How to Effectively Grow an Email List (Episode 1 of 2 with Brittany Bayley)

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Brittany Bayley, and we’re going to discuss the ins and outs of email marketing including how to grow our lists and the essential email sequences.

Brittany Bayley is an email marketing expert, coach, and copywriter who helps her clients monetize their email lists and create unstoppable marketing channels for their businesses. She has penned successful campaigns for some widely recognized brands such as Russell Brunson. She’s the founder of the popular email template system Swipes That Sell. She focuses on making email marketing simple, so it’s easy to stay consistent and get ongoing and sustainable results.?

How to Effectively Grow a List

Here are a few strategies for growing our email list.

Focus on the Customer’s Point of View

We can grow our list by thinking about things from the customer’s perspective. We can ask questions about their perspective and what they are dealing with to attract them to our list. We can do things like low ticket offers, freebies, or other hooks to invite the ideal reader onto our list.

A lot of people come at it from, “What do I want to offer?” But they don’t see great results from this kind of approach. If instead, we say, “Here’s my person. What do they need from me?” our list is going to grow significantly faster because we’re coming at it with them as our focus.

Paid Advertising

The same mindset will work with paid advertising, we just have to put some money behind it. We do need to be careful with trying to scale it and putting a bunch of money behind it before we’ve proven and tested it. We should test it organically to make sure it works before we start paid advertising.

To test this, Brittany recommends split testing one thing at a time. Generally, the three things we will be testing are the subject line, calls to action, and our story. When we do this we should be watching our open rates, our click rates, and our conversion rates to see how they change. Brittany personally uses ConvertKit to do this, but she said she thinks ActiveCampaign is great and she’s heard great things about Mailgun.

Networking

Getting on other people’s shows, or Facebook Lives, or having other people talk about us on their email lists is a great way to bring in traffic. Brittany was recently in a mastermind bundle called Digital Insiders and her list grew by about 1,500 people. They all got together and were sharing each other’s audiences. “It’s a really good way to jumpstart your list and to get some fresh people onto your list and then get that ball rolling,” Brittany said.

3 Essential Email Sequences

Here are three different email sequences we should implement and how to get a start on setting them up.

Nurture Sequences

Whenever someone gives us their email address, we should start with a nurture or onboarding sequence. This is an introduction to us and our brand. It should tell our audience about who we are as an expert or coach, and it will set the foundation for the rest of our relationship with that new subscriber.?

Typically, this is a five-part series that will tell our story and set us up to coach them and give them some of our resources. Once we’ve done this sequence we can drop them into our main list.

“That’s an example of a core sequence that every coach, every single online coach, should have. There [are] no exceptions. We all need a nurture sequence to onboard our customers, to onboard our new subscribers, to set ourselves up for success with every other aspect of the email list,” Brittany said.

Launch Sequences

Launch sequences introduce a new product or highlight a product we already have in existence that we haven’t brought up for a while. This can be a 5-10 part email sequence saying, “Here’s what it is, here’s why I created it, here’s how it’s gonna serve you.”

Abandoned Cart Sequence

We can set up an abandoned cart sequence by having them enter their name and email address before they get to the order form. Then, if they do that but they don’t complete the purchase, an abandoned cart sequence would remind them of their cart and ask them if something went wrong on our end. It’s a great way to save some sales.

How do we set this up?

It can be overwhelming to try to figure all of this out and expensive to hire a copywriter to do it for us. Brittany offers a more affordable way to at least get a start on our email lists called Swipes That Sell. The product has templates for the core sequences and training to teach us how to infuse our stories into them so they don’t look or sound like templates. Swipes That Sell is just $37 compared to the thousands of dollars an email copywriter will charge to set this up.

Brittany’s Journey to Become an Email Marketing Expert

In college, Brittany studied journalism and wrote for the paper. She started writing more for herself, doing blogs. A woman came to her blog and told Brittany that she liked what she was writing; she asked if Brittany would ghostwrite for her. Brittany didn’t know what that was, but she accepted the job, figuring out freelancing as she went.?

Brittany wrote for her for years, and she did some of her landing pages, registration pages, and other pieces for her. She started getting referred more, finding herself in a place that wasn’t corporate that she really enjoyed.?

One day a client came to her, asking her to do her email campaigns. It was a great moment for Brittany because things started coming together. She could use what she’d been learning with freelance writing and one of her passions, psychology. She loved it, and from there she worked her way to exclusively doing emails for online coaches.

Her greatest home run was the opportunity to write a campaign for the Mastermind.com launch with Dean Graziozi, Tony Robbin, and Russell Brunson. She said it was one of the coolest experiences she’s ever had to write the campaign and to see the sales coming in live.

Narrowing Your Niche

When I asked Brittany what the biggest failure or mistake of her career was, she said it was not being specific enough in her niche. She didn’t specify what kind of emails she would be writing and for whom; she just said emails. She realized that emails for webinars and follow-up sequences for sales calls are significantly different from emails for infopreneurs.

“I made the mistake of assuming that just reaching into email marketing would make me an expert in all email marketing when really you have to know your industry,” Brittany said.?

Narrowing our niche is one of the secrets to how we can become number one in the world at something. As we narrow it down, there are fewer people that are experts in something so specific, so we become the expert of a niche within a niche within a niche. When we do this, we can become one of the best people that our clients could possibly hire to do that and we’re worth a lot more.

Long-Term vs Short-Term Monetization

Brittany said one of her favorite monetization strategies for email marketing is focusing on long-term?and?short-term monetization. For long-term monetization, we want to have strategies such as ongoing content going out, ongoing nurturing of our list, funnels that fire a couple of weeks after someone buys, etc.?

But we can also monetize in the short term. We can do flash sales or if someone came through our funnel and didn’t buy the bump or the OTO, we can say, “Hey, how are you liking this product? Here’s something that you might have missed in the haste of buying this.”?

These are a couple of easy ways to monetize long-term and short-term. We should always be leveraging our list to the max, not just focusing on one side or the other.

The Best Way to Provide Value

We need to make sure we are nurturing our list. Brittany said, “If all we’re doing is . . . hopping in and doing these little sales, we’re never going to nurture them. We’re going to have a lot more unsubscribes. We’re not going to build loyal customers or loyal brand credibility. We’re just going to be those people who are hopping in when they need money.”

If we make sure we’re consistently providing value to them and nurturing them, then when we do come back with a short term offer or short term sale, they’re much more likely to realize that we’re bringing that to them for the best interest because we’ve been investing in that relationship in the long-term.

“It all comes back to who you’re talking to,” Brittany said. “Sometimes we get really over-complicated with how to nurture lists or how to do these things.?It all comes back to . . . the person in your list. What can we do for them? When you come from that standpoint, all of the strategies, everything else, makes sense when you come from a place of, what do they need from me?”

We should be thinking about what we can do to improve their circumstances. What questions are running through their mind at night? What things are they coming up against based on current events? What is coming up for them that we can solve or answer? What resources do we have that you can give to them? It can be as simple as what they need and how we can fill that.

Owning Our Database

Brittany sees an increasing need to build our list, own our database of customers, and have a way to directly contact them. There is so much going on with social media, with algorithms, with changes to how we’re able to relate to our customers, and with what we’re able to stay in our ads. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t be on social media, but it is important to be able to have a direct-to-customer line in case something happens with social media that negatively impact our business.

This is an example of the tectonic shift of building a “skyscraper” on “land” we own. In this case, the skyscraper is our business and our customer database, and the land we own is our email list. If we don’t own the land, someone could come in and disrupt things for us. However, if we do own it, we can control what goes on on it.

It is important to sell in a way that we can get their contact information and permission so we can build that relationship through our list. The long-term value of a business comes in the ability to have that list and continually be able to sell new products to that list.

“Until you have a list, you don’t have a business.”

– Russell Brunson

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Brittany for sharing your stories and insights with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. Focusing on the customer’s point of view will better attract them to our email lists.

2. Before we do paid advertising, we should test it organically to make sure it works.

3. We can grow our list through networking and leveraging other people’s audiences.

4. Everyone should have a nurture sequence to introduce customers to us and our brand.

5. Abandoned cart sequences are a great way to save a sale.

6. When choosing our path, we should narrow our niche, so we become an expert in that specific thing and increase our value.

7. We should focus on both long-term and short-term monetization.

8. The best way to provide value is to look at things from our customer’s perspectives and ask, “What do they need and how can I give it to them?”

9. It is important to be able to control our connection with our customers and have a direct way to contact them.

Connect with Brittany

If you want to learn more about Brittany or connect with her, you can find her on?LinkedIn,?Instagram, or visit her website at?BrittanyBayley.com.?

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