#309: 3 Ways To Build Your Mailing List

Michelle:
Well, hello there, health coaches. It can feel like you're swimming in information and ideas and there's just so much to learn about health coaching and running your own business. I mean, if you're here with me live and you know what I'm talking about, you can just say, yeah, that's me in the comments. I think we've all been there at one point or another. So today I've taken a real minimalist approach and I've distilled down a really big topic into just a couple bullet points because the idea of starting and growing a mailing list can feel daunting and in some ways it is. If you think about like, oh my gosh, this is something I'm going to be doing pretty much every day for the lifetime of my career as a health coach, years and years and years. We're looking forward and you're going to be building your list through all of them.

But here's the good news. By the end of this episode, you'll have a really helpful overview, like a map to help navigate with so it doesn't feel quite so overwhelming. And then in a couple of weeks, I'm actually going to show you how my very favorite list builder works, and we'll talk about it in a few minutes during this episode. But my favorite technique is holding a free three day challenge. Have you done one of these before? I'm going to let you experience a three day challenge for yourself, and at the same time show you how to put one together for your business, and that is going to be a completely free event that you can sign up for now. It's at healthcoachpower.com/build, and I'm just going to drop that over here in our Facebook group.

Now, before we really get into this today, again, I'm just going to apologize if I sound a little stuffy. I am a little stuffy. I guess that's just the time of year that it is, but don't worry, I got my elderberry and I've got my echinacea, I've got all the things. I got the yin chow. Does anybody else take Yin Chow? It's a Chinese herb, so I'm feeling much better already, but I apologize for my voice. It's not great for podcasting when you have a cold. So let's just start real quick with the whole mailing list idea. If you don't have one yet, I know many of you do, but if you don't have a mailing list yet, you're not alone. I think most coaches that I hear from when they just have graduated from school, or even if they're newer in their business, probably don't have a mailing list yet. When I'm referring to your mailing list, I'm not referring to a spreadsheet on your computer and I'm not referring to you using your Gmail or your Yahoo, I'm referring to an actual email marketing service, the kind that lets you send a broadcast out to an entire list at once, and it also manages your list.

So it allows people to hit that unsubscribe button at the bottom. That's really important when you're running a business. I mean, how annoying would it be if you got an email from, I don't know, any company that you get emails from right now think about or any practitioner? What about Brene Brown? I get emails from Brene Brown, I bet you do too. And at the bottom, there's always that unsubscribe link. That's because she's sending through an email service provider, so there's lots of them out there. I'm just going to cut to the chase and let you know that we like ConvertKit for health coaches for various reasons. The biggest reason is they give you a lot for free and they give you a lot for very, very, very low cost compared to some others out there. And I don't think there's any reason that you need to be spending a lot of money every month on an email service.
So I'm going to suggest ConvertKit, which before I forget, they just changed their name. It is just Kit at this point. So I'll put a link to check them out in the show notes, or you could go to healthcoachpower.com/convertkit, I don't think I changed the link yet. I'm still calling them ConvertKit. Anyway, same service. It's a fan favorite, so if you don't know where to begin, check them out. That's first and foremost. So Linda is here. Linda says she is using Kit, and she even properly wrote that just Kit not, and she says she's still building and it's going slow. Remember, it is list building is very much like the slow and steady race. You're rarely going to get a thousand people on your mailing list today. That just kind of doesn't happen. It's slow. It's over time. It's a snowball effect. That said, it only snowballs if you do the things continuously over time.

So that's what we're talking about today. And KA is saying she uses Kit as well. Okay, see, I told you it was a fan favorite. Let me put that link over here again, healthcoachpower.com/convertkit we'll just say slash ConvertKit for now and we'll make sure that gets updated in the future. So okay, let's say you got your service, whatever it is, before you even do anything fancy. Don't do anything fancy if you haven't even just asked people if they want to be on your list. I know it sounds so stupid and so super obvious that can possibly work. What do you mean? Just ask people. But even if you're just starting out, I know you have people in your life who care about what you're doing and you can just say to them, Hey, I'm starting a real email list. I'm getting my first email list going. Would you like me to put you on it? That way? Everything that's going on in my business, I can keep you updated, whatever you plan on sending out. A lot of people don't want to be put on a mailing list, of course. So this is not the big reveal of today. This isn't the main technique I want you to use, but for your best friend, your sister, whoever, the people who are already very close to you or people who have already expressed interest when you said you were going to school to become a health coach, they were like, oh, I can't wait to talk to you. Those are the people that you can just ask like, Hey, I'm starting an email list, can I put you on it? Right? So that's easy. Do that first. I know health coaches who do that and they get like 25 names on their mailing list in a day just because they just ask.

So there's nothing fancy, there's nothing techie about it. And you might think, well, these people are not my ideal clients. That's always going to be true. Our list is always going to be a combination of a lot, hopefully a lot of people who are our ideal clients, and then also our connectors, the people who know us and love us, the people who really admire what we're doing, because they themselves may not be the clients in the future, or they might be, you never know, but they're going to be the ones who are like, oh, look what she's doing. Look what he's doing as a health coach. Look what's going on. Oh, this event's coming up and they're going to tell people about you. So it's cool to have them on your list too. Don't shy away from that. Alright, so mailing service, get the low hanging fruit, just ask people first, get your first handful, whatever of people on the list so that you have some folks on there.

And then I've got three ways to build your list today. Three, I mean, I could say there's like 300 ways to build your mailing list and get into all the very nuanced minutiae of it, but I just want to talk about the overview. So when I think about building my own list way back in the day, just getting it started, and even today, it never ends. One thing to think about is doing in-person events where people are either going to register in order to be able to attend, and these can be free events, but they're just going to register. They're just going to give an email address and sign up in order to attend the event. Now by doing so, now you have their email address. You're going to want to make sure that when they give the email address, they know they're signing up for something, they know they're going to be added to your mailing list and boom, now you've got people on there.
So I'm going to give you some examples. One example is when I just started my health coaching business, I'm sure I've talked about this before, I may have even talked about it recently. I held very, very casual. I called it my cooking club. So it wasn't like a formal cooking class, it was in my cooking club. And so I'd have people register to attend, they'd show up at my house and we would just cook together. I'd put out some cutting boards, everybody would chop and mix and blend, and at the end we would enjoy the food that we made together. Very, very simple. That is an in-person event where somebody registered in order to attend, now they're on my mailing list, they're going to hear about the next cooking club, and they're also going to hear about everything else that I'm offering in my business.

So that's one way to go about it. Another way to go about it, and I'll also give you an example, is that people come to your in-person event and they didn't necessarily sign up for it, but it's the kind of event where maybe they're walking by and they stop by your table or whatever. And what you want is to have some reason for them to give you an email address. So here's my example. Again, early in my career as a health coach, I remember having a table at my friend's boutique where I was doing a raw food demo. I was in my raw vegan era. You guys, it actually worked out really beautifully because when you're doing a demo, you don't necessarily have an electric outlet and you can't have a flame and you can't be cooking cooking, but you can be chopping, you can be preparing.

So in this case, raw food worked out very, very well. The go-to for health coaches of course is always to make energy balls for this type of event. But I was doing all kinds of stuff anyway, what I did was I was giving out samples and people were asking lots and lots of questions about it, and then of course they wanted the recipes. So rather than paying money to print recipes and bring them with me and then hand them out, they're just going to get tossed in the trash most of the time anyway. Instead, it was like, put your name here and I'll send you the recipes tonight. So that's what I mean by offering something that they would want at your live event. Give them a reason to give you an email address that's going to work much better than if you just have something that's like, join my mailing list. Because nobody, again, no one really wants to join a mailing list. And so just in terms of collecting email addresses in that type of event setting, back in the day, I literally had a clipboard with a pencil dangling offer tied with kitchen twine. And you can still do that, but these days are our nicer options. So once you get set up with an email service, you can have a nice QR code or you can have a little form on an iPad available that people can use to put their name on your list. But the point is that you're giving them an incentive to do so. So those all work really well when you are live and in person. Now, for those of you that are with me today, have you done any in-person events? I'm curious what they were and did you collect names? A lot of times we forget to do the part where we collect the names and email addresses.

We might show up and do a little talk for the PTA or for our local book club or something like that, but we forget the part about how do I get these people on my email list? We just tell them, go to my website or follow me on Instagram. That's not the call to action. The one thing you want everyone to do is get on your list. Okay? All right, promise. Okay, good. So in-person events, that's first and foremost. Okay? The next way to grow your list, and you see this all the time in the online space, is offering something called a lead magnet. A lead being someone like a potential client, a lead and a magnet, something that attracts them. A lead magnet. We usually just call it a freebie, like some sort of downloadable freebie. And it could be a downloadable, it's often a downloadable PDF.

It doesn't have to be a lead magnet, could be a video, it could be an audio file, it could be something else, but most frequently it's some type of PDF. Does anyone here have a lead magnet that you're already giving out anyone? So of course you would create that document or that piece of audio or whatever it is, the gift that you're going to be giving away for free, that's obviously one part of it. And then you have to create an opt-in page. You have to create a form through your email service where someone can put in their name and their email address, and then they would receive your lead magnet. So you don't need any other fancy tools, you don't have to pay for some third party whatever. You can do all of this within Kit. If you're using Kit or whatever email service you're using, you're going to be able to do all of those functions.

And in terms of creating your PDF, think Canva, has there ever been a better tool than Canva? Okay, Linda's saying yes, she has a lead magnet. I know you do, Linda, if you guys don't have a lead magnet, the reason they're so powerful is because you can offer them every day of the year. If you are a guest on a podcast, you can offer your lead magnet on the podcast. If you're writing an article, remember, somebody might read that article or listen to that podcast episode like years later. So that's when it really makes the most sense to offer something that is evergreen, IE always available. That type of lead magnet just allows you to always have a way to grow your mailing list. So that's what I love about lead magnets. You basically, you must have one, okay? You must. That's essential for any of you.

So keep that in mind. Don't skip it. Sometimes it feels a little bit boring. We want to do the fancy stuff, but I promise you there are 5,000 in one different ways that you can be sharing your lead magnet and you're going to want to have one of those in your back pocket. Now can have, I have many, many lead magnets, but you want to start with one, get one done first. Don't try to make 10 at the same time. And then of course, over time you can create more and more good. So that's number two, the lead magnet. And now let's move into number three. And this is where it starts to get exciting. This is my favorite because we're going to talk about online events. And I love online events because basically it's very similar to the in-person events that we talked about earlier.

People are going to register in order to participate in your event. But in person, I mean, how many people are going to come, even at the height of my health coaching mean if I did a workshop or whatever and I had people register to come, maybe you get 10, 20 people, there might be an occasion where you have 50 or something like that in person. You're restricted by location. But now when we take it online, I mean you guys in my health coaching career, I've lived in Boston and then I lived in the DC area, and then I lived in New Jersey, and then I lived in New York. So if I did things locally in each of those, I could only reach the people in each location. But when I offer something online, now they can all participate and they can all invite their sister who lives in San Francisco and their best friend who lives in Taiwan. And this is how you turn it into a global operation. You are working with clients around the world, and I have, so I love, love online events. They take what you're doing locally and it just multiplies the impact and your ability to reach people. So I love the online event thing. So there's different kinds of online events. I'm going to talk about two of them today. And the wonderful thing about online events, obviously you're reaching people from all over the place. The other thing is that you can be inviting people to your online event just like you would with the lead magnet. So again, if you're doing some sort of Facebook Live, you're doing an Instagram live or whatever, it doesn't matter where people are, they can all come to your online event and it has a little bit more urgency than saying, download my freebie, because when you're download my freebie, it's like, okay, sure, I guess.

But when you're like, I have this event coming up and it starts on this day, Ooh, I'd better go sign up for that now it's just a little bit more urgency around it. So one type of online event would be holding a free webinar. Obviously you could just say, I'm holding a free webinar, but you don't have to just call it a webinar. You could call it an online workshop. You could call it a training, you could call it, it could be an online cooking class. I mean, it's still happening over Zoom. Basically anything that you do over Zoom essentially as a webinar.

I remember signing up, oh gosh, this was years ago, and I jumped at the chance to sign up when Aveva Rom, who then years later I ended up studying with and really getting to know, and I love Aviva, but my very first touch point with her was she held a fireside chat and it was all about vaccines for babies. And I was in that stage of my life. I had just recently given birth and I was like, I need this. So anyway, she called it a fireside chat. So don't let the word webinar throw you, that sounds really corporate. You want to host something that people actually want to come to. You could call it like a Girls' Night Out or Girls' Night in, which just means people are going to gather on Zoom. That's all that it means. And then so that's an event where again, you would've a page where they can register and where do you build that page inside your email service? That's right. People will register to sign up. Now they're on your mailing list and you do this event with them. But what works even better I have found than a webinar in many cases is to hold a multi-day online event. And specifically what I'm talking about is a free three-day challenge. And I've helped so many health coaches put together free challenges, and it works so well because it's the same as a webinar in the sense that you're getting people to sign up for an event that starts on a particular day. So we love that. And then the day comes and, oh, I forgot I have to pick up. So-and-so from the airport or, oh, I got really busy and I didn't end up doing it. There's so many reasons that people won't make it to one day to the first day or to your one day webinar.

They won't make it. But with a three day challenge, there's two more days that they can come to. So you have more touch points with those that have registered. And in fact, then we usually do some type of online forums. Then you have that as a touchpoint, and there's just many more ways for your registrants to actually participate so that they're more likely to participate, so that they're more likely to get to know you and listen to what you have to say and try some of it and engage with you. And basically, this is all about building up that know and trust factor so that not only do they end up on your mailing list, but now they're very interested in becoming a paying client. So I love, love the Three Day Challenge. It has all of the benefits. It's an event. We love events. It's a date-based thing that has urgency. We love that. And it allows for this. And some people will participate all three days and by the end of three days they're like, I love this health coach. They're like, how did I ever live without you? So we see people getting great results, they're really getting into it. There's a comradery that happens. It's a group that's going through these three days together. Love, love, love it. And I have found that there's really good conversion rate at the end, particularly with one-on-one coaching. We had that time. We have those three days to build a relationship, even if someone's brand new to you on day one. So the thing with three day challenge is this, the more days you're doing something like imagine a wedding and that's a lot. And then imagine an Indian wedding, which actually I've never even been to a real Indian wedding. So if anyone's having one, please invite me. I want to see what this is all about. But I've heard about them and they just sound amazing, but they're like many days of festivities right now. Imagine how complicated that gets to arrange when we're trying to put on a multi-day event. It is admittedly more complicated than putting on a single day event. And again, there's more touch points and there's also a lot more opportunity for you.

I don't want you to miss all those moments where you can be connecting with people, changing lives, having an impact and making them go, oh, I really got to hire her. That's why I want to actually walk you through a three-day challenge. You'll be able to see how I do it. Every single touch point you're going, it's going to be very meta. You're going to sign up for it, but then you're going to go, oh, I see how she did that. Oh, I see what just happened now, right? You're going to get a sense for the flow of this kind of event. And then I'm actually during the event, going to teach you some of the nuances, okay, here's what you want to think about. Here's some thoughts on the content that you want inside of your challenge so that we are best leading people towards hiring us. We're not just doing this for fun. I mean, they are fun, they're a lot of fun, but that's not the point. And I'm going to kind of give you the insider tips each of those three days so that you can do one of these for yourself.

So again, I want you to go run and sign up for that event. It's happening October 22nd to the 24th. Even if you can't make it those days, sign up anyway because you're going to get the materials again. That's October 22nd to the 24th. That's 2024. If you're listening to this podcast later, sorry you missed it, but don't worry, I always have cool stuff going on, and you're going to want to go to healthcoachpower.com/build. And when Linda's saying, yes, Indian weddings are amazing. She's been to many and they're so fun, and the food is ish, guys, somebody must be getting married and having an Indian wedding, please, I'll send you my home address. And Alyssa says, great ideas. I have all the content and the biz class and the mentor, the small email list just had a small in-person mini retreat, and for some reason, I'm overthinking overcomplicating, putting my lead magnet out there. So this is super helpful. Oh, Alyssa, you know what? Okay, when it's an event, you do it and then it's over. So that's why I want to walk you through the three day challenge.
So when you do it, you get it right the first time. You really just get that one shot with a lead magnet. Don't hesitate to put it out there like imperfectly because then it's out there. It can do its job and you can always edit it. You can always go into that PDF, you can make a little edit, replace the file, and then the next person who downloads it gets something just if you had a mistake, if you had a typo, if you decided to add a page, whatever it is. And the same thing goes with your opt-in page with your event. Again, I want to help you get it right the first time, but there's so many iterations of these things. So any of my lead magnets, you're going to do your very best to get it right. And then you're going to put it out there and you're going to see what the result is.

And if it's not converting the way that you hoped it would, you can adjust that opt-in page. You can adjust what you call it or the headline that you're using or the call to action or the colors or the photos. So it's always a work in progress. We're always just trying to improve upon what we have. So I would say just, yeah, exactly. She's saying it's like this analysis paralysis. Just get it out there and then look at the numbers. Because if I'm like, oh, I think this stinks, but all right, lemme get it. I'm just going to get a good enough and all my healthy profit university members have heard me say, just do B minus work. Just do enough that it's a good enough. It's B minus. Get it out there. And then you can just iterate version two, version three, version four. Because we get smarter as we look at the numbers and we see what actually happens. Because sometimes I don't think it's my best work, and then I'm like, oh, it's converting like gangbusters. People really like this. And I'm like, oh, good, I'm done. So you can't actually know how good it is until you see the numbers, and that's what's going to get you there. So I hope you got some ideas today. You guys, just to recap, we have number one in-person events. I want you all doing in-person events, especially if you're in the first one to three years of your health coaching business. Very, very powerful to meet people, person. Very powerful. Anyone who comes to your event, and you can actually shake their hand or give them a hug, they're going to remember you forever much more than someone who downloaded a lead magnet, but we can only reach so many people in person.

So number two, you need to have a lead magnet. That's your fail safe. That's the thing you're offering on your website. If you have a website, that's the thing you can offer every single day on social media. That's the thing that you can offer if you're going to be a guest somewhere. Got to have one of those. And then third online events, which tend to work the fastest. If you need an infusion of new subscribers to your email list, if you're feeling stagnant in your business, hold a free online event. There's going to be more buzz. It's going to be more exciting for you and for everybody else, I promise. It's a lot of fun. So again, that's at healthcoachpower.com/build. If you want to build your list with a free three day challenge and my guidance, we're going to be doing that in just a couple of weeks. Thanks for joining me today, you guys. I will see you again real soon. Take care.