How to Grow Your Email List Fast and Free: 5 Proven Methods that Work

Every successful online business owner has built a healthy list of previous and potential customers. Better than paid advertising, your email list is your biggest asset. With a healthy email list full of qualified leads, on any given day you have the ability to successfully share an offer to your audience and generate revenue without needing other people or platforms to give you access to people who want to be from you. Being able to effortlessly sell to your own quality list of clients and customers is one of the most effective ways to quickly make money consistently online. It’s unfortunate that many entrepreneurs and business owners, possibly even you, tend to struggle when it comes to starting and growing quality email lists. The good news is that with the right strategies, anything is possible. Today let’s explore five proven, fast, and free ways to grow your email list on a more consistent basis.

I’m sure you already know that creating a lead magnet is one of the most common ways to get people excited about joining your list. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve already done the work of creating an amazing freebie offer and possibly set up a beautiful landing page too, but it’s crickets. Are your lead magnet marketing efforts not currently working for you? I wouldn’t be surprised if you told me you had a few signups initially, but now only a few trickle in or none at all. The truth is that creating a great offer is just where it starts, the trick is to find clever free ways to drive more traffic to your lead magnets without having to overspend on paid advertising. Here are a few options for you to consider:

Instead of waiting for people to signup for access to your free content, take that same free content and share it publicly on platforms that are frequently visited and searched through by your ideal clients and customers. I know you might initially think that’s crazy to give it away before people even signup, but hear me out. Youtube, for example, is a mega search engine. Check the stats, 1,300,000,000. 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute! And almost 5 billion videos are watched on Youtube every single day. You should create youtube videos to promote your business using the content featured in your freebies and then mentioning the link to your lead magnet landing page both in the video content and video description.

Turn Your Freebie Lead Magnet Content into Social Media Content

Following the method mentioned above, you can increase traffic back to your lead magnet landing pages by starting with video marketing and then digger even deeper. For starters, you can take that same youtube video content, cut it up, and post short-form micro-videos like Reels and Stories on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. This is a smart way to repurpose and cross-promote your youtube video content on other social media platforms. Also, consider turning your freebie content into podcast episodes, blog posts, and Pinterest infographics. Every day millions of people are searching through Pinterest, Blogs, Podcasts, and the top Social Media Platforms. Help them find you, by turning your lead magnets into social media content. And I know that you might say, if I share it for free publicly, why would anyone sign up to my list? My answer, when people are able to sift through all the fluff and find really valuable information online, they are inclined to want to save that information and get more of it. This is an effective technique known as Content Upgrades. How it works is essentially after people review your free information online, they are compelled to signup for a lead magnet version they can download, watch, and listen to, especially if it includes even more valuable content.

Less is More and More is More

If you think about it, less can be more if you strategically use some of the content from your lead magnet and repurpose that content in different formats to share across multiple platforms thereby reaching more people. Think about the fact that if you do this strategy more often, you have the potential to reach even more potential customers. In other words, diversify your lead magnets. Create more quality lead magnets and then proactively share more of that content publicly online if you want to see a more consistent flow of traffic back to your website, lead magnets, and landing pages. The idea here is that by diversifying your freebie offers, you can appeal to different people or the same people who want to see different things from you. More offers equal more opportunities to grow your email list fast and free. Just keep in mind, that the magic word when it comes to your content is always going to be quality. One really good quality lead magnet trumps one hundred really crappy ones, so don’t overlook the value of sharing solid value for the sake of quickly cranking out a ton of low-quality content. The ultimate purpose of freebie offers is to compel people to buy your stuff, which means that if you want to rise above the competition and improve your conversions, your free offers need to be better than their paid offers. Again, yes, more offers can help drive more traffic to your landing pages, but the quality of those offers is what matters most.

Promote Your Promotions

If your lead magnet landing page is sitting somewhere online collecting digital dust instead of converting it into digital dollars, it’s time to change that. I know you created a freebie to promote your business, but that was just the first step. This might sound a little crazy but, you actually have to promote your promotions, if you want them to actually work for you. Here’s a quick lead magnet marketing checklist. Create a pop-up signup form to share your offer on your website home page. Add a ‘freebie’ link to your website navigation menu that links to the lead magnet landing page and/or create a ‘resource page’ that showcases a list of your best freebie offers. To make your resources page even more enticing, you can go a step further and create a virtual vault full of your freebies, that visitors can only unlock when they sign up for your list. You can mention your freebies in blog posts, or embed your signup forms under blog posts, in your sidebar, or website footer. You can do this on your own or have a web designer like myself, set these things up for you. Guess what? You don’t have to stop here. There’s even more that you can do when it comes to promoting your promotions. If you have a link list page that you connect to your social media profiles, you should highlight your lead magnets on that page as well. If you are willing to get even more creative, you can use that same lead magnet content to create live stream training or master class webinar sessions, all with the purpose of being able to intentionally promote your freebie as part of your training. You can add your lead magnet offers to your email signatures and even spotlight them inside of your books, or mention them as ‘You Might Also Like options inside invoices, new client welcome onboarding material, and on thank you pages.

Get Out of the Lead Magnet Loop

I love a good lead magnet as much as the next boss, but I need you to understand that contrary to popular opinion, freebie lead magnet marketing is not the only list-building strategy available to you. If you are looking for an email marketing strategy that is even better than promoting freebies, consider working on more LPPs, please. LPPs are what I call low price point, entry-level tripwire offers. The idea is to directly sell tiny offers and make sure that you automatically capture new customers’ emails after each purchase. This technique trumps lead magnets in several ways. First, it allows you to actually make money, which is why you wanted to create freebies in the first place. Second, it allows you to build your list, which is also another big goal here. Third, you are intentionally building a list of not just freebie seekers, but actual customers. It takes time to convince people to buy your stuff, even after they get your freebie, they need time to get to know you and decide if you have something they actually want or need to purchase. But the people who buy from you are much easier to sell to, which is why you want more previous customers on your email list that you can retain through regular email marketing, which in turn helps generate repeat business. Watch the master class, Better Than Freebies, for a deeper look into how to make this strategy work for you.

Hopefully, after reviewing the above suggestions, you can find at least one new list-building strategy to try. Or at the very least rediscover a technique here that has worked for you before, so you might want to consider doing it more often. Meeting people where they are, sharing your freebie content publicly on social media using the content upgrades technique, and making your lead magnets more visible, these techniques are just a handful of things that you can do to get started. Even if it’s a struggle for you, it’s essential that you take the time to get better at growing your email list, because having a healthy list is key to building a sustainable business online. As I mentioned in a previous article on growing your online business without paid ads, Email Marketing is one of the oldest and most effective online marketing strategies. Some essential email marketing methods include promoting freebie lead magnet offers, auto-capturing new customers’ emails after each purchase, sales funnels, virtual events, email challenges, and publishing your own brand newsletter.

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