60 Ways to Grow Your Email List with Jessica Hughes

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All right. Well, thank you very much for attending. Today I'm going to tell you how to grow your email list. We'll keep it really casual. If you've got questions along the way, just go ahead and raise your hand. And I know everybody's really probably at different points in their business. So if I don't get to something, you know, just please let me know. Can I see by a show of hands if anybody now is currently working with a third-party email system, maybe like Mailchimp or Constant Contact? You are? You are? Okay. So the majority of you in the room are. For those of you who aren't, I'm going to kind of explain, you know, why I would recommend working with one. Okay. To give you a quick background, my name is Jessica Hughes and I'm president of Hughes Marketing Solutions. We provide outsourced marketing services to small businesses that just don't have their own in-house marketing team.

So we do anything from public relations to graphic design to email newsletters, web design, pretty much the whole gamut. So I'm a small business owner myself. So I created a partnership with Constant Contact that gives me the opportunity to speak to small business owners. So it's a pretty neat partnership. I in no way work for Constant Contact, but it allows me to have kind of the resources to share them with small businesses. Okay. I'll go over. Okay. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about how marketing was prior to social media. When you look at marketing prior to social media, it's a funnel that's going downwards. And this is a really interesting slide. Marketing with traditional methods, that's, you know, we'll say is a newspaper. That might be the television, print advertisement, where really businesses were spending the majority of their money on.

You are really casting a wide net. So you're taking this net and you're casting a wide net to a large, large, large audience. You are then keeping a few and you're converting just a few at the bottom. And then again, you would cast this wide net, right? So you keep casting this wide net, looking for millions of people. This was very, this was very costly, but it was kind of easy to do. You make a quick commercial, you make a quick graphic, you put it in the, you know, in the newspaper. But again, it's very costly and really only the big, big, large businesses could afford to do so. Marketing now, which we'll say is with social media, email, newsletters, is the complete opposite. You're not trying to talk to the world. You're trying to talk to your brand loyalists or people who really already like you, the brand ambassadors.

So when you're talking on social media and email marketing, you're talking only to those people who are already associated with your brand or your business or organization. They are then doing the word of mouth for you. They're sharing your great information to their friends and their followers who are then sending it to more people. So they're actually doing the conversion for you. So that's really where the funnel has completely changed. Where the sales funnel before was going downwards, it's now the opposite. And I think a lot of businesses don't realize that, that you need to actually be only talking to the people that know and like you. A way to do that is by social media and email marketing. So that's why today we're really going to focus on the email marketing portion. Constant Contact does have a series.

If you have an interest on the social media side, we're actually going to be presenting here in a few weeks again on social media. But today was just the email marketing side. One other quick thing about this is that right now you're actually on the same playing field as let's say a Coca-Cola because you're able to do social media and email marketing. So I actually think this is more time spent. You know, when people tell me, oh, well, it's great. Social media is free. It's not free. You know, email marketing is not free. It takes, it's labor intensive, but it's not, you know, cost prohibitive. So that's kind of where we stand now. Ninety-one percent of people check their email daily. So if you think about everybody's got their phones out, they say that the average person can check their phone up to 150 times a day. I didn't believe it. I tried it myself.

And I realized I checked it 114 times. And I even checked for the time five times in a day. And I wear a watch. You know what I mean? So it was kind of like, wow, I even wear a watch and I don't even use it for the time. So email is all around us. You know, grandparents are even checking their email daily. Eighty-two percent have signed up for an email on a brand website, and seventy-two percent sign up expecting discounts. $44.25 is the average return for every dollar spent on email marketing. So it's a great return. And email marketing has a three times higher conversion rate than social media marketing. Social media marketing, and I know there's a little bit more glamour tied to it, but if you really focus on email marketing, the conversion rate is absolutely phenomenal when done appropriately.

I can say that to me, I think of social media and email marketing almost like peanut butter and jelly. It goes hand in hand. One's got to be doing the other, but you need to be doing both. Okay, the next slide. I found this statistic and I found it really interesting about your email marketing database. The contacts that we're receiving degrade by about 22.5% each year. So about one in four people are going to fall off your email list. You know, that's for anything simple as, you know, you've got somebody's work email, they switch jobs. Somebody has two Yahoo accounts; maybe they only check one of the two accounts. But why, you know, a lot of people are like, I've got a great email list. Well, that's great, but you've got to continuously be updating it because one in four is falling off just to stay, you know, stagnant. So you really got to be continuously growing your email list.

So my recommendation is just to think about one in four are, you know, falling off. Okay, the next slide. Okay, I'm going to start with a quick overview of what the agenda is for today. We're going to talk about where each person is and we're going to start with what we've got. For some of you, that might be you've got 40 people on your email list. For other people, it might be a thousand, four thousand, who knows. So I'm going to try to kind of talk so it makes sense to everyone. But if for some reason it doesn't, you know, just kind of let me know. Then we're going to talk about make what you have work for you. How do you use your resources and actually grow your list? Then we're going to talk about collect more from everywhere you are. You've got the email address, now what? And lastly, next steps. Does anybody have any questions before we kind of begin? No? Okay. Okay, next slide.

For a lot of people, it sounds kind of like overwhelming. You know, I got to do this, I got to do this, I got to do this. I've got all these other parts and elements to my business. But my recommendation is that you realize email marketing, very similar to social media marketing, has to happen organically and it takes time. You know, you can't just go buy a list or go get, you know, thousands of people. This is something that really needs to be kind of implemented and ingrained in your business as an ongoing process. It needs to be organized and consistent. Sorry, just push a few more of the buttons. And just for everybody to know, it takes time. You're not just going to get a thousand contacts in 24 hours. And my recommendation is we're going to talk about traditional methods of how to collect an email address versus some more modern methods.

For some people, I'm going to present a few different ways. Some might be good for you or your business and some might be based on if you're a non-profit or what kind of organization you might be. Okay, so now you want to, if we're just starting out, we need to really look, I think a lot of people kind of miss the low hanging fruit of email addresses that you've been in communication with people and you're not putting them into an email system. For those of you that don't have an email system, and we're talking like a third-party system, like MailChimp or Constant Contact, my recommendation is that you really get one. If you're emailing people just, you know, a blanket email to all of your contacts, I would not recommend doing that. One, you really have no branding there; you know, you're just kind of sending a boring, body-text email.

Another is, if you email too many people, they might see it as spam. Another, which is shocking, is your deliverability rate is really low. I was always shocked, like, we can go to the moon, but why can't we send an email to like a few hundred people? It just doesn't work. A lot of times it won't go to those people. And what I found most frustrating is if I was going to take the time to actually create this email and do all this work, not knowing whether they received it is too frustrating for me. A third-party email system provides analytics on how many people opened your email, clicked a link, or forwarded it. You can see that Bob clicked on the email, clicked on the bottom part, and forwarded it to two people. If I am going to spend time writing that email, I want to know whether people like what I am writing.

Because it's really easy to see, you know, on the analytics on the back end. So my recommendation, if you're a business, is invest in the cost of, I think it's $20 a month; spend that $20 and make sure that you have a good email system. And you want to make sure that it's actually delivering to people. So for those, if you're gathering contacts, and right now you might have a large list or a big list, you want to make sure to start with your database. If you've got a POS system or a CRM, any kind of system there and you're communicating with people ongoing, you need to get them on your email list. If for some reason you're not sure, you can always send out an email saying, you know, you're being put on the email list and if you want to unsubscribe, here's a safe way to unsubscribe. But a lot of people miss the low-hanging fruit. Another way is to digitize your business cards.

My desk has all these business cards from people I have met and called, but they do not go into the email system. I write notes on the back, and there are ways to digitize them. Two I have used are Shoebox and [unclear: card-scanning app name]. They had free and paid options and made digitizing everything easy. That creates a simple process for growing your list. There are also many other apps. Constant Contact had one that let you put a free newsletter signup form on a Facebook business page. You could click a button that said, "Sign up for our newsletter." It was free, and you would receive email addresses straight through your Facebook business page. It takes about 10 minutes to do and it kind of does it for you. Another thing is you need to make sure to establish an incentive for somebody to want to join your list. You know, is that incentive, you know, $10 off?

Do they get a white paper? What are they going to get to be part of your mailing list? If you're kind of only saying sign up for our list, you've got to have an incentive and it's got to be really enticing. So my recommendation is spend a little bit of time in figuring out what is that that you need to entice people to become a part of your list. Because when people do become a part of your list and how I'm going to show you to create an automation series, you can get the sale. You become the authority, but you need to get them to sign up for that email. So to me, it really spends some time on that coupon or that, you know, there is a resource. It's called the PLRstore.com. This is something if you're sitting there and you're saying, I don't have any—my business, I don't know what I could put on there—you can easily go to the PLRstore.com.

It's private label rights and you could get some form of either like a white paper and it's about like a dollar or two, and it's very generic and you can tailor it specific to your company. PLR, private label rights. Maybe is it .org? PLR—I'll check. It's the PLRstore. Sorry. Thank you. It's the PLRstore. This is a good option if you're in a bind and you need something. My recommendation is you don't use this a hundred percent. You take it, you buy something for a few dollars—maybe it's "60 Ways to Grow Your Email List" or maybe for your business it's a white paper. You take it, you download it, and then you tailor it to your business so that you have something for them to take off the website. But again, that's just if you're kind of in a bind.

And then a lot of people just forget to ask their best customers or the best clients or their best vendors or even family members—anybody who it could be—to go ahead and sign up for their newsletter. Because organically that will help to grow it. People do share, you know, even let's say you have a newsletter, they do share that with other people. So even though it sounds funny to say, hey, I'll put my mom or I'll put somebody else on it, you don't know who they will share it with on their social networks. Because now a lot of the things you do through a third-party email The system can be shared on social media networks. So really we're going to collect, we're going to compile, and we're going to organize. So now we're in the stage of kind of starting. Does anybody have any questions there? Okay, the next. Now we're going to talk about make what you have work for you. The next.

Okay, before we can, now we're kind of looking internally and now we want to grow our list. Before we grow our list, here are some of my recommendations. You've got to make sure that you have on your website where it says, "join our mailing list." You know, however you want to put that, you need to have that. That's a quick link. If you yourself don't know how to do that, get a web person to do it. It's a really easy thing. So you've got to have, and sometimes you see it fly over, sometimes it's on the corner. That's based on your preference, but you need to have an embeddable link of "join our newsletter." If for some reason people aren't clicking on it, maybe it's the wording you're using. Maybe you need to say, "See what 5,000 other people are interested in." You know, kind of use that everybody else is doing it method.

Or if you can get a testimonial from somebody on how great your newsletter is, or if they're an authority figure, stick that up there. You know, so-and-so said how great my newsletter is. Whatever it is that you need to entice people, but you need to have that link. If you don't have a website for your business but have a blog, make sure the signup is on the blog. But my recommendation is, first and foremost, make sure you have this link: join our newsletter. Don't ask people too many questions. My recommendation, keep it simple: name—if you can get away with just name, you know, first name, last name—and their email. Again, this is, I'll talk more, it depends again across what your business is. If you have to know certain demographics, you have to know certain other things, but make sure to get the name and the email address.

If you start asking too many questions, you usually lose people. Another easy way of getting email addresses, my recommendation, is you can set up a quick text-to-join. So I'll show you that in the next slide. You text this word to this number, and they can join. This is great when you're at a networking event. You know, sometimes at networking events, for me it's like, I get the card, but like, how do you feel like I accomplished, you know, at the end of the event, I had these accomplishments. Well, that's a great way. I grew my list by six people at this networking event. Right there, they took out their phones and they joined. Or if, you know, you're in a space like this, you just have people join. It could also be done, you know, in kind of different meetings. I'll show you on the next page how to do that. I don't know, QR codes are really based on your business.

I can't say that I've seen them really grow in any way. Maybe if you're, you know, a restaurant, you want to put [them] on the back of the menu, it can't hurt. I can't say that I see it all the time, but it doesn't cost a dollar. You can go online, create a QR code for your company in 10 seconds, it's free, and post it anywhere. So you can go to, like, you could really type in "free QR code," and it'll create a QR code for your business. So let's say my business was Hughes Marketing Solutions. I would then put it, let's say, on my business card. I could put the QR code on my business card. When you actually take it with the picture, I would direct you to my front page of my website where you could go ahead and sign up for a newsletter. So you can link it to wherever it is that you want, but I would just make them go to where I have the signup for my newsletter.

And QR codes, I can't say, like you said, people are using them that much, but it's a free thing that if you wanted to stick it on, you know, the back of a business card or on a pamphlet, it doesn't hurt. But I get it. It's a free resource, but I can't say it's the new next best thing, unfortunately. Another one is you want to set up a "Join My Mailing List" app on your Facebook business page. That's something that we had just spoken about. And there's also another free resource through Constant Contact, but there's a lot of them where you— I don't know if you've ever been maybe to a trade show—it's pretty much a landing page. It's really easy. It will say right there: name, and you can go on an iPad, name, email address, and you just click sign up right there. And that's such an easy way because sometimes it's hard when you're writing pen to paper.

You know, it's like, what is that, a Y or was that a J? So this is an easy way if, let's say, your business has a trade show. It's really easy, or you want to give away, let's say, a raffle at a trade show. For example, we're giving away a $100 gift card to a local sandwich shop. Instead of just writing down their information, they type their name and their email address and they hit send. Boom, it goes right back to the landing page and the next person can do it. Or you give away free swag or a promotional item. Here's a t-shirt of my company. Bam, they fill it out and they get the free t-shirt. That's a great way because you don't have to do anything—bam, all the information is entered in right there. So that, to me, if you could do that at, let's say, a booth at a Chamber of Commerce event, you can figure out how you see that fit.

Maybe at a networking event, it really depends, you know, if that works for you. But that's iCapture; that's another free resource from Constant Contact. But there's plenty of other downloadable apps that do the same thing. When I was talking about the free text-to-join, just push it two more times. Here's a quick one that I did: let's say it was a hair salon called Salon Bella. Really easy. I just go in there and I put the keyword as Salon Bella. Easy enough. The phone number came up—it's 22828. Bam, put the phone number in there. Ask the person, what do you want to give away? It's got to be good. At least, you know, $10 off. Okay, agreed to $10 off. Bam. So now every time somebody texts 22828 and they write the word Salon Bella in there, it automatically will send them a $10 coupon and bam, they're in the database. So that's easy.

Now this salon has communication with them to let them know we've got Valentine's Day specials, we have whatever that might be. It's extremely easy. It doesn't cost a dime. And then she can create marketing collateral based on it, right? So if she even were to go here today, she could just pass around a little flyer saying "$10 to try out my salon." So text to really grow your database to me is easy, easy, easy, and I would definitely invest in it. Okay, next slide. As I mentioned, you know, print advertising, I'm not going to say it's dead. It leads to the internet. That's the way I see it. So you can think of kind of creative ways of how to use print. You know, you could even do a text on there. Print's not dead, but it's not going to be the end-all, be-all. That's the way I see it. Okay.

You know, based on what kind of business you are, sometimes even pen and paper works, don't always think it has to be everything high tech. But you know, I'm just trying to get creative on ways just outside pen and paper. Okay, now I'm going to discuss with you segmentation and targeting. I don't know if anybody, I guess we'll save questions. I'll just keep talking. Segmentation and targeting. I'll give you a quick rundown. If I had a database of a thousand people, not everybody is the same. I need to put them into buckets, right? In our head, we probably already categorize our clients or customers and buckets ourselves, but we need to do this into a third party email system. We need to segment the communication and target it to direct people. So I'll give you an example. Let's say buckets are in your head. So I'll give you an example if you just push. Let's pretend we're a nonprofit.

Okay. Not everybody on your list or who you do business with is exactly the same. You're going to have kind of the people who might be the donors. You've got the VIPs. You've got somebody new. Everybody's at a different sales cycle and you need to be sure to communicate with them at the appropriate sales cycle. Because I know, like for instance, I get, I got an email for a children's clothing store and I've got a two-year-old daughter and they sent me newborn clothes, you know, 50% off newborn clothes. At the time I bought all these clothes. I'm still getting an email for baby clothes, but my daughter's two. So why do I want an email for baby clothes? So I quickly unsubscribed. If they could have been able to segment and target and realize, ask, you know, for my child's age, they would have been able to send me toddler's clothes.

But now I have no interest in receiving an email from them again. So I unsubscribed. So whether that is finding out a birth date for your business, finding out who they are in these buckets, you need to do that instead of sending a blanket communication if you really want to grow sales. So here's a suggestion. I'm going to provide you with two suggestions. Here's the first one. If you can just click it, I think three times. Let's say we're a nonprofit and we've got our regular donors, right? So we want to be in communication with them consistently. They want to hear from us. That is going to be one group of people. And then let's say we've, they want to know about the research that we're doing. They want to know about events and galas. They want to know everything quick, short, and to the point. Our seasonal supporters don't want to know that.

Let's say our seasonal supporters, we figure out only do the 5K walks. I don't know. So maybe we only send them information on walks or the events. Then our VIPs, we want them to be in the know. Do we let them have tickets to the gala first? What do we give them to make them feel like they are a VIP? And then if you click it one more time, you'll see the last one is a new person. Now this acquisition, we got to make them feel welcome. So they need an automated welcome email. When they sign up for your newsletter, and we'll discuss this, there's a way to put in a welcome email that doesn't cost a dime. You write it one time, and every time somebody pushes, you know, sign up for, sign up, bam, it automatically goes to them. And they feel, every single person feels welcomed. Oh, great, they welcomed me. You're not doing a thing. You know, you have nothing to do with it.

You set it up that one time. But if you see here, we need to segment them by these one, two, three, four, and then we need to target the communication specific to them. Does anybody have any, I guess we'll hold, write down your questions. Okay, next slide. Okay, here's another idea. So let's say I work with a pet store owner, and he has, just pushed it three times, he's got people who buy dogs, people who buy cats, and people who buy birds. People who have purchased dogs do not want to hear about, you know, the discounts on the cat food. And I'm just trying to keep this really simple to, to, so everybody gets it. But if you purchase a dog at his store, you don't want to hear about the discounts on cat food, and you don't want to hear about the birds. So he quickly put them into three buckets, and bam, now they have direct communication with each bucket.

Okay, so you need to make sure to segment, and then target your communication. Here is a company that I found that does really well at this, and what I like about what they do. This is called Bisk Imports. They are, I think, extremely smart. If not every business can do this, but they asked for a first name, last name, and email address, and then they said, what do you want to hear about? And you click yourself on what you want to hear about. So if your business or organization can do this, this is phenomenal. Because you want to know about free shipping. Do you want to know about, you know, event announcements? Do you want to know about new products? Not everybody wants to know about everything, or they only want to know about one thing. People themselves click it, and it automatically goes into that bucket. So that to me is a great way to kind of segment.

Not every business can do this, but to me that's a great way. So if you go to the next slide, you can see I have a group of people. Click it one more time, and you'll see, bam, they went ahead themselves and told that company what they want. So now free shipping people are only going to hear about free shipping. And for the event announcements, you're only going to hear about event announcements. So that's another idea to target in segment. Okay? And then the next slide. Now I have people ask me all the time, well, Jessica, like, we got to get a list, like, quick. We need to get this moving along. You've got a lot of great, you know, ideas, but they take a lot of time and resources. So people are always asking me, do I rent a list? Do I buy a list? I've had experience on all sides.

You know, I'm not going to tell you exactly, you know, this is what you have to do, but my recommendation is not to rent or buy a list, and it's to grow it yourself. When you rent a list, and if you've ever heard about this, you're essentially giving your communication to this company who then sends it out for you. So you'll never actually have access to all of these emails. So you hope they do it, they do it right? I mean, you know, maybe they got some good, and again, it's based on that company. That's one way, or you can buy a list. Okay? So you can buy this list, and then you send it out. The pitfalls that happen with this are that you buy a list from a company, but if that company is not scrubbing the list—continuously updating it—many addresses may no longer work.

If 22.5% of email contacts degrade each year, nearly 25% may go into spam or thin air, and you will be paying based on those numbers. The other problem is that you could be spamming people. You have not had any direct communication with them, and they may report the message as spam. If too many people do that, your email provider may call blacklisting, and they won't allow you to send out any emails. If you can't send out emails, it kind of ruins the reputation of your company. There's actually an email law people may not be aware of called the CAN-SPAM Act. You could get about $6,000 in fines for violations at the time. I worked with an organization that was purchased by a larger organization. They had all these brands, and I was the director of marketing there. The president said, let's send this one brand to the 50,000 people on another email list.

I said they had not subscribed to that brand's email list and questioned whether we should do that. He wanted to do it, so we sent it out. We got all these spam, you know, all these people labeled us as spam, you know, the email company's calling us and saying, we're dropping you. We no longer want to work with you. So it's funny. I didn't ever experience that firsthand until then, but it really is a big thing. So you've got to be very careful when you just kind of rent or buy lists. There are some positives for a lot of businesses out there.

I'm not going to say that there's not, but just to be wary, and if you are ever going to do that, make sure to ask the appropriate questions of how often do they scrub that list, you know, how often have they been given the rights to pass out that information and they're not some "buy the list for $199 today" operation, you know, I would just be a little wary of that. Okay. Now we're going to talk about how to collect more from everywhere you're at. What a lot of people fail to do is to train their staff or people who are working for you or even volunteers that are working for you how to grow your list. I would focus a lot of time, not only on yourself doing it, but those around you. Whether it's at a point of sale, you can ask for it over the phone. I'm pretty sure the statistics say 53% of consumers say they will give it out when asked.

So one in two will give it to you, which is pretty good, pretty high. Another recommendation is you and all of your employees have a signup link right there in your email. So really easy, bam, sign up for our newsletter. Or let's say you did Caribbean vacations, you know, put a little catchy phrase of, you know, go somewhere warm, sign up here for discounts or whatever that might be. But make sure that you and your employees have that in your email signature because every email going out will have that information. And again, use that text-to-join. But really, I would even incentivize your employees — for example, let's spend the next 30 days and the person who gets the most email addresses gets a $25 Starbucks card. Okay. So network whenever, wherever you are.

My recommendation is if you're getting cards, you're talking to people, I would do that — text-to-join, to me, that's the easiest. But make sure when you get these email addresses, you can enter them in what we call an automation series. And I'm going to explain that to you. But what it is is you want to have a series that you create one time that automatically gets emailed out to somebody the minute they sign up. And I'm sure we've all experienced them: you sign up for something and whoa, in my inbox — like, welcome, thank you for, you know, coming. Here's our YouTube series, here's our this. For the sales cycle really to be effective, or what I've experienced, is you need that welcome message, and then you should really have some other follow-up message. Now that's different for everybody, and I'm going to show you an example of one.

But based on your business, are you going to provide them with a free YouTube video of how to market a small business in five minutes? Are you going to provide them with a downloadable something that they can download for their business? My recommendation is you can create it — it's as simple as creating a quick email. You put it in there and bam, every time it happens. So always have that welcome and some type of follow-up, because people really see you as then the authority. And not only do they see you as the authority, they kind of get ingrained with your brand and with your organization. Okay. Is there an industry term for that? I mean, the follow-up for — Yeah. So it's an automation series. Thank you. Yeah. So this is more what I would recommend doing and it doesn't hurt.

I would make a list, you know, whether right now, if you're scribbling or when you go home, of all of your online properties. This is what I would do. And everybody is different, but it doesn't hurt because I know we put our information out there and we kind of never check up on it. I would put all of your online properties for everybody. This is different: your Instagram, your Yellow Pages, your Yelp. I mean, it's amazing. You could have done a Yellow Pages listing two years ago and you've moved and it's never been updated. Make an online listing of everywhere you are. If you're a new business, if you've been around for years, things change. I didn't even realize it myself — I switched office spaces and I realized I had all the old information. Make a list of everywhere you are, all your online properties.

And then I would make a thing next to it of how I'm going to add my mailing list right there. So every single one that you're on, you can add "Add my mailing list." If you've got a blog, bam, right there in the author bio. If you write a guest blog, bam, right there in the author bio. So make this list, whether today, tonight, sometime, If you aren't on some and you think you should be on some, that's a whole another discussion, but make this list. Okay. Here—let's say I'll kind of tell you where I would stick the URL for your mailing list on each one of them. These are more of the ones that I think a lot of the people in this room would probably have. If you're on a website, my recommendation is you're going to create that link, but I would even create a page on your website of why—what are the benefits of somebody subscribing? What do they get out of it?

Because that's another page and another link that you can actually have on a website: here are the benefits—increase sales, save time and energy, whatever that might be for your business. Keep it short and simple: go ahead and sign up for my mailing list. Again, here you can add a testimonial. Maybe if you've got somebody who's very influential who's on your list, or again, use, you know, "over 10,000 people in this newsletter." If you decide to comment on other blogs, or let's say on your own blog, even still put your URL there. On your online listing—so let's say it's the Yellow Pages under the About menu—you can do the same thing. We talked about even your Facebook business page. You could even right there on the big picture put, let's say I booked vacations for people, and I would put a picture of a sunny destination and right there say, "Don't you want to get away?

Sign up for our list right there." You can also buy Facebook ads and do it right there to say "Sign up." Or you could even do a webinar and say, "Sign up for my webinar." And then you collect email addresses, so you can even advertise that. Another is on your social media platforms: you can create fun posts with a request to subscribe; try using images. You can use a link shortener—if you go to Bitly, you can shorten that link—and you can easily put it up there. Let's say on your YouTube video at the end of a two-minute clip, it's "Sign up for my newsletter." There are a lot of things that you might already be doing and you're not asking people to join that mailing list. On Instagram, you can include a signup form URL in your profile bio. On Pinterest, you can create a really nice image and tell people where to subscribe.

If you have a bio on your website, it should be right there in the bio. And again, you'll get these slides. Next. And here's some more: if you're on LinkedIn, you can easily let members know if you're in a group. On Vine, you can tell them in six seconds why to sign up, and then go ahead and post it everywhere. Based on your business, if you do a survey—which Constant Contact you could do for free—you can ask right there. There's a lot of ways. On your newsletter, if you're doing a monthly or a quarterly newsletter, that's a great way to stay in communication with people; you can ask there. During event registration—if you had to register for this event, we could have asked it there. So there's a lot of ways to continuously be asking for it. Here's just a quick example of a business that I think is doing a really great job of it.

The company is called Building Aspirations, and of course they're doing a great job because they're email marketing experts. But just to give you a quick idea: right here on their left-hand side, as I mentioned, there's social media and they do email marketing, but this is their website and they're asking you to sign up for their email newsletter. The branding is consistent throughout. You can't see it really well, but on their social media page they're asking you to sign up for their newsletter right there. Then you go to just one random page on their website that talks about reasons why you should sign up for their mailing list. They tell you it's small-business friendly, it won't bust your budget, it's results-focused, and you can subscribe right there.

They have a YouTube video on their website with a great free video—at the end, "Sign up for our mailing list." At the end, they have what you call the automation email. So every time somebody subscribes, they then say, "Hey, thanks for subscribing. We welcome you. We give you the warm and fuzzies. We're going to send you 10 weeks of videos, one video a week. Stay tuned." So every week they are not going in there and pressing the send button—it's an automation. They've established ten emails for ten weeks. So week one you get this one-minute video; week two, you get this one-minute video; week three, this one-minute video. They've created this for every time somebody signs up. So at the end of the 10-week series, you now know that they're the expert, right? You've heard of their company. You expect to see it at the same time every week.

Let's say they chose Wednesdays at 11:00—you are now kind of programmed to receive it. So week 11, maybe they're communicating with you: "Hey, what did you think about the videos? Oh, we have a special deal," or whatever that might be for that business. So to me, an automation tool—the welcome tool—is very important. And based on your business, if you can find some kind of follow-up series, I would really recommend doing that. This was just a quick slide I put in because a lot of people asked me, when we had spoken about it before, "What do I offer as an incentive?" Here are some ideas: a percentage off, an exclusive video link. It really is based on your business—if there's some gift or a special offer code, whatever you can think up. Next one. Okay, you've got the email address—now what do you do with it? We were just talking about the automation.

Here's another: 79%, just a quick statistic—79% of consumers say that they like or follow brands for information about the company, so that's pretty high; people are willing to find you. And 89% of consumers turn to search engines to research products or services before purchasing. So people are going to sign up for the mailing list prior to making a purchase. If you can lock them in and get them ingrained in your brand or organization, this is an easy way to do it because it's a high conversion rate, a lot higher than social media. Okay, the next slide. Here's another slide that I created for a small company just trying to give you an easy way of understanding it. This is Liberty Jane Clothing. They make clothing for little American Girl dolls.

American Girl dolls, but they do a really great job on, "Hey, welcome." You know, let's give you the warm and the fuzzies and we are going to give you two free patterns to download right here. So right there, you can download the two free patterns and then here, check it out. Here is our other sites that you can buy on right there, the pattern, other patterns. And here's our YouTube video. So you can check out, you know, three minute YouTube video. A few weeks later, they send you the next one. Here's another YouTube video and click here for 50% off a pattern. So they've created a great automation series. And what I like about this is it's called "evergreen." Something that's evergreen means it can be sent out a million times and it doesn't, it's got no season to it. It never really has to be updated. It's just doing it itself.

You know, and my recommendation is create something that's evergreen. You never have to touch it again. You know, you don't want to have to tweak it all the time. Oh, it's this season, it's that. And then you have to remember, like set it and forget about it. That's the way I see it. And some, just some quick takeaways from the discussion or the presentation today: make sure to put everything in its place. You know, so you've got to kind of gather all of your contacts, make sure to create segmented and targeted lists. And I know that this requires more work—I'm going to be totally honest—but it's worth the effort upfront for your business. That might only be creating two separate emails, but don't lump everybody in.

You can segment even by birthday, so if you want to send somebody a birthday coupon, maybe you just target it based on their birthday and it sends out an automated targeted message. Maybe you can do it just based on these are people who get emails five times a year, and these are people that only get it two times a year. It can be really simple or it can be really in-depth, really in-depth, but it's not to say you have to target 20 different emails. My recommendation is just really look at your list and how you can really hone in on there, because people do—I mean, I don't know about you, or if I'm hypersensitive to it—but I unsubscribe if you don't give me anything good, you know? So in order to give somebody good, either ask them or yourself, put them into a bucket.

Make sure you've got some collection methods kind of ready of how, when you get email lists, how are you going to segment them and how are you going to target them with information? Um, make sure you schedule everything you're going to do—schedule, schedule. You're not going to ever touch it, so you're automating it. If you don't automate this, you'll go crazy and this could become a full-time job. So you want this just to all be automated. And once you put it into its place, you're hands off other than collecting it. And then lastly, you just want to kind of keep repeating this process and making sure that it's kind of part of your every day. It shouldn't be labor intensive once you have it up and running. That's the way that I see it. Like once it's up and running, it just kind of goes and it's that snowball effect.

It does take a little bit of time and energy at first, but I can tell you that I've seen a lot of success on email marketing. I've done a lot with email. I've done that with social. I've done a lot of different things, but if it's really done right, you'll be amazed at the results. And for, you know, $20 a month, it really works if done right. If you create one list and barely touch it, a lot of people do not see the benefits, so I would invest some energy in it. All right. I know there was a lot of information, so I am ready for questions or thoughts. An audience member said, "I really appreciated today. It is a bit overwhelming. Marketing and advertising are huge here in America. Everyone is practically whoring themselves out in so many ways, but it is often a bland marketing strategy where you see the same photo or image.

It is not real in a lot of respects, in my interpretation." I said I like to bring something real, fresh, fun, and interactive. The audience member agreed that it is a great way to reach people in a more connected format and said, "I definitely need to take note of this and build it up so I can actually have a system—a system that's emails and find numbers and everything else all over the place. Oh, I mean, that's before I didn't use Constant Contact before, and it was always like, "Where's that business card? Find it here." And unfortunately, when you get, you know, as you get bigger and bigger, you need a system in place. What I like about email marketing is it evens the playing field. You could have a business of one or a business of a thousand and you can have the same branded look and feel.

So the emails that are going out are extremely branded, with the right coloring, with everything there, the right font. So even though you're just typing in the copy, you're able to put in the right logos. They've got free stock photography if you need photography. So you're really looking—you know, it really puts everybody on an even playing field and there's a lot that you can do with it. Like you said, you can create videos and upload them here. You can easily create a welcome email where they just click on a button and you're telling them welcome. "Hey, welcome. It was nice to meet you at the networking event yesterday. If you'd like to sign up for my email, you could"—I mean, it's limitless. It does take time up front building it, but once you build it and it's systemized, it grows quickly.

At first it's kind of like a train; it takes a little bit of time, but yeah, there's a lot of things that you can do with it. And if you play around in an email system, I would recommend doing that. I think you can still create that really direct communication with a system like this, because I think if you're doing all that, that can be really labor intensive and you're not going to be able to keep up. So everybody is going to get a welcome email. Why not just create one blanket welcome email? And then you can create a series for that type of person, right? So it could be—you could create the new meeting series and they don't need to know that it's not really specific to them, you know? So maybe it's a welcome, and then 10 days later it's automated of, "Hi, I haven't heard back from you. Here is my didn't-hear-back email." You know what I mean?

Like it can still be—you could still put them in a bucket, but it's not like, as you said, just regular email. I don't see how you can keep up with all of that. If you even want to send them a blanket email—so let's say you met 400 people and you want to send 400 people, "Come to my event," and you go to send that email out to 400 people, 400 people aren't going to get it because email just doesn't allow you to do that. And every email provider is different, so some will say you can email up to 70 people, some can be 200, and you don't know what that is. So it's like you spend all this time, and then you get all these errors. The way I see it is, of course I'm a marketing company, but I want to see analytics on the backend.

You know, television or print is awesome and you see all these people—"A magazine was in the doctor's office and 20 people saw it"—or "Did it get sent to my house and I don't read it?" I can see exactly who clicked; I can hone in and know you clicked and you didn't click. So when I find out you didn't click, I'm going to go change my subject line. I'm going to resend you the exact same email. I'm going to change my subject line and I'm going to see if you open. If you don't, I'm even going to do one more time and then you'll probably open it. You know what I mean? I send the same email twice. Yeah, I do the same email twice. That is for my next series here in two weeks: subject lines and the graphic design behind them, because there are so many things in email marketing. An audience member also asked whether there were tools we could share. One resource I liked was ThePLRstore.com.

ThePLRstore.com has a bunch of copywriters. I believe there is a Cult of Copy job board, and there are freelancers on there who will write funnel campaigns and autoresponder campaigns, so you do not have to think of every word of every response email. They map all of that out. They can be really expensive or really cheap. That is perfect—you do not have to write it. A lot of people think they have to be the writer, but you do not have to be any of it. You have to project-manage to get it done. An audience member asked: I know there is Constant Contact and Mailchimp. Are there any services that you would recommend for small businesses? And what are things that we should look for or stay away from in selecting who we use? I have used AWeber, and Constant Contact is who I use and recommend. One reason is deliverability: I want to use a system where I know my emails are going to show up.

But all of the companies are good for a small business; I would recommend them. Mailchimp had a free tier and based its pricing on how many contacts you had, with the price rising as the list grew. Customer service is really important to me. I was blown away by Constant Contact's customer service. They would stay on the phone for two hours and walk you through every little piece. I even said to the woman, "I'm so embarrassed." I called her like 1:40 in the morning; they're 24 hours. And she's like, "Don't worry, I've got all the time in the world." And I'm like, "I'm so embarrassed." I mean, I was two hours later and she's just like, "Have a great night. Don't forget to call back soon." And I'm like, "I would hate me right now." You know what I mean?

The other ones that I had used were like, "Let me get you off the phone; I have to answer the next call." So that was really impactful for me when I was just starting email marketing because I didn't know, like, how do I get my logo colors to be not purple? It has to be my logo. How do I play with this? I personally don't want to play for two hours; I just want you to tell me and sit there on the phone with me. So that was really big for me. It's not that I couldn't do it, but I'd rather pay $20 than $16 and spend that $4 and just have you tell me what to do. If you know this is what you need, try a free option and experiment. I think email marketing is worth experimenting with as a small-business owner, and I also think social media marketing is worthwhile. Those are the ways to go.