How to build an email list of qualified leads (Email workshop series part 2) | Ep. 31 Content Magic with Lindsay Smith

Welcome to the second episode of my special 5-episode series, How to Have a Love Affair with Email Marketing.

Today we are diving into lead magnets, opt-ins and freebies. This is usually how you build an email list. However, I'm also talking about some non-traditional ways to build your list and what has worked for me.

Plus, I'm also talking about market research; one of the most underrated parts of building a business. And how this will help you figure out what your ideal clients need and you can build a lead magnet from this data.

And, I'm introducing my brand new membership, The Email Lab!

Freebie: Workbook

Lindsay [00:00:00]:
Today we are chatting about building the list. If you have an online business, you're creating content. And the way you create content is more important than ever. It's really noisy out there and learning to stand out is the only way. Hey, I'm Lindsey and I'm the host of the Content Magic podcast, all about being an entrepreneur and creating kick ass content to market yourself and your business. I have a not so secret superpower for copywriting, marketing and content, and I've helped hundreds, hundreds of folks just like you show up with a ton of confidence in the online space. I've been doing this content thing for 20 years and I believe the real magic is a combo of intuition, creativity and strategy. You can create content for your business without losing your mind, I promise.

Lindsay [00:00:49]:
So tune in every week for tangible content tips, inspiring guests, and some real spicy opinions. Probably mine. Ready to dive in? Let's go. Well, hello and welcome back to the podcast and to my special five episode series called how to start a love affair with email marketing. If you are just joining us, I'm going to encourage you to start from the beginning and jump back to episode 30 and to start there. Today we are chatting about building the list, and if you haven't yet got the workbook for this series, I'm going to encourage you to do get that as well. And you can do that on my website at lindsaysmithcreative CA workbook. And if you download it and print it, you will develop your own email marketing strategy as well as come up with a couple of ideas for things that you can send to your own list.

Lindsay [00:01:50]:
Okay, so today we're talking about the traditional way to build your list is to create a lead magnet, a freebie, an opt in of some sort. These words have all been used for the same thing. And I'm going to say six, seven, eight years ago, it was, the freebie was usually some sort of PDF, a checklist, or some sort of training or information of some sort. And you would promote it on your social media and people would want it, and then they would give you their email address and then the free thing would come in an email for them to download. So I feel like the time of the checklist is perhaps on the way out, depending on the industry and depending on, you know, if there's any other information surrounding that PDF. If you're new here, one of my business values is to not gatekeep anything. And what that means is I believe in giving away my best stuff, stuff for free, because, well, one, it's just good energy and two, I don't believe that giving away all of my best stuff replaces working with me one on one or in any of my group programs. I was taught once upon a time to if I was going to give away something for free, it has to be sort of teasery, like not give away too much.

Lindsay [00:03:21]:
I not sure I believe that anymore. So in the stuff I offer for free, I treat those people as if they are paying clients. And I think there are some traditional ways to create a lead magnet and some non traditional ways. However, whatever kind of free thing that you want to offer, I'm going to encourage you to do a bit of market research here. So if somebody is, or if you're getting the same question over and over again, I'm going to guess that that is something that you could offer for free. With this in mind, it does depend what kind of industry you're in. So, for example, let's say you're a bookkeeper. And the question you get again and again is, you know, they need some sort of people come to you because they're like, listen, I have no bookkeeping routine.

Lindsay [00:04:18]:
I need somebody to, you know, call me every quarter to help me get my books in order to know what's a write off, what's not. I need some sort of organizing system. So perhaps that bookkeeper can put together something that is free, that is some sort of quarterly check in process that that person has. Maybe that's the free thing. It helps them organize their books every quarter. And then, of course, working with a bookkeeper is far different than having something of your own. And maybe there's an email that goes out every quarter that's like, hey, here's a reminder. Make a tea, do your books, here's your, here's your system.

Lindsay [00:05:14]:
These are all the things you need to do. So, which would be far different than somebody that works in the beauty industry, for example, because that's a totally different, like what, what if you work in the beauty industry? If you, let's say you're a hairstylist, what's the thing people are asking you about most often? Or, you know, I'm gonna guess, like, I don't know. I once downloaded a thing. This was during the pandemic because someone showed me how to do, how to curl my hair with a flat iron. And the way she described it made it super easy. So those are just two examples. So it depends on your industry. And if you don't and if somebody is not, or people are not asking you the same question over and over again, do a bit of market research with current clients, past clients, potential clients, figure out the thing that they're struggling with and then create a freebie out of that.

Lindsay [00:06:12]:
Because creating something for free that nobody wants is not going to work. Also, here's another thing. One of my best performing free things, if you can call it that, is I have this community call. It's called content and coffee. I do it every Tuesday at noon. And the way I run it is sometimes we have a theme, sometimes we have some sort of content theme. Sometimes, like, for example, we'll talk about transparency. What does that mean? We'll talk about.

Lindsay [00:06:47]:
Sometimes we talk about, do you have a podcast? What's your strategy for that? And we talk about that. And then other times I give the group content prompts so they're coming up with ideas for their own content through this call. So this is an example of I'm giving people stuff for free. The signups for this Community call make up half of my email list. So again, that's probably not super traditional. I do have a traditional freebie on my website, but my community call, which has taken time to build probably like a year and a half, that has converted better than any other traditional lead magnet. And this is the other thing, too. Usually when it comes to building these types of freebies, you often have to look at them, often, maybe not once a quarter, maybe once a year, and figure out if they're still working and if they're still relevant.

Lindsay [00:07:56]:
So, for example, one of the first free things that I offered was a reels training. And it did very well. It was super popular. It got a lot of downloads. However, that was a while ago. And now, to be fair, at the time, that was my number one question. How do I create a reel? And so in that training, I think I gave five different types of reels to make with examples. And I also shared, like, I had a.

Lindsay [00:08:31]:
I was able to share my phone, like, on my screen so you could watch exactly what I was tapping and how I was creating the reel in real time. Creating the reel in real time. So that did very well. However, like, now that, I mean, I don't know. Instagram says reels are on the way out and static posts are on the way in this week. Who knows? It could be something different next week. And, you know, Instagram changes their rules all the time, so. But now that's not really relevant because creating reels is so much different than it was whenever I created that four years ago.

Lindsay [00:09:09]:
So it's outdated. So sometimes you have to change things up. Some people do change their lead magnets every quarter. Sometimes they stay relevant. Like, you know, my community call, even though it's been a year and a half, it has taken that long to build, and it still performs very well. So here's some other ideas. Is there a way that you can offer like a free consultation call or something? Maybe it's 20 minutes, depending on the industry you're in, or can you do some kind of, you know, video training? Is it easier, depending on your industry and your niche, is it easier to do some sort of video training where it's like, lives on your website and you're giving away super valuable stuff? This is a horrible cliche that helps people move their needle forward. Whatever it is.

Lindsay [00:10:04]:
Whoever your ideal client is, is that feasible or is. Can you do some sort of like, you know, training in an email? Like, do you. You know, I have a traditional. The traditional lead magnet I have on my website is called supercharger content. And it's. And so every day over five days, you get one email, and it is some sort of content tactic or strategy that you can implement immediately in your content to help make it easier to create. And so the thing about offering free stuff, there's always going to be people who don't become a lead because they just want the free thing. That's fine.

Lindsay [00:10:53]:
We're going to love those people where they are, and, you know, they are still absorbing our content. There will probably still be lurkers, and that's okay. When I. Back in the day, like years ago, maybe 20 more than 20 years ago, when I was still living in Montreal, I worked for a company called Sweet Spot and Sweetspot ca was the website. And I was essentially like their Montreal correspondent. So I was writing about the new restaurant or the new pedicure place or the new, you know, tea shop or whatever. And it was, you know, it was kind of like a blog ish. Anyways, they asked me to do this women's conference thing that was in Montreal, and there would be people who, and I remember we had these super cute pink fortune cookies that were custom made and inside the fortunes, like, had something to do with the website and the company and had the website on it.

Lindsay [00:11:56]:
So there were people who would walk around this conference with, you know, those, they would pull those carts behind them with like, sort of the backpacks on them, and they would just grab as many free things as they could. And that's okay. That's fine. And they might not be your ideal client. That's okay. They, they took the, they took what they needed and we're gonna love those people where they are. And there's one more thing I want to talk about before we say goodbye until the next episode. Um, this idea of email consent.

Lindsay [00:12:33]:
So, and I want you to dm me or send me an email if this has ever happened to you. So you start receiving somebody's emails and you have no idea how you got on this person's list. So sometimes if you book a discovery call or you meet somebody in a networking group or whatever, they, if you use maybe like a calendar link of some sort, that person will manually take the email that you used in the calendar link and add you to their list. So this isn't really the best practice unless you have a call with somebody and you say, listen, would it be okay if I added you to my email address? And I even saw somebody say on threads once that he had developed some sort of software that even if you went to his website to look at stuff, there was some sort of something that would capture your email and automatically add it to his list. And he got a lot of comments on that post. That is super unethical. And not to say that any of you are doing this, it's just, I just want you to be aware of the consent thing. Right.

Lindsay [00:13:56]:
And also I had a client that actually challenged me to this. She said sometimes she doesn't want the free thing. She meets somebody really great that she loves and she wants to receive their emails and she goes to their website and she says most often there's no space for people to just opt in to be like, yes, I want to receive your emails. Like, you have to get the free thing first. So, and I, this doesn't exist on my website. And I thought, huh, that's interesting. So these are a couple of things to think about. Oh no, I lied.

Lindsay [00:14:31]:
There's one more thing I want to talk about before we sign off to the next episode. So I'm launching a brand new program. It's a membership, it's called the email label. And I created this because I get a lot of questions about email and that's why I created this series and this is why I'm launching this membership. So you can go check out this new program at lindsaysmithcreative, CA email. And essentially this is a subscription based program. So you can sign up month by month or you can sign up for the year and you are. And the purpose of this program is to make email marketing much easier for you.

Lindsay [00:15:20]:
So you're going to be able to write your emails a lot faster. I'm going to give you some templates and some prompts where it's like, fill in the blanks so you don't have to. You know what it's like? I'm going to tell you. So we get the good food boxes where once a week we get all of the food and then they give you a recipe and you don't have to think about it, you just follow the recipe and then you have like food, you have a meal for two days. This is the, this is what it is. I'm essentially giving you the good food box for email marketing. And I'm going to. You get all of my.

Lindsay [00:16:00]:
You get a new training each month. You get a chance to have your emails reviewed before you send them out from like my professional copywriter brain. And you get these prompts and templates that you don't even have to think. You just fill in the blanks and put your own brand voice in it. And then you can send the email. So that's lindsaysmithcreative, CA email. Go check it out and let me know if you have any questions. So tomorrow's episode, the third episode in the series, we're going to be talking about storytelling and how you can actually use this in your email to create something super memorable and relatable.

Lindsay [00:16:47]:
And I'm going to give you a really easy way to do it. Okay? So until next time, gang, thanks for tuning in and we'll see ya. Thank you so much for listening. If you loved what you heard, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share this episode on social media. And don't forget to tag me on Instagram at lindsaysmithcreative. And if you do all three, I'll be your best friend forever and invite you to all my birthday parties. That's it for today, and I'll see you next time.

CONNECT WITH ME

Instagram: @lindsaysmithcreative
Website: lindsaysmithcreative.ca
Free community call: Content & Coffee
Listen to the podcast on iTunes
Listen to the podcast on Spotify