Your Most Important Launch Tool: Building Your List
Growing your business from scratch every day is not easy.
Maybe you’re not starting all over again, but if you’re working to grow your business online, it sure can feel like that. Every day is a new struggle to build your email list. Every morning you start from scratch for the day and work to see how many new subscribers you can get.
It can be frustrating to add new email subscribers. It’s hard work convincing people that you really want to help them, to provide them with great content that they are going to love. You work hard to write great emails and engaging blog posts, yet your subscriber list is slowly building up. You feel like the turtle.
You know this is a job you have to do, but boy, isn’t it easier to access your social media account and interact with your fans there? Pictures, videos, quick comments – these are the things that cheer you up and get your juice flowing. Be careful, this is where you will be dangerously close to becoming the hare.
Sure, it’s nice to have a massive following on social media. It feels good knowing that people respect you, that they enjoy interacting with you, but have you ever considered that these potential customers, these social media fans that you have are not yours?
It’s all about your list: your email list
In the world of online marketing, where everything is virtual, all you really have … is your list.
The list of people who love what you are doing will follow your every word and are likely to buy what you sell. If that valuable list of people who love you is only on social media, you are operating at the whim of a company that you cannot control.
What if you wake up tomorrow and Facebook is gone? How would that affect your business, your interaction with the customer? What if it was Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter?
In recent years we have seen how platforms modify their policies, change their algorithms and decide to start charging us if we want followers to see our content. This is not a way to build your business – at the mercy of someone else’s business success.
Whether you have hundreds or thousands of followers on Facebook, Pinterest, or Twitter, you will eventually need to move them to your email list if you want to be able to market them. This can be much more difficult than it sounds. It is easy for people to decide to interact with you on social media, there is very little commitment on their part. All they have to do is click a button. They can log in or out at will, they can block you or they can unfollow you and you will never know. Don’t let a large following on social media give you a false sense of your popularity.
Yesterday I replied to someone who is launching his product and even though he has thousands of followers on Facebook who love what he does and like his posts, he cannot get them to buy. That’s because social media is for interaction, not for sales.
Building your list is personal
Getting into someone’s email inbox is much more personal than getting them to like or share something they’ve posted on social media. Instead of your message being one of thousands that skip past and “like” it without reading it, your message is now among the people who matter most to you – your family and friends.
Once someone trusts you with their email address, once they start offering you amazing content as your beloved subscriber, they will tell you that they appreciate what you have to say when interacting with you, when buying from them. They are allowing you to enter their inner circle. Make sure you deserve to be there.
Yes, building an email list is difficult. Yes, it can be time consuming, but it is also the best way to give your business a firm and solid foundation. You may feel like a turtle, but at least your home moves with you, not far behind for the sake of the next eye-catching novelty.
If you want to build an incredible online business, if you want to be able to launch incredible products to the people who respect and admire you the most, trust me. Your most important launch tool is your email list.
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