creates this viral sort of effect. Here's the thing, because you're giving them something for free, they're going to be very thankful, and they're going to look for ways to pay you back. An easy way to do that is to just share it. You want people to share it, because you want to get it in as many hands as possible. Knowing that, you're also going to get people when they go to not that page that you give your email list, but a new page that has a registration form for your email list. That's what they're going to share, you're just going to grow your list that way.

Glenn, hopefully that answers your question, thank you so much and I look forward to hearing about the results. Keep going, Glenn's website just so you all know is SurvivalStill.com, super cool. Glenn, I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Also, mark your calendars. Every Friday, 1:30 PM Pacific, I'm going live at Facebook.com/SmartPassiveIncome, and I'll be able to answer your questions live there as well. Subscribe to that, and I look forward to this Friday with you. Then finally here's a quote to finish off the day by Gail Sheehy, “Growth demands a temporary surrender of security.” Love that. It's also another way to say, “Guys, you gotta get uncomfortable sometimes in order to grow.” Actually, most of the time. All right, take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks again, bye.