AP 0631: How Do I Make the Most of My Mailing List for My Community Site?

AskPat 631 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody, Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 631 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate you, and we have a great question today from Tyler.

But before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks. A simple to use, super simple to use, cloud accounting solution for small business owners like you, that I use. It's an absolute joy to use because it helps me save time. And it'll help save you time, too. With invoicing, for example, you can create and send perfectly crafted invoices. It literally takes about 30 seconds. With online payments your clients can pay you online, which can really improve how quickly you get paid. And there's an automated expense tracking, too. So you can link your FreshBooks account, for example, to your credit card and debit cards so that when you expense stuff it's already there for you. So, if you want to check out freshbooks.com for free for 30 days, go to FreshBooks.com/askpat and enter “Ask Pat” in the “how did you hear about us” section. Awesome. Now here's today's question, from Tyler.

Tyler: Hello. My name is Tyler and my site is loltraininghouse.com. I'm a little different from most people who ask questions in that I don't write any content at all, I write code. My site is a SAAS that helps people who play the video game League of Legends find other players to play with or other people to help them improve. I have almost 5,000 registered users on the site and to sign up I require an email. So I have an email list of roughly 5,000 people. Right now I have one affiliate I recommend, but I feel I could be doing much better than I am with a list this big. What do you think I should do to better utilize my list? I have people who come to my site, register to use the tools I created, not to get content from me. Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Hey Tyler, what's up? Thank you for your question. I think it's really smart of you to have collected those email addresses just knowing that you could potentially do something with them in the future. But, obviously you're kind of just sitting on a potential gold mine there. I think it's pretty cool. And you won't know that until you actually try stuff out. So I'm thankful that you're asking this question.

First of all, congrats on the success of your tool and the list that you've built. I think that's really cool. The first thing that I would do is that I would start sending emails very soon. Because if you've built the list, but if you don't send any emails for months, for example, and then all of a sudden you send one, you're going to just have people leave because they're going to think it's spam, or they're not going to remember signing up for your list, or any of that stuff. So I would send them, you're going to have to send some content, I would say. And the content doesn't have to be anything like what other people do, creating stories or information, teaching, how-to, that sort of stuff, although that could be very useful for your audience to engage them even more, to build a relationship with them. They might not even know who you are yet, Tyler, so if you were to come by and say, “Hey, I'm the creator. This is why I built it. Thank you again for using it. Here's a couple tips you can use to enhance your experience with it,” for example, that could be one quick thing that you could do just to introduce yourself. But not just to introduce yourself, but to also share value at the same time.

But, ultimately, you'd like to survey your audience and ask them, “Hey, what else are you guys looking for?” I think if you have partnerships that's great. You can experiment with those, too. And, for example, you could segment your list just so you can make sure that you're properly advertising, or recommending, products that actually make sense for them. So you could segment out, for example, one thousand people on your list. You can do that with most email service providers, and send them an email talking about a particular product that you are an affiliate for. But, again, this is where that relationship that you build, and just, sort of, the introductions are really important before you do that. Because if you come out of nowhere and say, “Hey! You can buy this product, too,” it's going to be more of a pitch and people don't like that coming from nowhere. They want it coming from somebody who they trust.

I think it's really cool for you to start to utilize your list in this way. Again, you don't need to create massive amounts of content. You don't even need to create blog content or podcasts or any of that stuff. Email content, fortunately, can be very short as long as it gets to the point. So, I think what you could do is, sort of introduce yourself, thank people for being on your list, for picking up the tool, sharing some helpful tips for people to get to use it. And then, over time, you can start to inject, sort of, these offers, in addition to what they are already getting from you. So that's what I would do. And then, like I said, when you segment these lists, if it works out, that's great.

Say you send an email to a thousand people, and you get a, maybe, a five percent click-through rate, which is all right, and then you get some people purchasing, that's great. Well then you can start to keep track and start to understand what's happening with the metrics. And you can work on different subject lines and work on different content that would then lead to higher click-through rates and see what the actual pay-off would be after that.

But you definitely want to make sure that when you work with affiliates that you are working with people that align with who your target audience is. So if it's related to the same game, that's fantastic. That could work out very well. You can also use the opportunity with that list, because when you have a big list you have a little bit of authority, a little bit of power. And so when you reach out to these partners, even the one already have, you might be able to get special deals for your audience, too, which would make them feel great. And that would enable you to send these deals without necessarily having to spend a long time to build that relationship. Because if they could see that you've formed this partnership, but you got them a special, exclusive deal just for them as, sort of a, thank you, they're going to appreciate that. And that's providing value. In a different way than content and helpful and things like that. But giving people savings is a great deal.

So I do that often when I work with other people for JV partnerships or affiliate relationships. I often ask if there's anything special that they could do just for my audience. Because I know I have a large audience and they are great and often listen to what I recommend, so I say that. And I often get these deals for my audience, which is fantastic. So try to do that. That's what you should be doing. And also, like I said earlier, the surveying, kind of just asking, “Hey, what do you guys want more of? What kinds of products do you already use?” And that can give you an idea, also, of who you could then be reaching out to. So I would do that nearly immediately, too, if you wanted to.

So, reach out to your audience via your email list and ask them, “Well, what other League of Justice”…I can't even remember the name of the game, I apologize…but, what other programs are they using, what other tools will they want built? That's another thing, you can actually survey your audience to see what else you could build. There might be something, a great opportunity to create another product that you could actually charge a lot more for. Or just something that would be easy to do that could then allow you to provide more value to them, build your list even bigger and then go from there.

So, wishing you all the best, Tyler. Keep up the good work. And I look forward to hearing what you do with this list, 'cause you're off to the . . . race is off to a great start and you have a lot of opportunities, for sure, ahead of you. So, Tyler, thank you so much. I appreciate you. I want to send you an “Ask Pat” t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you've a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can it right there on that page. I appreciate you.

And I also appreciate FreshBooks for sponsoring this episode today. If you'd like to check out Fresh Books for free, for 30 days, head on over to freshbooks.com/askpat. Again, that's freshbooks.com/askpat. And make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Thank you so much.

And here's a quote to finish off the day, by Joe Chernoff. He said, “Good marketing makes the company look smart. Great marketing makes the customer feel smart.”

Love that quote. Thank you and I'll see you the next episode. Bye, now.