#294: Grow Your Mailing List With These Free Tools

Hello there, health coaches, thank you so much for joining me today. I have a question for you before we dive into today's episode because this came up for me recently. I wonder if you have a friend like this. I have a friend who never, ever cooks. We have a lot of things in common. This is not one of them. And the last time I saw her, she said, you know Michelle, I bought a chicken. I bought a whole chicken. This was a big deal. She never purchased a whole chicken before and she tried cooking it and she said it didn't come out so great. And I said, what went wrong? She goes, well, I put it in the slow cooker and it was too mush. Well, all of a sudden I had about 300 pieces of advice that wanted to come out of my mouth all at once.

For starters, putting a chicken in the slow cooker for a pulled chicken kind of dinner, or if you want to make chicken salad, that's a fantastic way to cook a chicken really fast, especially while you go to work. Just throw it in there. I wanted to tell her and then I wanted to tell her, and then you could just keep the bones in there and make chicken broth. And then I wanted to tell her, if you really want it crispy, don't use a slow cooker. You got to roast that burden. You know what? I rubbed mine with baking powder and salt to get the skin really crispy, and I wanted to ask her if she had a meat thermometer because some people like to roast at 350 degrees. I prefer going higher for the first 20 minutes and so on and so forth. See, I personally have spent, if couldn't tell, I've spent a lot of time perfecting my whole chicken cooking techniques, but my friend Jennifer, she just would've been overwhelmed if I blathered on and on about all of this.

And maybe for some of you listening, you're nodding your head and you're saying, yes, Michelle. I like to cook my chicken that way too. Or some of you were saying, no, I never do it that way. But for her it was just like it would've been information overload. So instead, because I know my friend, I just smiled and I said, try roasting it next time. So here's my question, have you ever known how to do something? And you're like, you're so good at it. So well-versed, you just know it inside and out and then other people get confused. You give them too much. They need just the basics. And like me, you want to give them way too much advice. I think this happens quite a bit as health coaches, especially when we're working with clients, we have to be really careful of this. It can feel like someone's trying to drink from a fire hose when we're like, and then do this and then do that and then buy it organic, and then it's just too much.

It also happens to us as health coaches, it happens to you too. Business owners, if you're new to cooking chicken or if you're new to say building your mailing list, which is today's topic, sometimes I know that you just need the basics in order to move forward. So that's what today's episode is all about. I'm going to be explaining the basics of how the whole mailing list thing works and offering lead magnets or freebies. What's that whole process? And I'm going to tell you about the free tools that you'll use to get the job done. That's it. No more, no less. You with me? Alright. This episode is brought to you by my upcoming free event. It's called your Next 100 Email Contacts. If you're looking to start or to grow your email list, join us this June, 2024. It's all free. It's at healthcoachpower.com/email. We already have hundreds and hundreds of health coaches signed up for this. So go run now. Hit pause. If you're watching this, listening to this later, go to healthcoachpower.com/email and get yourself signed up.

Today's topic is all about the basics of the mailing list. It's inspired by a question that Jesse asked in our Facebook group. So Jesse, thank you for posting your question. I love when I can answer your questions more fully. I always try to answer in the Facebook group, but when I can answer more fully in an episode, I try to do so. So let's do it today. This is what Jesse said. I'm having some trouble with understanding the process of mailing lists and lead magnets. For example, when something like a free recipe is offered and the enter your name and email pops up and they enter it to receive the freebie, is that hosted by one's website or an app like Practice Better? I thought it was something like Constant Contact or MailChimp, but not sure that's what I need. So very good questions. Jesse, thank you for asking. I know you're not the only one who's confused by this. No one. Just to be clear, none of us were born understanding any of this mailing list lead magnets funnels. What the heck is this stuff? I remember as a new coach, so I started my health coaching business in 2009. I would spend hours, days going down rabbit holes like this, just trying to figure out is this what I need for my health coaching business? Getting a hint from maybe one article and following the trail and it can't just wasting so much time. What I learned is that some tools that are out there and some processes that you'll hear about are for larger companies and they can be really complex and a lot of times as health coaches, we don't need all that. We don't need to pay for all that first of all, but we just literally don't need all of that. We most often just need the basics. So there's some good news for everybody. So I want to start off just
Explaining the concept of a mailing list. I know we have listeners who are like mailing list. What's that? I don't have one of those. So let me explain a mailing list. Obviously that's going to be a list of email addresses, but I'm not talking about a list that you have on a pad of paper over here on your desk or a spreadsheet that you started on your computer. Those are good starts. But when we're referring to your mailing list, your formal mailing list, we're talking about taking those names of people who want to be on your mailing list. And we all start with our friends, our family, people that we would email anyway in life. We all kind of start with that small group and we take those names and we have to upload them to an email service provider. That's how all of us start a mailing list.

And an email service provider is not Gmail or Yahoo. Those are your personal email inboxes. I'm talking about an email service provider meant to help you manage your mailing list because it doesn't just send emails. It really manages the whole process when you get an email and at the bottom there's a little link that says unsubscribe. That's how you do that. You send emails through an email service. So when someone clicks that unsubscribe link, which is fine, but if we have somebody on our list who doesn't want to be there, God bless, they're going to click the link. That's okay. And the email service provider takes care of making sure they don't get any more emails from us. Does a lot of other things too. I mean, not only are you going to be able to manage your list, you can tag people. These are people who all came to my workshop in March.
These are all people who expressed interest in cooking Whole chickens, for example. Whatever it is, you can really get to know your list and tag people appropriately. You can see behavior when you send out an email. So if I'm in Gmail and I send a personal email to my best friend, I'm not going to know when she opens it. I'm not going to know if she clicks on any links that I sent her. That information is just not available. But when you email your list through an email service provider, you can see how many people opened this, how many people clicked on the links, who were those people. So you really get more information and you can get a lot smarter about what you're sending, finding out what resonates with your audience. So I could go on and on about that, but that's the main distinction.

So you do want to set up an email list with an email service provider. Many are free. There are lots of different options out there. And when I say many are free, many are free for a time, they give you a free version and sometimes those free versions have lots and lots of features and will last you for a very long time. Other times free versions are more limited. So this is where we've done a lot of comparison shopping for our health coaches, and I can let you know that at least as of this recording, we are strongly recommending a company called ConvertKit, which soon is changing their name by the way, to just Kit. So if you would like to check out ConvertKit or Kit, you can go to healthcoachpower.com/ and if you go to pricing, you'll see there is a free plan.

They have a 14 day trial and on their paid plans, but you don't need those. You just need a free plan to get started with. And boom, you're well on your way to having a formal official mailing list for your health coaching business. So that's step one. What Jesse was asking about in the question was about opt-in pages. And so the way to grow your list beyond just adding the names of your sister and your mom and your best friend is you're going to have to provide incentives or reasons for people to give you an email address. And I'm sure you've seen a lot of this online. So people offer a free download or it could be a free webinar that you're doing, a free guide of some kind, whatever it is in order for someone to get it, there's an opt-in page or an opt-in form where people are saying yes and opting in to your mailing list.

They're saying, yes, I want this free thing and to be added to your mailing list, here's my name, here's my email address. So Jesse's question was, where's that form come from? How does it work? So good news, you don't need anything other than your free ConvertKit account to create forms and pages like this. It is a built-in feature. You don't have to pay extra for it. You can build, well, at least as of this recording, they let you create as many of these opt-in pages and forms as you need so there's no limitation. And you will be able to design your page, have a spot where someone's going to give their email address and their first name to you. You're going to tell them about what you're giving them for free. And when they hit the submit button or the yes I want it button or whatever that button says, they will, two things are going to happen.
One is they will automatically be added to your mailing list. ConvertKit knows that they just filled out that form, so they're going to be added to your mailing list and they are going to automatically get an email. You don't have to do anything. This can be happening while you're asleep at night. You don't have to get involved. You just set it up once. They will get something called an incentive email, and that's an automatic email that says, here's that thing you ask for. So if you were saying, get my free downloadable guide to Hashimoto's or whatever, and they give their email address within minutes, it's going to appear in their inbox and in that email you can write a little message and you can link to the PDF that they can download. So that's the whole process. You have to set the mailing list up first.

Then you create the opt-in page or an opt-in form, somebody goes to it and they will get that automatic incentive email to get whatever it is that you're giving away for free. So again, all of that is free. You don't have to pay for any of that functionality. And really the sky is the limit. I mean, in my career, since I became a health coach 15 years ago, I've given away all manner of free downloads. I've given away various videos. You could do recordings of various things. You can imagine a cooking class or a meditation. These are things that you could provide in video form. That's another way to give a freebie. Free events, like I mentioned, a workshop, a webinar, a challenge, whatever. You can have one time events in that case when the new user, a new subscriber to your list gets that incentive email, there wouldn't be anything for them to download per se, but it would say, you've been enrolled in such and such free webinar.

Here's the date, here's the time, and here's the zoom link. That's what you'd be delivering to them instead, right? So get your brain churning on all different ways that you might incentivize somebody to join your mailing list because this is a very important piece of marketing yourself as a health coach. And other than holding maybe in-person events and having people give an email address when they sign up or if you have a speaking event, maybe you can pass around an iPad or back in the day we would just pass around a clipboard with a pencil hanging off of it and people would write down their email address saying they wanted to join your mailing list. Aside from that kind of thing, offering freebies, creating these opt-in pages is really like it's 99% of how you're going to build a mailing list for your business. So this is a process you want to get familiar with.

You're going to be doing it over and over and over again through the years. And when you sign up for our free training coming up this month, all about adding your next 100 email contacts, this is exactly what we're going to be talking about. What kind of freebie can you offer? What makes for an effective freebie, what makes for not such an effective freebie? And you're going to come away from that with light bulbs going off in your head like this. So make sure you're registered for that. It's at healthcoachpower.com/email. So that's the first tool. ConvertKit, if you have nothing else in your business, this is what you need. You don't need a website right out of the gate. You probably don't even need a website for a year in your health coaching business. If you've got an email list really rocking and rolling, you don't have to be on social media.
There's lots of things you don't necessarily need. You do need an email list. So get that sucker set up right away. And I want to tell you about another free tool that does. I mean actually it does so many things, but at the top of my mind, there are two ways that we can use Canva to help build our mailing list. Now, Canva is another entirely free tool. A lot of our health coaches actually do upgrade and pay for the pro version. For years, I used the free version years and years. I just upgraded very, very recently because I use it so much and you're going to use it for all kinds of things. But when it comes to building your list, the first thing you're going to need obviously is that lead magnet or that freebie that you're giving away. And so like I said, it could be a video, it could be whatever format you want to provide.

I think I've given away spreadsheets you could give away whatever format makes the most sense, but the most common and the easiest for a user to actually open up and use is often just A PDF. You can create a PDF out of Microsoft Word if you want, but it's not going to look so great if you make it in Canva. You can use one of their templates. You can make it so beautiful and professionally designed. I mean there's no reason not to. This is a tool I definitely think all health coaches should be getting well versed in because again, it's free and it's going to just uplevel the look of everything that you do. So you can use Canva, create a document, put the information, put your whatever you're giving away for free into that document. You always want to include something about you, your picture, a little bio about you, and a strong call to action book a call with me or whatever it is that you want people to do next, make sure that is baked into the freebie itself so you can use Canda to actually create the thing.

Then you will export it as a PDF. Now that's the file that you're going to share in the incentive email. Is this all making sense? It's all connected like this. So I hope I'm adequately explaining all the bits and pieces, but there's one other way that we've been using Canva recently, so I want to share that with you as well. So going back to ConvertKit for a second. All email service providers have opt-in page templates for you. They have some limitations, right? There's going to be an area for a headline. There's going to be a place maybe for a picture, there's a place for the form and there's a button, but they're not endlessly flexible. If you wanted to include another paragraph of text, there may not be anywhere to put that. If you wanted to include a couple testimonials, which can be a great idea, there's probably nowhere to put that.
And as much as we do love ConvertKit, we've noticed that there are limitations to the templates that they provide for these pages. So aha moment, just in the last year we did this with our fast track members and it's worked beautifully. We actually started using Canva to create the opt-in page. Canva allows you to publish any kind of webpage or website, and they're so easy. I've never seen a website builder that is easier. I don't know if I necessarily recommend it for your entire business's website. Maybe I haven't learned enough about Canva websites yet. I'm not sure if that would be my recommendation, but for something like this, just a one-off page with Canva, you can make it gorgeous. You can make it look exactly like the freebie itself that you already designed on Canva, any colors, any fonts, you want to add a picture here, add another picture there, fine.

You can move things around however you like. It's such a gorgeous tool. So what we started to do was actually marry the Canva webpage with a ConvertKit form. I know crazy. But in this way, we were able to build much more attractive and high converting pages on Canva. People click a button, they go to a convert kit form that accepts the information and boom, that person ends up on your mailing list. I'm sure there are 300 other really great ways to use Canva to build your mailing list, but that has just been such a game changer because for years, health coaches have said, Michelle, I want my landing pages to look more like yours. Michelle, how do you make your pages look like this? I use a paid tool, which I'll tell you about, even though this episode is not supposed to be about paid tools, but I use a paid tool called Lead Pages to build stuff like this, and it's a fantastic tool.
You can check it out if you want, go to healthcoachpower.com/leadpages, you'll get a 14 day free trial and a discount, I think. Check it out, let me know. But again, I didn't use leadpage in the earliest years of my business. I really do believe in sticking with the free tools at first. So Canva has become sort of that in between option for everybody who wants to do something really beautiful but also save some money. So I want to tell you before we go, some things that you definitely do not need to build your mailing list because so far the only thing I've told you that you definitely need is ConvertKit or an email service provider, which is free. You do not need a website. People think, oh, I need a website. I mean, that's how people are going to find me. That's how people are going to get on my mailing list.

Probably not. If you publish a website today, how many visitors is it going to get? Three. It's you. It's your mom, it's your boyfriend, that's it. So it's not going to be a major driver of traffic to anybody opting in for your freebie. You don't need mailing list in order. I mean, I'm sorry I take that back. You don't need a website to build your mailing list. That is first and foremost, other things you don't need. And by the way, if you're watching live and you're like, Hey, Michelle, but what about this? I need this. What about that? Now's your chance. Put it in the comments and I'll let you know if it's something that's necessary or not. I think we just get bombarded with offers for this system and this software, and you feel like you just spent $400,000. You don't even have a client yet, so you don't need a website.
Amen. You don't need any kind of fancy funnel tool like ClickFunnels is something that comes to mind. There's lots of things like this out there. They're going to build out your funnel. You don't need that. You do not require complicated funnels at the stage of your health coaching business. Maybe one day if you're selling a high-end course and you're making over six figures and you're running Facebook ads, yes, you can always get complicated later. You don't need that. Now, you also don't need higher end email service providers that cost hundreds of dollars a month or thousands of dollars a month. There are services out there, they're meant for larger scale businesses. Stay away from that. You're going to do just fine on ConvertKit or something similar. That's free. What else? You do not need an all-in-one tool. It's very tempting to see tools, and I'm going to call out Kajabi where it's like we do your website, we do your member site, we do your email marketing.

We brush your teeth for you in the morning. It's like all in one for a monthly fee. It's kind of expensive. And what you're going to find is that when email marketing is an add-on to another service, it's not their specialty, which means it doesn't perform as well. It doesn't give you the options that you need. So I would advise against using any email system that is built into another service. Wix also comes to mind. Some of the Yu website hosts have an email system built in. I advise against it. Nobody wants to hear this like, but I already have Wix. I want to use the email. Don't just get a free ConvertKit account. You can thank me later. Okay, what else? Jesse had asked about does she need practice better in order to offer freebie? No, you don't need any kind of client management system to build an email list.

Practice better is a client management system, which means it's for the clients that you are working with. It's not for your marketing. In order to get those clients in the first place, practice better is there to help you manage payments and scheduling and things like that. So no, you don't need that in order to build your list, and you don't need any kind of member site or course platform or any kind of login area in order to grow your list, which means that it's a perfect step in the early stages of your business because not only do you have to grow your list and your audience if you ever want to have a pool of clients at your fingertips, and we do want that, but it's so easy and zero cost to get started. You can be building your email list, and I did this even when you're still in school to become a health coach.

Or sometimes we have health coaches that are like, yeah, I'm certified, but for whatever reason, I'm an expat living in wherever. I'm not allowed to work. Fine. You can't take clients for some reason. You can still be building your mailing list. Anyone can build a mailing list. You don't need a certification or letters after your name. So start now because there's literally no barrier to getting going. And now that you have a better understanding of how the whole mailing list thing works and how simple it actually is, I hope you'll join me for our free upcoming training, your next 100 email contacts. It is happening this June, 2024, and you can register for free@healthcoachpower.com/email. I will see you there. Take care, everybody.