growing an email newsletter – WhosChrisHughes.com

So you're looking for a way to get more email subscribers and you want to reach more people? If so... this could be the exact thing you've been looking for. Do you want to attract quality subscribers who would be your ideal customers? The first thing you need to realize when doing a giveaway is that you want the prize to be something that your ideal customer wants to have. Something that an outsider would see it and think "who would want that piece of junk?" or something similar. Sure, you COULD give away Amazon gift cards or a laptop or something, but that's a prize everyone would like... not only your ideal audience. I first stumbled upon this particular technique in 2013 when I did a giveaway to build my country music lovers' email list. I found a gift that was a framed photo collage of a very well known country musician. The cost of it was around $50 or so. The gift was something that was appropriate for the audience I was looking to get onto my email list. When they saw it, they opted in to enter to win the prize because it was something that they would actually enjoy. If someone who didn't listen to country music were to see the contest, they wouldn't even pay attention because it didn't apply to them. the opt-in rate for it was absolutely insane too, which made sense because it was something that the audience wanted. I think it was like 83% or something. That means that for every 100 people who went to the landing page, 83 of them gave me their email address so they had the chance to win. It might have been 82% or 87% I don't remember, it was a few years ago. Not important though. What's important is just how easy this technique is to apply to your business if you know who your target market is. Do you know your ideal customer? If I were to have you pull out a piece of paper and have you write out a few things about your ideal customer, could you do it? You know, basic stuff like their age, their interests, what keeps them up at night, what problem are they looking to solve. ...and don't just think "yeah sure it's anyone above the age of 18 who is alive" because we both know that's not true. If you don't know these things about your ideal customer, you won't benefit from this technique for generating leads. Think about it for a second here with me... if you said "anyone above 18" I could say just give away a pizza then, everyone loves pizza... But if you said "my ideal customer is a 28-34-year-old young professional woman who just had her first child... that hits a little differently right? You can start to actually picture that person. You can start to think about the things that this woman needs. For instance, you could give away a year's supply of baby formula or diapers or something that this new mom will need. A man who is 23 years old might see that particular giveaway and think "what kind of person needs that?". That's just an example, I'm not saying you need to do that. What's Something Your Ideal Customer Wants? If this stuff was easy, everyone would be doing this right? I'm here to actually get you thinking and actually finding stuff that will work to build a targeted email list of people who are interested in your products or services. This part is going to take you some time to actually step into the mind of your customer and find something that will get them excited. But it's also gotta lead the person into your product/service. If you have a restaurant, you can do a free dessert giveaway every week and run ads to your local area (through Facebook and Google) to build your email list. Then you just send out a weekly email with offers to get those email leads to come into your restaurant. If you are a Chiropractor, you can giveaway a massage every week and run ads to your local area (Facebook and Google) to build your email list... Are you getting the idea? You'll give away something that's relevant to what you sell. For me, I knew that the demographics for the country music email list I was building were fans of country music and they were 45-64-year-old women. These women grew up on country music and love what it represents...and so do their kids. Yep, they are parents as well! Both of those are little details, but knowing the details about my ideal customer allowed me to find a product I knew they'd love.... to be truthful I ended up repeating this giveaway a bunch of times because of how well it worked. How Does This Make You Money? I like you. You're like me. You know that you need to get an ROI when you spend money on your advertising. After all, that's why we're in business, right? One of the first things I did after a person opted in was I had a thank you page that gave them the option to head over to Amazon and buy the product immediately. I used the Amazon Affiliate program where I earn a commission on sales from people who use my link to buy stuff. (They often bought the product I recommended plus other stuff that was in their cart... and I got commissions on all of it for referring the traffic) I also had 2 other options of related products that the person could buy after opting in. I earned commissions each time one of those products was offered as well. It kinda looked like this. Very simple... You, of course, need to make sure that all of the pages are compliant and that you have the proper links along with terms and conditions, privacy policy, etc... you know, the boring stuff you need to do for legality. Once you have that setup, you'll want to send people over to the giveaway page to see how it works. That means you'll need to buy traffic (clicks) from a site like Google or Facebook. Yes, you do have to spend money to get your giveaway in front of the right people. Remember we're paying these social platforms for the opportunity to get in front of the audience they already have. Until you own the lead's information (when they give you their email and then become a customer), you need to pay to get your stuff in front of your potential customer. We pay websites like Google, Facebook, and other people's blogs for the chance to get in front of our prospects. Once you get them on your email list though, you can email them with offers often as long as they're relevant... remember people can always unsubscribe if you aren't providing them with valuable stuff. What Do You Do After They Opt-In? It's simple in theory, but difficult in execution... You email this new lead with value and with offers to your product or service! That's it. See, simple in theory... but not necessarily in execution. I've made errors where I forgot to write out a series of emails to follow up with new leads... more times than I can honestly remember. It's hard work. It's difficult to do, and it's not always fun. It's also cost me a ton of money. and then like 6 months later I email this group of leads and they've forgotten about me. What a waste, right? You're smarter than that though. That's why you always need to have someone working on writing emails to your audience that pre-sells your product. If you aren't putting your content in front of your leads, they're going to buy from someone else. With these giveaways, a certain % of people are going to unsubscribe as soon as the giveaway email is sent out and the winner is announced. That's human nature... once the prize is gone, the people disappear. So there are two things you can do here. Set up a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly giveaway that's only for your email subscribers.Just accept that a certain % of people will unsubscribe and keep emailing people until they unsubscribe. It's up to you which one works best for your particular business. Right now I'm keeping this pretty generic because we haven't hopped on the phone to discuss your particular business yet. I like that kinda stuff, as long as you have a real business and need guidance on how to apply this for your stuff. You can actually set up a time to chat with me by clicking here. I do 15-minute discovery calls to find out if I can give you enough value to make it worth it. But please don't set up a time for a call if you don't have a business that's already established and you just need more customers. If you want a sample of these giveaways for yourself. I recommend this Free Dessert Sales Funnel that will automatically download into your ClickFunnels account with this link. How Do You Pick A Winner for the Giveaway? One of the easiest ways I have found to pick a winner here is to export all of the leads into an excel spreadsheet. What's cool is that you can actually upload this spreadsheet to a Custom Audience on Facebook and set up ads on Facebook that specifically target the people who are leads from this giveaway. But once you have the spreadsheet you can simply go to google.com and type in "random number picker" and use that to pick the winner. You'll put the number 1 under "Min" and however many leads you have as the "Max" number and then just hit "Generate". Once you have the number, go find that number in the excel sheet and that's your winner! Simple, right?