146 - Sharing Details About My Opt-In and Email List Growth

Are you struggling to grow your email list and generate revenue for your business because you don't have the budget for expensive ads? Well, what if I told you that you can achieve the same results without spending a single penny on ads? I know it's possible because I did just that in 2021 - I grew my email list from 0 to 100 subscribers and generated $75,000  in revenue by using a strategy that doesn't rely on ads.

In this episode of the Life Coach Business Building podcast, we are going to continue our mini-series on marketing for life coaches. In the last few episodes, we've talked about finding your niche, perfecting your message, getting to know your audience, and making email opt-ins that work. This week, I'm excited to share with you what I've learned from my own experience about what techniques have worked and what haven't when it comes to building my own email list. I'll also give you important information about the key parts of an opt-in that really brings results. 

I’m sharing the details of how creating an organic email list will be your most crucial marketing strategy. In six months, without spending any money on advertisements, I grew a list one email address at a time. That involved me meeting someone, asking them to sign up for something I posted on social media,  or to take me up on an offer for free coaching, and asking them to get on my schedule so I could acquire their email address. My first 100 email subscribers and the coaches I developed in 2021 helped me earn $75,000 naturally. And that is what I want you to do as well. 

Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your email list to the next level! Tune in to this episode and gain valuable insights that you can implement right away to start growing your list and generating more revenue for your business!

Transcript

Email list building is, gosh, the most important marketing thing you will do. It really is. An organic email list building. I grew a list in six months time, one email address at a time with no ad spend. That was me meeting somebody, me putting something on social media, asking them to join, me offering free coaching, asking them to, you know, get on my qd calendar so I could get their email list. Those first hundred email subscribers, the coaches that I grew in 2021 organically generated me $75,000.

Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.

Welcome to the podcast. We're gonna continue our marketing series. If you've been around, you know that we've been talking about niche, we've been talking about marketing copy, and last week we talked about opt-ins. Today I was scheduled to have a guest and I decided that the guest should be me.

I wanna really talk to you guys about list building from my perspective, what I've learned about what's worked, what hasn't worked, and to give you an idea of really what it takes, because an opt-in only works when you work. I know that there are lots of people that talk about just putting things out online and then they just bring you business, and that just isn't true.

You can put something up and yes, it does work, but you have to continue to market and keep yourself really active. You know, whether it be through social media, whether it be through email marketing, whatever it is, you have to keep your presence out there in the marketplace for these opt-ins to work, for everything to work in your business.

So in the first stage of my online business, when I went exclusively online in 2017, I worked with a coach who helped me create a webinar funnel, my first kind of real online funnel. I did paid ads in about 18 months. I spent about $57,000 on paid ads, and I ran this webinar, which was a traditional webinar.

And when I say traditional webinar, what I mean is the format was to give you three or four tips. But to not tell you enough to give you a complete solution, and then to get people on a consultation call to talk about the success of my program, what I had to offer, but not give any details, including pricing, and then to get people to a consultation call.

That did work. I wasn't comfortable with that, but that did work. I had about 800 consultation calls in a couple year period of time, which was a lot of consultation calls. And I had about a hundred clients that came from that webinar funnel. So I made, gosh, between 56, $57,000 the first couple of years each and the third year, I made about $77,000.

So that opt-in really wasn't profitable for me. If we think about how much I spent on ads. If we think about the number of hours that I worked, plus I was working with a coach, it really wasn't profitable. And I think the biggest lesson that I learned from that was I was doing something that did not feel good to me.

I was doing this webinar that I felt kind of was sleazy. It was a little bit slimy where I wasn't authentically telling people. I was just withholding information. I was leading 'em down kind of a, a rosy path, and then I was stopping just short of telling 'em what they needed. And that is the way many of the webinar formats are taught. But it just didn't feel good to me.

So when I changed my niche and I started expanding from where I was in the beginning of 2021, I stopped my ads and I decided to utilize the list that I had built. I will tell you, with that money that I spent on ads, the $57,000, I did grow a big list. So I built a list of about 5,500 people.

Now, I will say many, the people that come into a webinar funnel, I think are really cold leads. They don't really know you, which is again why I recommend that you guys do organic marketing, that your opt-ins are more organic and the way that you reach out to people is more authentic to you.

That email list I started to use without ads in the beginning of 2021, and I just decided to tell myself, you know what? There's money in this list. My only job is to talk to these people in a way that is compelling to them. Now, in next week's podcast, I'm gonna talk to you about email marketing, so we'll talk about that a little bit more, but I had just decided that that list that I had invested that much money in was worth money.

There were people on there that wanted to buy coaching for me. All I had to do was to be able to communicate with them in a different way. So at that time, I really went heavy into workshops. I started doing workshops in 2021 pretty regularly. I also started meeting with people individually and having coffee dates.

I offered lots of free coaching. As I was shifting my niche, I was moving towards only coaching coaches. But I was shifting my niche and I really just wanted to get to know people. So I had free conversations. Out of that conversation, those people were not opt-ins, right? They were free conversations. I would then say, listen, I also do lots of workshops.

I do free training. If you want me to add you to my email list, I would be happy to do that. And most of the time people were like, yeah, do it. Keep me up to date. I also was doing my podcast. Now, I will say the podcast is not a huge list builder. For me, it wasn't because if you can imagine, people are listening to the podcast and when you give them a call to action and you say, go subscribe or go get this particular thing, most of the time they're listening. So they're not in a place where they can stop right there and you know, click on a button and go do what you want 'em to do to grab the freebie that you have to offer 'em. So the podcast was part of the list building process, but I wouldn't say that it was huge.

Another thing that I did was I had a Facebook group that I started in 2021. Honestly, you guys, it was an experiment. So that was the way that I built actually quite a few leads. It was probably about a couple hundred organic leads and I had about 1500 people in that Facebook group. I built the group in about four weeks time.

And the idea of the group was to create a community for women that were in like-minded businesses where we could talk about our business challenges. I did some free training there, and again, I used it as a way when you joined the Facebook group, you could get access to something free. So they opted in. About 200 email addresses were collected out of the 1500 people that joined.

That actually was, you know, a pretty decent amount. But I will tell you it's a lot of work to have a Facebook group that's really active. I also started asking for a lot of referrals in 2021. When I decided that I was going to coach coaches May 11th of 2021. I first put my listing on the live Coach school website. That did begin to drive traffic to my website.

And I did have an email opt-in there that was about email templates actually. And I also had a growth checklist, business growth checklist. So there were two different opt-ins that you could get there on my website, and people did start going there. 

Now at that time, I decided to not email my old list anymore. So my old lists that had, you know, over 5,000 people as of May 11th, 2021, I stopped emailing that list because I was gonna coach coaches and there weren't any coaches on that list. So I decided to build a list from scratch. So if you are in a place where you're like, Debbie, you don't understand my list is so little.

No, I do understand. It was not very long ago that my list was zero. So basically the 1st of June in 2021, I started with an email list of zero and I did grow it that year till the end of 2021 to a hundred. Now I say that to you guys when you think about an email opt-in, you gotta know kind of what's possible.

That was all organic marketing. All organic, where I was asking people either on social media or gosh, in that Facebook group or through workshops or whatever it might be. I was asking people to go grab my free checklist or to get the email templates, so I was directing people there. I was also offering consultations, and I was still offering lots of free coaching conversations. At that point though, I did change the way I was offering the free coaching, and I offered it through a link in Acuity so that I was able to then start building my email list. 

So by the end of 2021 at a hundred people on my email list, I will tell you that email list generated me $75,000 in six months. Now you guys, I worked every single day, seven days a week, thinking about my business, working on my business, and I wanna make sure that you understand when I say worked on my business, I am not talking about projects or getting tasks done or learning things. I'm talking about actually reaching out to people, connecting with people, writing emails, really direct marketing, not kind of passively learning.

I was working into my business. Planning things, doing workshops, answering questions in Facebook groups. That was another thing that I, I know I recommend to you guys to do that, but I was answering questions in Facebook groups as an expert, never selling my own services. But what would happen is people would come from there, maybe they would link to my Facebook page, which might take them to my Instagram or my Facebook, either one, and they would opt into something from there. right. You're getting the picture of that.

In 2022, last year, I really focused on workshops. In fact, I looked up and in 2022, I did 23 workshops that I could account for. I probably did a couple more. So essentially that meant I did a workshop every other week. Those workshops were anywhere from 30 minutes of education to up to two hours of education, and many of them were just an opportunity for people to get to know me.

I was not selling anything. I just was selling the know, like, and trust factor. Really, I was helping people get to know me, get to know what I did, and really beginning to point out to people that there was a gap between being certified and having a business, and that was that you had to know how to be in business.

So, I focused on 2022. Again, the workshops, my nurture email series, my growth checklist, and then I shared on Instagram and Facebook. I did weekly email marketing. I also collaborated with a couple of other coaches that grew their list and grew my list. And finally, The last thing that I did for collaboration was that I invited other guests on my podcast.

So I had about an eight week series where I had other coaches come on my podcast and that exposed me to their audience and vice versa. They got exposed to my audience, so I'm sure that I gathered some leads through that. In May of 2022, end of May, I started running Facebook ads. Now, this time I decided that I was going to do it in a way that felt authentic to me.

So I did a workshop and it was the Canva workshop that many of you guys know about. The first version of the workshop was literally just a workshop. It was only a training. There was nothing at the end that talked about the coaching program that I have, the business building boutique. It was just essentially a gift. Come learn from me.

There were no follow up emails that were like sales emails that followed. The idea was, I just wanna grow my list. I can afford to run the ads, I'm gonna run the ads, and I'm gonna grow my list. So I did that. I will tell you, in the last 10 months, I've spent about $12,400 on Facebook ads. So that'll give you a little perspective.

In the beginning it was about a thousand dollars a month that I was spending on Facebook ads. it really did grow a list, but I will tell you again, those people that came from that list that opted into that list were still cold. And how I really sold the business that I sold in 2022 was I had them opt into something else.

So it was kind of like, you know, they joined me through the Canva workshop and then they started getting emails from me. Maybe they followed me on social media. They listened to my podcast. Then I started inviting 'em to the workshops where I actually have the most success in my business with consultation calls being scheduled is because of my workshop.

Because I'm really talking really face to face with people, so I really wanna encourage you guys. That actually is my favorite opt-in, and a lot of us don't think of that as being an opt-in. I will tell you in 2022 that that particular opt-in process actually earned me about $215,000. So I went from the hard webinar with paid Facebook ads with all of those consultation calls that for three years earned me between 55 to 75,000, let's say a year for three years.

And then when I finally got really authentic to what felt good to me with an opt-in, my list started to grow, and it was okay that the result wasn't coming from the paid ad and the Canva workshop because I said, that's all right. People need to know more about me. So it did work because again, I generated over a couple hundred thousand dollars. I probably spent if I was able to just look at my ad spend from 2022, I probably spent about $8,000 on paid ads.

And you guys know that I only recommend that you turn on paid ads once you are doing over a hundred thousand dollars in business because I wanna make sure that you know how to sell people. So when I think about what works in opt-ins, The first thing is personal connections, number one. And when I say personal connections, I mean going to find people, whether it be in Facebook groups, through a friend of a friend, through your own personal network, through your own personal email list, through your own personal Facebook page, your personal Instagram page.

You go find people there first. That is the way that you want to grow your list is through an opt-in that will serve that audience first. Then from there, I want you to think about the journey that you need to take them on, which is going to be where you engage them by sending 'em regular emails, and then again you decide to invite them, hopefully to workshops because that has been the most effective thing for me.

That's kind of the first part of what I would recommend that you do. At some point, you'll get to the point where you can do Facebook ads or whatever kind of ads it's gonna be. Maybe it's Pinterest ads, maybe it's LinkedIn ads. But what I wanna say is when you get to that point, I really wanna encourage you to do some kind of training that really feels true to you.

Now, I do believe that when you have a paid ad training like that, you do need to talk about your program. You need to have a real defined purpose for what they're opting into. So they're opting in to learn something and what is the next step, which is, in my case it was to have a consultation call. So the biggest takeaway that I want you guys to have is that email list building is, gosh, the most important marketing thing you will do.

It really is. An organic email list building. I grew a list in six months time, one email address at a time with no ad spend. That was me meeting somebody, me putting something on social media, asking them to join, me offering free coaching, asking them to, you know, get on my qd calendar so I could get their email list. Those first hundred email subscribers, the coaches that I grew in 2021 organically generated me $75,000. Now, that's what I want you guys to do. So just know as I wrap this up, what you do with your opt-in is you have to sell it every day. You have to go market it every day. It has to be presented in many, many different ways. So you are personally talking about it on your social media platforms. You're posting about it. You've got links in your bio. You are sharing it with your friends, you're engaging with people. That is the best way to grow your business. Again, think of email opt-in, sort of out of the box, and think about having people opt in to connect with you for free coaching, for free conversations.

For education. There's so much that the world needs to learn about life coaching that you can do so much educating, and I know most of you guys really love to learn and the teaching feels really valuable to you. So that's what I encourage you to do when you think about building your list. Now of course you're going to have PDFs just like I did or downloads.

I still have actually the business growth checklist. I also have the email templates. I also have a mindset thing called Take Five, so there's a handful of other opt-ins. But again, most of it is done through the workshops that I do, the free workshops. 

All right. I'd love to know what you guys are thinking about, kind of what email opt-ins have worked best for you. Next week, we are gonna be talking about growing your business through regular email marketing. So I'm gonna talk to you guys about what that looks like, give you some ideas of what you could do for email marketing. Let me just tell you again, there is money in an email list, so I want you to stay focused on growing your list through opt-ins

and I want you to be open to experimenting in the beginning with lots of different opt-ins until you find the thing that not only works for you, but that you feel really good about. And again, for me, that was that Canva training that I did. I feel really good about the fact that. You guys come to me, you go to that training and you're like, wow, I love that training.

That was so good. You taught me so much. I suspect that you'll feel the same way. So when you decide to create an opt-in, give really good value, help people really fall in love with you that way and see, gosh, how great you are. And then let them come to you through a consultation or you know, further connection with your email, which again, we'll talk about next week.

All right, you guys, I hope this was useful and helpful to you. We'll get some guests back on here soon, but I wanted to tell you my own story about building my list. You guys have an amazing week. Until next time, bye-bye.

Okay, ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week.

I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.