Email List Building for Absolute Newbies

9 min readOct 19, 2021

4 Simple Steps for Every Freelancer, Solopreneur, Coach, & Consultant

Email list building is a critical skill for freelancers, solopreneurs, & coaches. But many don’t know where to start. Here are 4 simple steps to build your own powerful email list.

Kim Garst has said, “Your email list is your most valuable asset online.” And many marketers will tell you, “The money’s in the list.”

In fact, the only other asset that you actually own online is your blog.

Social media accounts, groups, boards, and even messenger marketing leads are all services that you rent. And the landlord can evict you at any time. But your email list subscribers are yours forever.

Therefore, one of the keys to successful online marketing is to invite your public social media audience into a private audience where they have either implicitly or explicitly given you permission to market to them.

As Seth Godin says, every aspect of marketing gets better with permission!

While there are several good options for this private audience, your email list is the big granddaddy of them all, and is the one that you have the most long-term control of.

In fact, an industry rule-of thumb is that a well-targeted, well-managed email list can earn as much as $1 per month, per subscriber.

So, you can see the importance of email list building, eh?

Email List Building — 4 Insanely Simple Steps

Here are 4 simple steps that even an absolute newbie beginner can take to get started in email list building.

1. Create Your Lead Magnet

The reality is that very few beginning online marketers have established enough credibility or influencer power to be able to attract people to their email list, just because it’s their list.

And so, the most common strategy in email list building is to offer your potential subscribers something that is so valuable that they will gladly give you their email address in exchange for it. You give valuable information or content away for free and your subscriber gives you their email address and permission to email them.

This is called a lead magnet. A lead magnet is typically one of these things:

PDF Guide or Cheat Sheet
Video
Slideshow
Webinar
Podcast
Software
Toolbox
Online Course

See Also: 8 Keys to an Awesome Lead Magnet

2. Set Up Your Autoresponder For Email List Building

The second step in email list building is to set up your autoresponder. An autoresponder is a service that manages emailing your email list.

Working with a reputable autoresponder provider is CRITICAL. Never try to manage your email list from your own computer. Doing so is a good way to get your internet service turned off.

A good autoresponder provides three critical services you’ll need to power your email list.

First, they hold the database of your email list subscribers, and provide the mechanism for people to subscribe to and unsubscribe from your email list.

Second, they allow you to send a broadcast email message to your entire list. An example of a broadcast email message might be a weekly email newsletter. The same message goes out to the entire list at the same time, possibly personalized with things like your subscribers’ first name.

Third, they allow you to set up a sequence of email messages that get sent automatically to a single subscriber based on a trigger event. For instance, when a person subscribes to your email list (the trigger), the autoresponder can automagically send a series of welcome email messages to that subscriber over several days.

So, let’s look at the steps to get your autoresponder set up.

Select An Autoresponder Provider

First and foremost, you need to select an autoresponder provider.

There are many, many autoresponder providers out there. Some primarily serve enterprise-class email lists that send out hundreds of thousands of email broadcasts per day. Others serve primarily hobbyists and non-profits.

Two providers consistently stand out for people who are serious about getting started in email list building: Aweber and ConvertKit.

Create a “List” In Your Autoresponder

You next need to create a list or campaign. They’re basically the same thing, but are called differently by different autoresponder providers.

Sophisticated email marketers may have many email lists that all reside within their one autoresponder account. These email lists are groupings of their subscribers who may have different sets of interests or who may be targeted for different types of promotional offers. Each list may even be a completely different audience.

At a minimum you need one email list or campaign. This is the email list for your regular email newsletters. If you have just a single welcome email message, then this one list may be all you ever need.

You may also need a second list if you have a longer welcome email sequence that delivers over several days. When your subscribers initially opt in, they actually subscribe to this welcome email list. Then, when the sequence completes, the autoresponder’s automation functionality moves them to your regular newsletter email list.

Is Single Optin Or Double Optin Best For Email List Building?

When you create an email list, most autoresponders give you the option of using what’s called a double optin. With a double optin, your subscriber is first sent a generic email message that says that they need to click a button to verify their email address before they can receive further messages. Then, once they click the button, they will receive your welcome message.

The alternative is a single-optin. As soon as your subscriber subscribes, they receive the welcome message.

So, which is better?

Gary Vaynerchuck says that marketers ruin everything, and in fact, we train our customers really well. Many people have a throwaway email address, now, that they use to fill in forms to get freebies online. So, when using a single optin, you are likely to get a high percentage of bad email addresses that no one ever looks at.

For this reason, using a double optin is a good best practice to ensure that you get quality email addresses subscribing to your list.

Having said that, the double optin is added friction in getting your subscriber. It gives the subscriber the opportunity to say, “Just a sec now… Do I really want that PDF this badly?” So, even if people gave you their best email address to start with, second thoughts may lead them not to confirm their email address.

Now, the best answer any email marketer will give you on whether to use a single optin or a double optin is… “TEST.”

If you use a double optin and get enough people actually confirming their email address, that’s the best alternative. If your subscribers are coming from a social media audience where they know you, like you, and trust you already, a single optin may actually get you better subscribers. You just need to experiment and see which works best for you.

Working with email lists or campaigns is very different from one autoresponder provider to another, so be sure to check out your provider’s help documentation.

Set Up Your Welcome Message Sequence

The next step is to create your welcome message sequence. This should include at least one email message that should do these things:

Introduce yourself to your subscriber and explain your background.
Set expectations for how often you will email your list, and what powerful information you will be sending in the list.
Ask your subscriber to “whitelist” your email address.
Deliver a link to your lead magnet (if you provided one).

That’s the minimum.

If you want a truly powerful welcome email, you should also include these three things.

Say why you’re the absolute best person for your subscriber to get this information from, and why they will want to open every email.
Let your subscriber know they’re welcome to converse with you. This can be as simple as, “Hit reply and let me know…”
Tease and intrigue your new subscriber with what’s coming next. “In my next email, I’ll let you know my secret for ______ . Look for the subject line _______ .”

You can also include a series of messages after your initial welcome message. The purpose of this initial series is to get your email subscribers to know you, like you, and trust you.

And, you can guide your subscribers toward an initial sale with your welcome sequence. Your initial product should be a relatively low-priced item, in the range of $5 — $49. (It’s OK, though, if the sales funnel for this initial product has an upsell to a higher-priced product in the range of $99 to $249.)

3. Create Your Email List Building Optin Forms

So, your autoresponder is configured with your email list and welcome messages. Now you need a way for your audience to subscribe to your email list and give you their email address. This is key for email list building ;-). An optin form is how you accomplish this.

There are two main categories of optin forms. Which you use depends on how you attract your audience to you.

Standalone Landing Pages

A standalone landing page is a single web page that is completely independent of any website. Its sole purpose is to get the visitor to opt in for your lead magnet, nothing else.

So all it has on it is a brief promo message about your lead magnet and an optin form. There are no other links, menus, or anything else that would distract from getting a person to opt in. Its purpose is to remove any possible friction from a person entering in their email address.

The use case for a standalone landing page is any time where you are explicitly promoting your lead magnet. This usually takes place on social media.

So, you may be tweeting about your lead magnet. You may be posting on Facebook about your lead magnet. Or, you may be doing a video on YouTube, where you invite your viewers to go get your lead magnet. You might even choose to use paid ads to promote your lead magnet.

In all these cases, you want to direct your audience to a standalone landing page.

Blog Widgets

The second use case for getting subscribers when you’re email list building is to use blog widgets.

If you have an active blog, then you invest a lot of effort into getting traffic to your blog. However, many people never visit your blog again after spending just a few minutes there. So, you would really like a way to connect with these people so you can invite them back whenever you publish new blog posts.

You might imbed a subscription widget into the text of your blog post where it is contextually appropriate. Or, you may want to have an option to subscribe slide in from the side after the visitor has read partway down the page. And, as a last option, you may want a popup that shows up just as the visitor is about to leave the web page, and give them one last chance to subscribe.

So, which is better, standalone landing pages, or blog widgets? Well, the reality is you will probably want to use both. You interact with your audience in many different ways, and so you invite them to subscribe to your email list in many different ways, as well.

4. Promote Your Lead Magnet To Your Audience

Now, the setup is done, and you can begin promoting your lead magnet and building your email list.

You can promote your lead magnet in several ways (many of which I mentioned earlier):

Directly promote the lead magnet landing page on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest.
Promote blog posts on Twitter, Facebook, or Pinterest, with each blog post having several optin opportunities.
Create YouTube videos with powerful, valuable content, and include a call-to-action at the end of the video for your viewer to come get the lead magnet through the link in the video description.
Run paid ads to promote your lead magnet landing page.

In fact, the options to promote your lead magnet are nearly endless.

You may wonder what to do once you’ve completed these 4 steps. Be sure to read these stories below:

And there you have the 4 simple steps that any freelancer, solopreneur, coach, or consultant can follow to build your own, profitable, email list.

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