If you don’t have an email list for your online business, then you’re leaving a huge amount of money on the table and this is never something any business owner should be doing. You may hear people saying that email is dead and that you should be focusing on other ways of building an audience, but this is very far from reality and the highest portion of sales for online businesses are still made through email marketing.

In this post, we’re going to share with you exactly what steps you can take to get your first email subscribers no matter whether you’re offering copywriting services, selling digital products or something like mobile app development from Xibis.

Create an opt-in:

Come up with an extremely high-value opt-in for your ideal client in the form of a mini-course, video series or downloadable PDF guide that they can use to get an immediate result if they implement the advice and strategies that you’ve given them in the opt-in.

Make your offer stand out:

One of the main things people fail to recognize when trying to grow their list is that just because something is free, doesn’t mean it’s valuable or that people will want it. Even if they do only want it just because it’s free, then that’s hardly the kind of people you want to be attracting into your business, so it’s always a good idea to make your freebie offer as high value as possible so that people actually get a result when implementing it. You can do this by making it stand out by creating something a bit different to what everyone else is offering for their opt-in.

Create an opt-in page:

You can create a simple opt-in page using something like LeadPages or ClickFunnels (you can use whatever other provider you prefer for this), quickly make a nice image for your opt-in page and write some information about what they can expect by downloading it or registering for it.

Offer an additional bonus:

This is completely optional, and depends on the type of opt-in you create. For some people, they’ll add in an extra print out or even a private Facebook group to offer accountability and support as they work through the free offer.

Connect everything:

You can do this by creating a separate list just for the course sign-ups within MailChimp and connect this to your ClickFunnels opt-in page.

Automate:

Once you have everything ready to go, you will want to make the process as easy as possible. So you can schedule a thank-you email within MailChimp that would go straight to the new subscribers welcoming them to the course, and give them the link to join the Facebook group or download your bonus print out.

After that, you drip feed each module of the course or each video in the series to its own email to go out over 5 days after they subscribed.

Finally, you will add in another 4 emails (so, a total of 10 emails) that follows on to provide value after they have finished the course or used the opt-in in whatever form it was. After these 4 emails, people are automatically moved to your main list where they receive a value-based email or blog post on the schedule you’ve chosen for your email marketing.