Any of you who listen to my podcast regularly will know that when I have a guest on, at the end of the episode, I asked them what advice they would give their younger selves just starting out in business if they could go back in time. Now some of you have asked me, well Rob what would you say to your younger self? So, the piece of advice I would give is to start building my email list as soon as I started my business. I know that's a sort of really practical piece of advice, but if I figured this out earlier, I would have a much bigger list now. And more importantly, I would have a much bigger pool of ideal target customers to fishing. 

So in today's podcast, I want to revisit one of my favourite topics because it's one of the most valuable things you can do in your agency and talk about the importance of building your mailing list, and more specifically, how to get new subscribers to join your list. Now I've spoken about the importance of building your list before in episodes 5 and 30, but today I want to dig in to talk about how you can get more subscribers.

Now hopefully, many of you will buy into the concept of building a mailing list. You'll also know that it's not really worthwhile buying in a list or building a cold list by people that don't know you and have given permission to be emailed by you. So you need to get people to opt in to join your list so that they are a warm, receptive audience. But how do you go about doing that every day so that you're getting more subscribers? Well, that's the topic of today's podcast.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips, and value-added interviews with your host agency owner and coach Rob Da Costa. This episode of the podcast is sponsored by my own programme, The Agency Selling System. The programme provides you with a resource library of video trainings, tools, and templates for everything to do with new business from your positioning, your marketing strategy, including everything you need to know about building your email lists and creating engaging nurturing sequences to convert your subscribers into loyal customers. Everything to do with selling and client retention and growth, just to name a few of the topics. You can see more about the programme by checking out the link in the show notes and as a thank you to my listeners for following me on the podcast. If you use Podcast10, that's podcast number 10 at checkout. Then you're going to get a 10% discount off the programme.  Okay on with the episode and this particular episode is action-packed, so it's well worth you sitting down and grabbing a pen and paper so you can take some notes. 

Every business will have two or three marketing activities that work well for them and deliver good results.

And these were based on the type of content their audience likes to digest, and also on the things that you're good at doing, whether that be making videos or recording a podcast like this or writing detailed blogs. But one of the things that are non-negotiable that every business should be doing and underpins so much of your other marketing activities is building your mailing list. Consider that every warm lead that you add to your list is worth £10 a month in revenue, Then hopefully you would be motivated to want to add more contacts to that list, and secondly, you would want to communicate with them frequently so that you can convert those contacts into revenue. Now, of course, you want to make sure that you're adding value when you send emails and you're not spamming your audience. And you also want to make sure that you are getting the structure and the content of your emails right, so that you're focusing 80% of the time on value and 20% of the time on selling. But that structures a topic for another podcast. Basically, the bigger the list, the more value will get from it. And communicating regularly with your list means that you're keeping your list clean and you are keeping them connected with your agency.

Now, if you want to win new clients, not only do you need to demonstrate that you're good at delivering your service, whether that be web design or writing or SEO strategies, but you also need to be showing up as the expert and the trusted advisor, and your email marketing strategy is a great way of doing that consistently by showing up in your prospects inbox and providing them with small bite-size pieces of value whilst demonstrating your expertise. Remember that we have to take our prospects through that no like and trust funnel and email marketing is a great way of building all three of those stages. 

But another way of providing even more value and positioning yourself as that trusted advisor and expert is by offering a more detailed lead magnet. So you may well have heard of this term before, but let's just take a step back. For those who haven't and explain exactly what a lead magnet is. As the name implies, a lead magnet is something of value that is going to attract your ideal target customer to part with their email address in return for receiving this lead magnet. Now it needs to be something that genuinely provides value so that it demonstrates your credibility and understanding of your client’s challenges. So what could a lead magnet be? Well, it could be a number of things from a detailed 10-page guide to a one-page template or top 10 tips. It could be a video lesson, or it could even be something like a quiz that provides some insights for the reader once they have answered the questions, and, of course, they received those results fire an email once they've submitted their email address. It just needs to genuinely impart some value to your reader. It's going to focus on the ‘why’ and the ‘what.’ And of course, when the client works with you, you're going to be delivering the ‘how.’ 

Now one of the questions that people often ask me when I'm talking about this with my private clients are my group coaching programme is, they say. But, Rob, I'm worried about giving so much information away that they won't actually want to work with me. But the reality is that clients come to you because they are time-poor and they don't have the time or the resources or the skills in house to solve the problem. And so they just want you to take the problem off their hands. So let's remove that as one of the reasons why you don't want to produce a detailed guide or you fear giving too much value away. Remember, people are time-poor. They've got time to go and figure this out for themselves, and they want you to solve the problem for them. So the lead magnet is just going to be providing them with some value and showing them via this value that you are the right person on the right agency to help them.

Now one mistake that I've made in the past is producing so many pieces of content for my lead magnet, and thinking that I need to have lots of these mitt lead magnets, and that's the right way to generate more email sign-ups. But the reality is that you only need one or two pieces of really great killer content to act as your lead magnet to start getting regular subscribers to your email list. So let's dispel another myth, which is I need lots of these lead magnets. No, you don't just start with one. And again, if I could go back in time and give my younger self some advice, I'd say, Rob, you don't need to have 20 or 30 lead magnets on your website. Start with one. Make it the best piece of content that you can promote the hell out of that, and then over time, you can add more to it. But just start off with one and market it really well. Oh, and by the way, let's dispel. Another myth here is that you don't need to spend thousands of pounds getting it beautifully designed pdf. Obviously, if you're a design agency, it needs to look like and you might have those design capabilities in house. But if not just used canvas and create a nice template so that it's easily readable. Remember, people are judging you based on the quality of the content. They're not judging you on the design. 

Okay, so now you've got this one piece of killer content for your lead magnet, and you've created a nice PDF or you've shot a video. Well, you've written the quiz. Where do you promote it? And how do you get people to start engaging with your lead magnet so that they can access it in return for their email address? Well, the best place is going to be your website, and what you want to do is create a specific sales page or landing page on your website so that when they arrive, they're seeing some really engaging and enticing content. It's almost like an ad if you like, to encourage them to download the lead magnet. Now, this sales page needs to lead with your client’s pain and then show them how your lead magnet will help them start transitioning away from being in pain to not being in pain and how to do that as quickly as possible.

Now I'm going to do a future episode on the anatomy of a great sales page. But a quick overview of a sales page needs to start with a really engaging headline, which typically looks like how to achieve a desire without getting stuck on an obstacle. So a recent headline for one of my cells pages using this formula was: “How to increase your profits without fear of losing clients?” So take that approach to your headline and then promote the freebie. The killer content is the lead magnet.

Now you're also going to want to include some testimonials or which could be written. Or there could be a video of people that have used your freebie and get value from it. So that's something to bear in mind to get some feedback from people, and a really important point is that you want to make it really easy for your reader to access your freebie. So make sure that right at the top of the sales page, almost below that headline and what we call above the fold, you've either a form that they fill in, which might just be their first name and their email address or a button to click on, which will open up a pop-up form. And you want to make sure that that's not buried somewhere at the bottom of the page. In fact, you're probably gonna want to include this but formal button at least twice on the page, once at the top and once at the bottom. And if you're using a long-form sales page and you're probably going to have it in the middle as well. So don't be afraid of putting that several times and making it really easy for your reader to access it. So, as I said in a future episode, I'll go through the anatomy of an ideal sales page. But that just gives you a kind of quick snapshot and have a look around my website to see some examples of sales pages. In fact, I'll put some links into the show notes. 

Okay, so you've written your piece of killer content. You've created this amazing, engaging sales page. Now we need to link it all together using the right tech. Now, sometimes this can feel really overwhelming, and actually, it's a barrier for some people to start building their email list. But at the end of the day, it's pretty simple. So let me outline the tech, and the process is you need to connect all of these pieces together. So basically you need three things. A website to host yourselves a page, an email automation system to send out the killer content and then subsequent follow-up emails and a form that people fill in to request the piece of killer content in the first place. So let's break these down, and we're going to start off with the email automation system. So you want to start using something like convert it or Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign. And I've personally used all three of these over the years. But now I host all my emails in Cartwright, which is an all in one system, and my websites are also hosted there. My email automation system, my forms, my videos and so on. But I would start simply by using one of the systems that are just off for email automation, and I'll list all of these in the show notes. Now, of course, you can also need a website, and I hope that with the website that you have you can easily create new pages yourself, rather than having to go back to your web development agency every time you need a new page. And certainly, if you use a platform like WordPress and a design system that sits on top of it like Thrive Architect, it will be very easy for you to create a new page. In fact, tools like Thrive Architect and Kartra that I use give you lots of pre-designed templates for sales pages, which are a great starting point. 

So now you've designed ourselves page. You need to connect the form to the email automation system, and you'll be able to do this in one of two ways. You either create the form in your web development platforms such as Thrive Architect, and then you link it through to your email automation system, or you create the form in your email automation system and embed it on your website. Now I know that might sound complicated, but trust me, it's not. It will take you 10 or 15 minutes now, of course, to ensure that you are GDPR compliant. You'll also want to make sure that you have a tick box confirming that the reader allows you to send them further emails. And your email automation system will make this very straightforward to add that in. In fact, usually, it's just part of your settings to say you include GDPR compliance approval. I hope that doesn't sound too complicated because it is really very simple. 

So the final piece of the jigsaw is the emails that you're going to send once they've given you their email address and requested to receive your lead magnet. And the nurturing sequence of emails that you send after they've downloaded the lead magnet is really important so that you can start to move them through the sales funnel and build that know-like and trust journey with your ultimate goal, being a meeting to discuss a potential project that you could help them with.

Now, one piece of really important advice here is that make sure you deliver your lead magnet via email. Don't just redirect someone to another page on your website where that PDF appears because that will encourage people to give you bogus email addresses. Whereas if they know that you will send the lead magnet via an email, then they have to give you their correct email address, so that's a really important tip. Also, by doing this, you force or highly encourage people to tick that GDP our compliance box. So word it carefully, such as in order for me to send you the guide you have requested. Please confirm you’re happy to receive further emails from me and tick the GDPR compliance box. Now the sequence of emails you send once they've requested your lead magnet deserves a podcast episode in itself. But I put together a lead magnet of my own, which is a welcoming sequence of emails that you would send to somebody once they've subscribed to your list. So if you want to grab a copy of that lead magnet, I'll put a link in the show notes.

The first email you're going to send immediately upon them completing the form is going to be the email that delivers your lead magnet or your killer content. And you can store that, for example, on Google Drive and then put a link to that in that email. Or you can send it as an attachment and that both of those approaches have pros and cons, and this will largely be dependent on the email automation system you use in terms of which allows you to do what? As I said, both have got their pros and cons. But again, just a reminder. Don't deliver your killer content directly on your website unless you want to receive loads of bogus email addresses. 

Okay, so you then want to send them further emails over the next week or so, which digs into certain aspects of the lead magnet that they have downloaded in more detail. So, for example, in my case, if you download my self-running agency book over the next five days, you're going to receive a series of emails that include videos of me diving into certain aspects of the book in more detail. Now, this is a really good idea because some people like to read and some people like to watch videos and so on so I'm covering all the different variations of different readers. Then the follow-up emails will become less frequent over time. But you probably want to end up with a sequence of about 10 to 15 emails sent over the next 30 to 60 days. Remember, your goal with these emails is to nurture them through the sales funnel so that you can identify your five-star prospects who you're hot prospects and start having a more personalised engagement with them to discuss a potential project. You shouldn't fear sending that many emails over that period of time, because remember what we said at the beginning. Your subscribers are worth £10 a month, and you need to identify those hot prospects that you can start engaging with. And if they have requested to receive your lead magnet, and in the emails you send, you continue to delve into that particular topic. Then they're going to be receptive to them, and your open rates should be high. Okay, so I feel like we've covered a lot in this episode, and as I said at the beginning, I hope you grabbed a pen and paper and took some notes.

I hope that it makes sense, and most importantly, I hope it inspires you to start building your email list if you haven't done so already. Now don't forget I've put the links to the email automation systems in the show notes. I've also put a link to my lead magnet, which is a welcome sequence of emails. You can grab that for free, and you can just see how all of that works. But other than that, go forward and create your email list. I hope you found this useful. Please hit the subscribe button. As you know, please leave a review if you enjoyed it, because that really helps me reach more people. But other than that, I will see you next week for our next guest interview on The Agency Accelerator Podcast.