How I Doubled My Email List Subscribers in One Year

7/8/2019

I just lost 400 IG followers, in ONE week.

How many have you lost?

To be honest, I wasn't surprised to hear from my clients, friends, and others on social media that not only have we lost followers because of algorithm testing, but we are also about to lose the "like" capability, too.

So, while I enjoy Insta and spend most of my social media time hanging out there, it is the riskiest place to build a platform. Seriously!

1) You don't own it.
2) It can change however and whenever it wants to.
3) It's pay to play and becoming even more so.
4) It's saturated.
5) It is the LAST place I go to make sales and the return on time investment is minimal.

ACK.

Okay, Stef. So what do I do?! I have been focusing on IG, but I'm with you. It's frustrating. My engagement is at an all-time low and now more than ever I just want to expand my BRAND.

Ready? Here's the secret...

E M A I L L I S T + a platform that you own (like a podcast! #podcastprouniversity #shameless plug)

Do you have an email list, sis?

Is it rapidly growing?

Are you converting new list subscribers into friends that turn into paying clients or customers?

That answer should be Yes, Heck Yes, and YASSSSS.

Tune into today's podcast episode where I walk you through HOW I more than doubled my e-mail list in 12 months... (when it took me over 3 years just to get to 1,000!)

I will give you 4 TANGIBLE strategies you can walk away with RIGHT NOW to start quickly scaling your list.

I know you'll enjoy.

Love and light,
Stef

P.S. If you enjoy this episode, be sure to share a screenshot in your IG stories! I will shout you out on my stories! Yeahhh!!!!!

Listen & Subscribe on iTunes!

Full transcription available at the bottom of this blog post.

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Show Notes:

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION:

Hey girl, boss, you little amazing thing. You welcome to episode 76 of the show, and this is how the heck I doubled my email list subscribers in one year. And this is absolutely insane because it took me three years to get to roughly a thousand email subscribers and the past 12 months over 1500 additional brand new loyal subscribers. And my email lists, it is more engaged than ever. My open rates are higher than they've ever been. And so are my click through rates. I can't wait to give you all of these juicy email list growth hack.

What's up mama boss. Welcome back to The Mompreneur Mastermind Show. I'm Stefanie Gass, success strategist and passive income queen creator. If you're ready to step into your God led potential, create profit from your passions and capture the success that is already yours. This podcast was made for you as always. You can find out more and connect with me over at stefaniegass.com. So grab that cup of coffee or fill up that glass of wine and let's dig in to today's show.

So since we're talking about email lists, girl, are you on my email list? Did you know as a success with Stephanie insider, I send you my podcast episodes before they air and I have literally hours and hours of free trainings just for my insiders. So if you're not part of that list, girl, you got to get on it, head over to 30 growth hacks dot G R eight, the number eight.com and get on the list. And I'm going to send you all the gold girl. Okay. Let's talk, email list subscribers. Shall we? And like I mentioned, the intro, I've always kind of struggled with this because I feel like I wasn't getting any direct return from my email list for so long. I set it up probably four years ago, roughly. And for the first three years I totally ignored it. I just had a simple pop-up on my website that said become a success of Stephanie insider receive my tips.

Yeah. And well, it worked really slowly. And over the course of those 36 months, I had about a thousand people joined my list, which I actually think is really great. Cause it was purely organic. I wasn't focusing on it at all. It was purely from people finding my content on Pinterest or really Pinterest the driver. Cause it pulled people back to my website and then they saw that pop up. So that was great, you know? Totally cool. However, about 12 months ago, I'm like, okay, I really want to be intentional about growing this list and really focus on pouring into it. You know, what you focus on grows, right guys. And so I came up with these four strategies that I implemented over the past 12 months to really scale my list. And I actually more than doubled my list. In the past 12 months, I added over 1400 brand new loyal subscribers, which is amazing, you know, hopefully close to 3000 subscribers at this point.

And I have very highly engaged email list and lots of sales are coming out of that email list. So why do we need a list? Let's talk about this first. You don't own Instagram. And as we know the harder you try, the more you try to show up, it doesn't matter. Instagram can just with a click of a code in the background, somewhere changed the algorithm to where you aren't seeing anymore. And the more social media is growing and the bigger player it's becoming, the more, it's really a pay to play kind of game. So unless you're spending a ton on ads, you're getting buried. And also the thing with social media guys is it's just a touch. It's where you go to attract your ideal client. It's not where you go to sell something to your ideal client. Really. You want to start touching people, adding value, making them laugh, making them resonate with you and having them find you and hopefully friend, or follow you that way you can grow and nurture that relationship online.

And over time as they start to enjoy your content, then they go, what else does this person have? You know, do they have courses or do they have a podcast or video and X, Y, Z. And you can kind of take it off of that platform, but you can expedite that entire process by getting someone onto your email list. Why? Because you own your email list. You don't have to, you spend money to be seen. You write an email and it legit pops up in that person's inbox. Now whether they open it or not, that is totally up to how good you are, your copyright and your subject lines. But we can talk a little bit about that strategy as well. Getting it open is a whole nother training, but getting people onto the list is so key because you own it. If Instagram went poof, gone tomorrow, where are all your leads?

Are they living in the DMS? You don't want that. You want them in your inbox. And also the beauty of this is they start to see your consistency. You know, I write my girls, all of you, my subscribers twice a week, and I'm writing you, like, I call it like a little love letter, a little love, note sharing, like a story of vulnerability. And then I'm asking you to come listen to the podcast or reminding about a special offer that I have, or having telling you about a freebie or a giveaway. So I have a call to action inside of each email, along with a solution I'm providing and the people that are opening these emails on a recurring basis. They end up buying from me. Okay. Every time, whether it's in a week, maybe it's six months from now. It depends on how long it takes that person to gain trust in me or to make sure that they feel like I'm the right fit for them as a mentor, coach or teacher.

Okay. But the point is, if I'm in their inbox, I'm always front of mind. If I'm in Instagram, I'm not front of mine. They have to come find me to see what's new. So Instagram is how to find new people. It's not how to nurture people. Do you see the difference here? So how did I, more than double my list in one year, number one, here are your four strategies. You don't want to write these down and you're going to want to implement them ASAP SIS, because this online world is expanding. It's growing, it's flowing and you've got to be sure the leads you capture are yours. They're housed in your list and you have ownership of that so that you can grow your trust factor. Your bottom line, you can grow the relate-ability with your tribe. Number one is better freebies, okay, better lead magnets. And like I said, the first three years I started with join my newsletter. Like that was my freebie because I had no freebie. I didn't have a gift to give anyone. I didn't have a checklist or a handbook or a training. It was just become an insider and get my newsletter. And then I ended up, I never sent them a newsletter.

Like the hilarious part about this as the people that were on that list. Like for the first two years, all of a sudden they get an, a first email from me like 24 months later, like, who is this? So, you know, you need some thing because people are all about what's in it for me. I don't care what we're talking about. I don't, it doesn't matter whether it's business service, growing a list, getting a better deal. You have to give people something or they just don't care truly at the base of buyer psychology. They want something for free first. Okay. Like you guys, we love a good sale. A buy one, get one free. When you get a free gift or a free hand-me-down, how do you feel? You're like a lady. Like I got that for free. Like the other day I told my husband, look at this swimsuit.

I just got, it's $118 retail because the tag says so, and I got it for $26. And he's like, Oh my gosh, nobody ever sells anything for retail. Like you're such a sucker for clearance. And I totally am. And I bet that you are too right. So imagine if you can entice your avatar with something that they really need right now, a fast solution that would appeal to them. They're going to click. They're going to say, Oh, I need that. It's not fluffy. It's not long. It's direct implementation advice to get them to a fast result with the number one problem they are facing right now today. So in the past 12 months or so, I came up with impactful webinars, live videos that I was using as my freebie. I had a huge blog post. So some of them were 14 attraction marketing posts to sell more.

That was a video training that I turned into my freebie 10 steps to starting a podcast. You all have heard me talk about this one. It's a training webinar, 45 minutes direct to the point, it gets someone from point a to point B. How do I start a podcast done right? 30 ways to grow your following in 30 days, this was an actual blog post that I wrote down 30 different ways for my avatar, Lola, Hey girl, Hey Lola, to grow her following in just 30 days, because what was the number one problem I was hearing? I have no following stuff. I can't grow, or I don't understand what to post on social media. How do I sell more? Or I need to scale my brand. How do I start a podcast? The same question that I get over and over and over is my trigger.

It's my life, the light bulb moment of what people need from me. So I simply, I do better on video. And I know that my mama is consuming via video. So I do webinars. I love them. They're fun. If you're a writing person, you love copyright, do a checklist or something, just make it simple and seamless and make it juicy. And you need to have very direct, specific titling. I, a lot of times I see people like three ways to feel great. I'm like, what the, Hey, is that not Nancy, like three ways to feel great. I'm totally not clicking on that. Okay. But Nancy, what if it was something way more juicy and specific and tangible to me three ways to find empowerment in 10 minutes for free or three ways to get super motivated, to do more in your business in one hour.

Okay. Like why would I care about your freebie? Don't make it general, make it super like killer, like that copyright needs to slap me in the face. Like Steph, you need this. Okay. So I needed to create better freebies. That was number one. So I did that and I didn't do them all at once. I started with the 14 attraction marketing posts to sell more. And I started with that one, that one started to gain a lot of traction. So I created the 30 ways to grow your following in 30 days. And recently, as you guys know, I have the podcast course. So I created the 10 steps to starting a podcast webinar that leads to the course makes sense. Okay. Number two, I needed more traffic to these new freebies that were so juicy. And I knew that they were solving the problems of my Lola.

So how did I get more traffic to these brand new freebies? First, my podcast, hello, this show's been out roughly eight months. It's insanely like my mind is just blown out of my skull. How crazy fast the organic growth has been. And it's because I finally figured out who I am speaking to, who I am serving, got myself out of the way, started pouring in with my best content, showing up as my highest self to solve every single problem that you guys are facing. And when I did that, I took away all the barriers and I started to just lay it out authentically and showing up for all of you with zero end game, other than I'm going to serve it exploded. You know, Mary told Suzy who told Nelly, who told sissy? I dunno like that word of mouth is like wildfire. And the only way you do that is if you have a platform.

So how can you get your message out? Is it a podcast? Is it live video? Is it a blog? I don't care what it is, but you need to be in line with what your avatar wants from you. How do they consume information? Right? And then show up consistently over and over and over. So that was one massive driver to my freebies. And I talk about the freebies inside of my show. Like I did at the beginning of this episode, I said, Hey, yay. Are you part of my insider list? Do you want to get three free video trainings and 30 ways to grow your following in 30 days, sign up for my insider list right now, go to 30 ways to grow a following dot G R eight.com. Did you hear me do that? Like I just pitched you on joining my email list.

It's that easy? You guys so easy. So the next strategy that really worked well for me was Instagram stories. If you haven't heard my Instagram story episode, where I talk about how I grew my stories from like 300 views to over a thousand views every day, you gotta go listen to that. Cause stories is like the new Snapchat stories is the new wave because it's this behind the scenes. Look at your favorite people. It's the reality behind the brand, behind the perfectly edited pictures. And that's what people want. Everyone is so sick of fake of the perfection. Like I'm just super over it. And I think Instagram stories allows us to take the filters away and kind of bring to light who we really are at the root. And that is how we connect with someone at a much deeper level. So in stories, I'll just simply say, guys, did you know, I have a completely free training for you.

Have you ever considered starting a podcast? You know, this freebie is going to take you through the steps to starting one, how you might monetize one and what the heck you would even talk about. Join me, come save your seat. You're going to head over to Bitly slash 10 steps to podcasting Bitly slash 10 steps to podcast it. Like that's how I promote it. And then in the story, people are the link. Now, if you don't have 10,000 followers and you can't swipe up yet, just tell him links and bio and use a link tree and have it in there where they can grab your freebie and your gifts. You don't have to call it a freebie either. Like I say, I have a free masterclass. I have a completely free training for you, blah, blah, blah. So the podcast for me was massive stories.

Now the third one is paid ads, paid traffic. This is really a great strategy guys. Don't be afraid of Facebook ads to drive and find new people to come to your free stuff, to grow your list. If you're at that point, if you are negative in your business, I probably wouldn't start doing Facebook advertising. But if you have a little bit of profit, you're breaking even ish every month start with like $3 a day. I don't think you should ever go less than that. I would actually recommend you start at $5 a day, but start with that and create some very simple campaigns, finding your ideal client because you can yeah. Target her two 80 to a T you can figure out what does she do? What does she like? How much does she make? What is this woman searching for? You know, you can really define who she is as far as the audience is concerned and then drive it to your free gift.

Whether that's the webinar, a training, a YouTube link, whether it's a checklist, it doesn't matter. You deliver it via the first email. Even if it's a YouTube video, you still have them opt in to the freebie via a landing page. And then you send it automated. In that first email wallah, you have a new subscriber. You've delivered them something of value in exchange for their information. Boom. Now don't go jump into paid ads. If you don't know anything about them, if you are a beginner and you want to launch your first campaign or you've launched one before and it was a flop, go and take my Facebook ad masterclass. It's one hour. It's like a hundred bucks. Okay? And it will teach you how to set up your audience, how to create copy. That's going to grab attention, how to formulate the photos or the videos that you're going to use to resonate with your audience.

It's a beginner Facebook ads class. You can get that at my teachable store. It's Stephanie gas.teachable.com. All right, now, number three, third tip here. How did I continue to grow this? I started to capture emails with my Facebook group requests. When someone requests to join my group, there are three questions. One of the questions is, can I add you to my email list? I'm going to send you a bunch of free gifts. No spam. I promise. I don't think I've had, I maybe have 5% of people leave at blank. Almost everyone puts their email list in there. Y'all and what's so cool about that is I get between five and 10 Facebook group requests every single day. That's totally free marketing for me to collect my ideal person because the people coming and joining my group are obviously my type of girl. Now she's on my list and I'm pouring into her in my group.

I'm pouring into her with my email list. I'm asking her to come listen to my podcast twice a week. Like she's either going to listen to my podcast and fall in love with me, or she's going to unsubscribe from my list. And both of those options are perfectly fine with me. So add a question. If you have a Facebook group and most of you do where you ask them, if you can add them to the list, now it's manual. You got to copy paste the email in there, but it's totally worth it. Now. Number four, I had to get more strategic with collecting information from my website. Like I said, in the beginning, I had a pop-up and it said, join my email list, get my newsletter, which didn't exist. Sorry. If any of you were back in from the stone ages with me, you're like this girl is a really come a long way.

I said, messy action. I didn't say like, have it all together. They said, start your list stuff. And so I did, they didn't say sending you any who. So I went to my website and I try to do an inventory of my website every year or every six months, if I can. And I did an inventory this last go round, and I have episode on this as well, five ways to improve your website. And one of those ways is to really evaluate if the traffic is being captured. And I have a massive amount of traffic to my site from Pinterest and just organic growth. That's happened over the years. I've had my website going for gosh, six years or so. And Pinterest is just such an amazing driver. I also have a Pinterest app. So I legit have an episode for any question you have, okay?

Like I actually have a solution for every one of your problems. And if I don't send me a DM because I want to create it for you. So I took a look at that and I'm like, where are these 17,000 views going? Like they're not being captured. And granted, if I can capture 1% of that fabulous. So I fixed my popups to where they reflected what the person was going to get when they joined the list, because it's all about them. It's the solution. So become a Stephanie success with Stephanie insider. I'm going to send you 30 ways to grow your following ASAP. Plus my top three completely free video trainings, something like that. And those opt-ins skyrocketed. And then I also added a bar, a static bar. And these are just plugins that you guys can get straight from your website, just Google opt-in plugins, or if you have MailChimp or get response or whoever you use for your email, see if they have a pop-up embeddable code that you can use.

It's very simple. And I added a bar, a static bar at the top of my website that also says the coming insider, get all my freebies and said something like promise, I won't spam. You like, go look at it. I don't remember exactly what it says, but that static bar is also really capturing people because regardless of the page, they're on, it's staying there. And they're like, the more that they dig into my website, the more interested they are, Oh, I've read her about me. She's really intriguing. Oh, I've checked out all the free resources. I think I want to be part of this community with her boom, I'm going to subscribe. So I really noticed a big uptick when I added that bar. And when I changed the verbiage on my popup, and then the final tip was I added a chat pop-up to the bottom corner.

So if somebody has a question, they email me right there from my website, instead of having to dig for my email address or the can't find the purchase link or something, they can chat with me directly through that chat pop-up and it automatically saves their email address for me as well. So that's the other way. That's the fourth way. Okay. Now I have one bonus tip strategy. I have to leave you with you. Can't add all these peeps to a list and then just ignore them like I did, please. You have to actually nurture them. I'm going to use the word nurture. I am not using the word sell to them. One of the biggest mistakes I made early on in my list was creating a three email nurture that basically just hard sold, like, Hey, here's this ad, join this by this. And people just unsubscribed because they didn't know me.

They absolutely didn't trust me. After three emails, I wasn't putting value out into the world. I didn't have a consistent platform, like a podcast I wasn't showing up on live very often. And that's not going to resonate with anyone. How do you feel when someone comes in, hard sells you, you know, you feel kind of slimy or icky, so nurture, nurture your list. And this to me means once a week, you're sending them some love notes, send them some solutions, send them something funny vibe with your person. And I had a client yesterday and she was like, gosh, I'm so scared of like actually speaking how I normally do. Cause I'm super weird and woo. And I'm into all the woo and I'm afraid I'm going to repel people. I'm like, girl, let your weird woo flag fly girl. Like you want to attract the people that are judging like you.

And if that's a micro-niche, that's even better, you want to repel all the people that are not like your hundred percent ideal person. I would rather have 100 perfect. You know, faith based coffee consuming. [inaudible] their sweat pants wherein go get her a type personality driven entrepreneurs that are juggling mom, life business, and loving them some Jesus on high. Then like 2000 women that are nothing like that, that are perfectly styled or I don't know, whatever. She's just not my person. She's not my type of Lola. And you want that too. So when you're nurturing your list, come from your most authentic place, speak the way you normally talk. Like if you are like explicit and that is the way you talk, don't change it. If you are really like quirky and weird own it, okay? Because you're going to repel and don't get sad on people unsubscribed because they're just taking up a subscriber slot.

That's going to cost you money by Felicia waiting for my Lola's. We don't take Felicia's up in here. I do. If your name is Felicia, but you know what I'm saying? Right. So anyway, that is my tip is you have to start with something. And even if you don't have anything to sell, you still nurture. Make sure you tell them about that new blog post or share a funny story. You know, resonate with them. Even if there's nothing in that email, but a simple, Hey, come follow my Facebook account or Hey, come join my group or come double tap or take a screenshot of this and post it in your stories. If you like it. Any of those things still drive engagement, which is still a value add to you. As you create passive income products. I hope this was helpful. I recently was digging into this and just thought it was pretty cool that the growth has been so much better in the past 12 months.

And I thought about what I've done to do that. And I hope I can help pass along those strategies to you. And whether your email list is 17,000 today, and you use these strategies cool. Whether your list is one and you grow that list to five, like, Hm girl, celebrate those wins sister. Because again, your journey is yours. You can't compare yourself to anyone else's and you got to start somewhere and you have to grow somehow. And you just can't focus on what everybody else is doing. I know it's hard because you're like, well, is this email and the subscriber number doesn't even matter. Truly what matters is, are they open your emails? Are they engaging with you? Are you helping and people? And then over time, are they converting? So you need some people in that list to do that with. And it's important to take all these leads out of social and control them yourself, right?

So that you have ownership of that process. Anyway, I hope you loved this. I'm going to sign off and I want to leave you with an abundance prayer. Beautiful. I want to pray over you now that you are so filled with gratitude right now, look around you. Look at all the blessings that surround you look outside. Is the sun shining? Is it raining? Is it snowing? I don't know, but know that each of those seasons are a blessing in your life and that whether you're in a sunny season in your business and in your home and in your relationships or whether you are in the darkest most foggy day and you feel lost and helpless, no that you're in that season on purpose that God has got you, that his blessings are right around the corner. If you just keep showing up for your mission, believe in him. And through that, you will believe in yourself because he gave you the tools on purpose for you to go further. The mission that he gave you, it all comes back to God, his incredible glory. And I just want to remind you of that because your blessings, they're infinite. I'm cheering for you. I love you as always love and light. Stef.

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