Hey, friends! Today we are talking about the best ways to build your email list.
Before we get started, make sure you hit subscribe on our YouTube channel so that you can get alerts every week when we publish a new video about marketing, specifically for financial professionals.
Let's get into it.
We're going to talk about three main ways to build your email list, one of the hardest things to do for most companies and brands.
The three things that we are going to talk about today are:
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Be interesting.
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Be consistent.
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Be clear.
Let's talk about the first one.
1. Be interesting.
This maybe seems a little bit self-explanatory. Nobody grows an email list to a couple thousand if they're boring, unless you're purchasing all those emails, which you don't want to do.
That's not how you build a community of followers and subscribers who are into what you're talking about.
So, be interesting. Let's talk about it.
First off, I'm going to say something a little bit controversial. I want you to forget that compliance exists for a minute now. I don't mean to just go like, you know, run your mouth and say stupid stuff. What I mean is I want you to focus on yourself and your personality and bring in humor and let yourself shine.
Everybody talks about authenticity, and that's what we're talking about here. There is a tendency by some professionals in finance to think to themselves, “well, compliance isn't going to let me do that anyway, so I'm just going to button up and read off this script and create the most boring video of all time, because that's what's going to show people that I'm a human being who can manage their money. well”
No! That's not the way to showcase yourself. If you are super into sports or sci fi, the outdoors, or cross fit, make that a part of your marketing.
Just showcase yourself. Be interesting, right? That's the personality portion.
Now, the content you deliver has to be more than just a sunshiny face and who you look like. It's got to be great too, of course, but the projection of yourself is an important element that is all too often missing.
So let's talk about the next part of being interesting. The next part being interesting is being valuable—and this is one that can't be overlooked. As a financial advisor, you have a place of authority and expertise in the lives of your clients, so you have to be continually adding value to their life in whatever way you're working with them, in your investment management, in your financial planning and your advice that you give to them.
Same thing has to be said for the content that you create as part of your marketing. It's got to be valuable. It's got to give something to the people receiving it.
Your content has got to deliver that value to the people receiving it. Maybe it's giving them something that they didn't know before so it's educating them.
But, whatever it is, even if it's to only a few of the people on your list at a time, that's got to be content relevant to problems that they're going through to help them solve those problems.
That's what we try to do in these videos every week. We try to talk about common problems the advisors have in marketing and frameworks and ways to get past those problems and be better at marketing.
The second part about how to build your email list is to be consistent.
2. Be consistent.
What does this mean? Basically, calls to actions everywhere.
A call to action is when you ask someone to do something to take an action. Simple!
It's it's the idea of saying, “Here is my email list. Here is my newsletter. Here's my YouTube channel. Here's my blog. Whatever it is, you’re continually saying, “Here it is. Here's what you get from it. Here is why you want to subscribe and get these notifications. Click here to do that. Subscribe, subscribe, subscribe.“
It's the same thing I asked you to do at the start of this video. Subscribe to the channel because we talk about marketing for advisors every single week. And if you don't want to miss one, hit that button and let's hang out together online.
So, put those calls to action on your website, on all the all the blogs that you write, within the body of the text, in your social media, in your email signature (“Click here to subscribe to our newsletter”).
Simple repetition is what it’s all about. You want to repeat yourself until you are sick of yourself because guess what? No one else is sick of yourself.
You might have said something a hundred times, but they heard it once or twice, maybe three times if they're obsessed with your social media and they have alerts on when you post. I don't know anybody that does that, but I guess it's possible.
The key theme here is if you want to be on the list, you have to talk about it. You have to make it a priority in everything that you do. You got to drive people there.
A really great example of this is Thomas Kopelman, an advisor at RLS Wealth.
I see him on Twitter. Every couple of weeks, I'll see a new tweet from him. “Hey, I write a newsletter just about money for millennials. There's 200 people. There's 300 people.” (He updates the number with how many people are subscribed to email).
It's short, it's effective. It uses that whole FOMO thing with, “Hey, here's how many people are on this list already. Don't you want to be one of them?”
He pushes it out. It's consistent. Be like him.
3. Be clear.
To be clear means to tell someone exactly why would you want to sign up for this? What are you going to get out of it? In the case of simplicity, I'll just use us as the example here—the Three Crowns marketing YouTube channel.
If you're a financial advisor or an IAR or a BD rep, wherever you’re at. If you're in financial services and wealth management, we talk about marketing with the specific mindset of how you can go about it in a regulated environment and still find ways to be fresh and innovative and talk about your value and showcase who you are because it's a relationship-based business.
So, put yourself out there. That's what it's all about. If you want to get those types of tips every week, sign up. If you don't want to get those types of videos every week, don't sign up. It's super easy. But you want to be clear.
Here's what we're doing. Here's what you're going to get out of it.
I feel like I talked really fast in today's video, but I'm super hyped about this topic. It's very, very important. The more people that you can be chatting with and talking to and build the community of people who are like-minded value the same things that you do, the greater your chances of building a successful business over time because you're tapping into shared values when you build those lists.
As Google in the next couple of years here makes changes to third party cookie tracking, you want to focus on building those direct connections with people and not rely on other websites to do things like serve the right ads at the right time.
So, ask people to join you on the journey of discovery that you yourself are on, just like I'm talking about the things that I'm thinking about every week with marketing. And I'm asking you, “Hey, let's talk about this marketing stuff together.” The same principle applies.
So, those are the ideas for today's video in how to build a list, whether it's an email list or a subscribers on YouTube. Whatever it is, those are ideas. I hope that's helpful for you. See you later.