Working from Home? Utilize this time to Build your Email List

All of us are stuck at home while we wait for the COVID-19 crisis to be over. The majority of brick and mortar stores and e-commerce stores that don't sell essential items or services have suffered a great setback.

But you can utilize this time to create a sensitive and lifelong relationship with your existing customers and potential leads.

1. Genuinely help your customers during this difficult time

If you were planning to launch a new product or already have one but don't how to monetize it, then start by building the email list first so that when you are ready to monetize, you have enough leads and subscribers.

Due to this health crisis, you cannot blatantly promote your product or services, as it will be insensitive. But you can utilize this time to nurture the relationship with emails that can genuinely help your customers.

And when the crisis is finally over, you will have thousands of email subscribers ready to check out your products.

“When in doubt, build your email list”.

2. How to solve the “social proof paradox”

You’ve probably seen this advice before:

“If you want people to subscribe to your email list, use social proof. Show people how many subscribers you already have.”

That sounds great in theory. But what if you have 14 people on your email list?

This situation is what I call the “Social Proof Paradox”.

You need social proof to get subscribers. But you need subscribers to get social proof.

It’s a classic chicken or the egg problem.

And it’s something that many of us struggle with today.

Most of the other newsletters in our space had things like “Join 250,000 subscribers” on their landing pages.

How could you compete with that?

You couldn’t.

So instead of talking about subscriber numbers, you can promote the companies that get your newsletter.

For example, highlight the fact that people from companies like Slack, Apple, Casper, Dropbox, and Shopify have subscribed.

3. It doesn’t matter how cool your product is. Promotion ALWAYS matters

It doesn’t matter how cool your product is. You need to promote, promote, promote.

Sure, an awesome product makes promotion easier. But you still need to get the word out.

For example, the first iPhone was 1000x better than The Blackberry. But Apple didn’t just launch the iPhone and hope for the best.

They ran billboard ads. TV ads. And more.

Apple realized that every product needs nonstop promotion to succeed. Even an awesome one.

(For example, Share trending topics on LinkedIn and Reddit every week)

And this consistent promo has brought in a steady influx of targeted traffic.

Now I’d like to hear from you.

What’s your biggest takeaway from this article?