Building an audience with free email list downloads can seem daunting.
The truth is, when it’s time to expand your reach and grow your business, the #1 challenge many face is…
Leveraging free email list downloads effectively.
Many entrepreneurs are clueless about how to do this. But mastering this strategy separates the novice marketer from the savvy digital entrepreneur. If you don’t know how to build a robust mailing list using lead magnets or other incentives, you’ll never achieve optimal growth in your online presence that allows you to thrive without social media.
Growing an engaged audience on your subscriber lists and seeing a steady increase in list growth is often overcomplicated and misunderstood by novice business owners.
Which is why…
Email marketing is a game-changer, especially for coaches, therapists, and wellness practitioners.
And the secret sauce?
They help you build your email lists fast by collecting emails efficiently.
Your reward? A treasure trove of potential clients waiting to hear from you through carefully crafted follow-up emails or engaging drip campaigns.
Email addresses, once collected, become invaluable assets that can be leveraged over time. They enable direct communication with interested individuals who have opted into receiving emails from you – talk about targeted audience engagement.
By offering free downloadable content like podcast episodes or e-books relevant to their interests as an incentive for subscribing, these tools make it easy-peasy to collect contact information without seeming intrusive.
Email lists, thus built, are highly effective channels for sending transactional emails and launching successful email marketing campaigns while also building customer loyalty.
Ready to learn more about how this works? Let’s jump into what exactly free email list downloads are all about in our next section.
What are Free Opt In Gifts?
Let’s break it down.
Lead Magnets (opt-ins, free downloads, free guides etc.,) are a tool used to find email addresses by offering an incentive to folks who resonate with the right message.
When you create a freebie, which we’ll talk more about in a moment, you can upload it onto your site as a file where new contacts can exchange their name and email to access the download.
You create a delicious piece of content or a free resource that you know your target audience is excited about receiving, throw it out into the world via social media posts, ads, or at in person-speaking events, and watch new leads come in as you build a powerful database full of contacts who’ve expressed interest in your work.
Different Types of Free Downloads
The choices for free downloads are seemingly boundless.
- Coaches and wellness practitioners love offering podcast episodes as a taste of their expertise.
- E-books on relevant topics that provide super helpful information or even a simple, powerful tool or practice can do wonders for email list builders.
- And who can resist guides tailored to their interests? It’s like a self-care buffet.
All these resources have one goal: to provide value to leads that incentivizes them to exchange their contact information for your free tool or resource.
The Mechanics Behind Free Email List Downloads
So, you’re into free email list downloads? Nice.
Get ready to collect emails and generate a loyal contact list of leads and potential customers.
Step #1: Create an enticing offer.
Give your audience something they can’t resist;
Examples:
- a free trial for your membership program,
- a free guide to a more productive morning routine,
- a free plan for easy-to-make morning meals in 5-minutes or less
- or other tools that you know your ideal customer would be interested in.
In the coaching industry, the most popular type of freebies are guides that serve as documentation for HOW to do something or provide an overview of a process that goes into more detail about your services.
You can check out our free guide, 3 Steps To Building A Business Beyond The Feed, by clicking here as an example.
Remember, you don’t want this to be overwhelming, you want to help potential customers get a win and start to build a trusting relationship with them overtime through your email campaigns.
Think about something you already have that you know your clients and customer love and appreciate or find incredibly helpful.
How can you simplify this into a short 3-4 page guide that can be turned into a freebie?
Once you’ve got the guide, it’s time to start building the technical pieces.
Step #2: Prompt visitors with subscription forms.
Before downloading your amazing resource, you’ll want a subscription form that asks for their contact information.
This should include the full name and email address, but you can also simplify it and ask only for the first name.
If you’re in Europe, it’s essential to look up GDPR compliance and use a tool that provides double-opt-in features, which is a tech term that asks contacts to “electronically sign.”
This means they give consent to receive your email campaigns by checking a box that explicitly says they are consenting to receive emails from you and how you plan to use their information.
Our free opt-in page is linked here for our guide built on our company platform, ScaleUp, and offers 14-day free trials to all new users.
GDRP compliance is location dependent; you can read more about the nuance and details of email marketing and GDPR compliance by clicking here.
It’s a simple trade-off: email for awesome content. Win-win.
Step #3: Send a confirmation message.
Once someone subscribes, you’ll want to send all new subscribers a quick message to verify their info.
This can be a simple email that says, “Thank you for opting in; please click here to verify your email list and download the free guide.”
This is essential to improving email deliverability and increasing overall open rates with your contacts and ensuring your subscribers are actually opening your emails with valid email addresses
Step #4 Improving Customer Loyalty with Value-Packed Email Campaigns
Once you’ve started growing your email lists with new subscribers, it’s imperative that you have a powerful email marketing nurture campaign that takes your subscribers on a journey.
We recommend having a 7-8 step fully automated email nurture sequence that goes out to all new contacts who sign up for your freebie and opt into your email list.
This email marketing nurture sequence is a powerful tool meant to connect deeper with your audience, share about your business, and provide more information about the services that you offer in a simple and eloquent way.
Our goal is NOT to SPAM subscribers with sales emails right away, but instead, to spend the first month or two building a relationship between them and your business or company that helps them feel excited about receiving regular emails from you.
Step #5 Drive Sales with proper Sales-based Email Marketing
AFTER someone has been on your list for a certain period of time, it’s finally your chance to begin talking more about your services and sharing how your business or company can help them solve their problem.
We do this by crafting a customer journey which is a fancy way of saying an email marketing campaign that’s a tool for helping potential customers:
- understand your services,
- how they work,
- why they need them,
- and addressing any major concerns they may have before choosing to invest in your services or products.
We recommend having emails that share other customer results or experiences from your services and highlight the kind of results other potential customers can expect to receive.
Along with emails that address the more logistical information such as what’s included, what’s the actual customer experience like, their biggest questions, etc.
Step #6 Share Your Freebie Everywhere
This one is pretty straightforward, now that your funnel is set up, it’s time to start sharing it with the world!
You can have it be the first thing potential customers see on your website or leverage the power of SEO to have it be found by potential customers who search on Google or other platforms.
If you mostly use social media, you can link it in all your posts and free content, inviting folks to subscribe to your email list and grow your audience!
More Data That Matters
As you generate your list of contacts, leads, and potential customers, it’s essential to keep your database as clean as possible using a tool called “Segmentation.”
I promise it’s a lot simpler than it sounds.
Different email marketing companies provide different features to the users on their free plan versus paid plan and often call the list segmentation different names.
Essentially, these are all the same thing and what we’ll refer to as a “Smart List” for each micro-segmented list of contacts that fit within the criteria we used to determine the list.
To create a “smart list” of contacts, users can use features like “tagging” that applies a simple “tag” to a contacts data field whenever a specific action is taken.
Database Information To Track
Here are some tags we recommend including better to segment your contacts and customers on your list:
- “opened email” will provide data about the most engaged leads on your list.
- “purchased product name” – this data will help you track sales for specific products and separate contacts from customers who may have already bought your product.
Depending on the email marketing software you use, you’ll set this up differently.
One easy way to do this is by creating an action that triggers an event, i.e. when a contact “opens” an email, add the tag “opened email.”
We provide this template as part of our software in ScaleUp and offer priority support to all users; monthly pricing starts at $97/month with complete access to all tools and software features.
Tracking Success Metrics in Your Email Marketing Campaigns
- Open rates: See how many people open your emails. It’s like peeking into their inbox.
- Click-through rates (CTR): Measure the percentage of recipients who can’t resist clicking on your links. They can’t help themselves.
- Conversion rates: Find out how many of those click-happy users actually take action, like making a purchase or filling out forms. It’s like turning clicks into cash.
- Bounce or Spam rates: This data is important and helps you understand what leads aren’t receiving your emails at all which could be due to a number of variables
BUT what’s important is that we delete any contact data that continues to bounce as it harms our email sender reputation.
Gauging Success Metrics For Continuous Improvement
- Track email open rates and, ideally, keep your open rates above 20-30% at all times.
When you notice your email open rates dropping below 30%, it’s time to start cleaning up your email list and removing users who are inactive and not engaging with your content.
Pro Tips To Generate High Open Rates
We recommend cleaning your email list every 6-12 months by running a simple re-engagement campaign.
This is a simple email marketing campaign that goes out to all inactive contacts on your email lists and asks them if they still want to be on your email list ideally with a “trigger link” that you ask them to click on to confirm their desire to stay.
You’re tracking two things here:
- Open rates – if the user does not open your re-engagement emails, it’s time to delete the contact data from your email lists and move on!
- Trigger Link Clicks – if they open the email, we can mark them as active user who is engaging with your content again, AND if they click on the trigger link consenting they want to stay on your list, you can track that data to know this person has shown genuine interest in your content
Why Companies Love ScaleUp For Email Marketing
Unlike most free email marketing software in the industry, ScaleUp offers a robust open api option that allows our software to integrate with an infinite number of tools and websites that most other software cannot without using expensive tools like zapier.
ScaleUp is a true all-in-one email marketing and client delivery software that allows users to explore a wide variety of features from building websites and funnels to generating sales and marketing campaigns.
Plus building out your membership site or course portal for your students to sign up for as users and easily integrate with 2-way sync to gmail and google chrome.
More importantly, ScaleUp also offers calendar booking so you can set your own availability and have clients or customers easily browse your website, sign up for your email list, and start the customer sales journey you’ve uniquely built out on our all-in-one platform.
You can also explore our full blog, the top 3 platforms for coaches, to explore our other favorite all-in-one software.
Linkedin & Other Social Platforms
Not only does Scaleup directly integrate with Gmail and all Google Workspace tools-
it also allows you to connect your twitter, Instagram, Facebook, AND Linkedin account where you can easily connect with all your potential customers on multiple platforms THROUGH ScaleUp to keep your data easily managed.
How To Move Your Email List Over To ScaleUp
If you decide you want to use our 14-day free trial and test out our email marketing tools, you can sign up for the free plan here and get all our templates instantly imported into your account to help with your email marketing and deliverability.
Importing and Exporting CSV File Data
Depending on what software you’ve used previously, you’ll need to create a file called a “CSV” which is essentially a spreadsheet of all the user’s data including the name, email, date the contact was created, tags, sales, purchase history, and any other relevant information that you may have collected from them.
You’ll then click EXPORT to download the file of your previous platform and IMPORT it onto ScaleUp using the IMPORT feature and dragging the file over.
Conclusion
Have you been on the search for an email marketing software that can do it all for you? You can checkout the full ScaleUp website here and learn about our priority support options to help you build your powerhouse email list on our platform.
