Why You Should Be Prioritizing Building Your Email List As A Coach, Consultant, or Service Provider
Yesterday I woke up to an email that no business owner wants to receive.
It was an email from Instagram and it read:
“Your Instagram account has been suspended. This is because your account, or activity on it, doesn't follow our Community Guidelines.”
After spending the next few minutes frantically filling out an appeal form, I was sure that this had to have happened by mistake and that I would be able to access my account again soon.
After all, helping clients get their disabled ad accounts recovered is something that I’ve dealt with for many years, so I thought this case would be no different.
Then it happened.
I got a second email from Instagram.
This time it read:
“We reviewed your account and found that it still doesn’t follow our Community Guidelines. As a result, your account has been permanently disabled.”
My mouth dropped.
Just like that – in a matter of minutes – my Instagram profile and community of over 5,500 people that I’ve built up over the last several years was gone.
And while I know it’s not the end of the world, it still sucks to lose something you’ve spent years building and putting time into.
So, what’s the point of me telling you all this?
The point is that as business owners we get so caught up in building a presence on social media and how many followers we have, but we forget sometimes that we DON'T own these platforms.
And just like me, your following and presence could all be taken away from you in a flash.
This is why it’s so important to focus on building assets that we own, versus assets that are borrowed. AKA our email lists.
While I was sad about what happened, I’m thankful that today I was still able to open up my laptop and have contact with the thousands of people that I’ve taken the time to join my email list over the years.
Had I not done this, it really would have felt like I was starting my business all over again from scratch today.
So if there’s one thing to take away from today’s blog post >> it’s the importance of building your email list and community outside of social media platforms.
We’ve all heard this advice but until something like this happens, it’s easy to ignore.
Here are 3 strategies for building your email list
Number One: Low-cost list-building ads
For as little as $10/day you can run ads to grow your email list and get hundreds or even thousands of new subscribers each month. Plus, with the right strategy you can even get your ads to pay for themselves, so it’s pretty much like growing your email list for free.
This is what I did for years and how I built the majority of my email list. The added benefit of running ads is that you also gain new followers in the process. I would estimate that about 2-3k of my followers had previously come just from me running ads.
If you want help getting some low cost list-building ads set up, this is something that I help my VIP Day clients with. We strategize on what the best lead magnet is to run, what to sell to get your ads to pay for themselves, and then my team and I help build out your ads from start to finish while showing you how to manage them each month in less than 20 minutes per week.
The other thing I love about running these types of ads is that they can last a long time without you needing to refresh your copy or creative, so once you set them up once, you can get the benefit of growing your email list with them for months or even years to come.
Number Two: Comment to DM strategy on social media
I’m sure you’ve seen many brands utilizing this trend lately. It’s where you ask someone to comment on your post on social media and then use a tool like ManyChat to automatically DM that person a link to something.
This works great for building your email list because instead of having to refer people to your link in bio which requires someone to leave your post, you can capture your audience white they are hot and instantly have a DM sent to them.
^^These types of posts also work great for repurposing into ads.
Number Three: Website Pop-Ups
Website pop-ups are not a new thing but I feel that they are so underutilized by businesses. They are a great way to capture people’s email addresses who are browsing your website or sale page, but may not be ready to take action yet.
I recently checked the analytics for another business that I help with where we had created a pop-up a while back to get people to join their email list. The site doesn’t get a ton of website traffic but since installing a pop-up, it’s brought in over 350+ new subscribers without us having to do any additional work.
WANT MORE SUPPORT? WHEN YOU’RE READY, HERE ARE THE WAYS THAT I CAN HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS:
1. Ready to create your own high-converting ads? Grab the High-Performing Ad Toolkit that’s helped thousands of business owners create click-worthy ads while saving time and the guesswork.
2. Want help creating your strategy or getting your most pressing marketing questions answered? Book a 1:1 consulting session with me.
3. Looking for Done-For-You support and help getting your ads up and running without paying monthly management fees? Apply to work with me through my VIP Ads In A Day experience.