For professional speakers, four of the most important keys to your success are your ability to:
- Build your profile and credibility
- Grow your audience
- Connect with your existing and potential customers
- Generate excitement for your keynotes
And if you’re looking for a way to turbocharge these factors, you need to focus on building a strong email list.
In this article, you’ll learn why this is important and how you can do it well.
Why Is a Strong Email List So Important?
A strong email list is important because it allows you to put your name, your expertise, and, most importantly, some added value into your customer or potential customer’s inbox. The benefit of this can be summed up in a few simple stats:
- Email marketing yields the highest return on investment (ROI) for the past 10 years
- It also has the highest conversion rate (66%) for purchases made in response to promotional messages
- For every dollar spent on email marketing, you can earn up to $44, with almost 4.3% of customers buying from these campaigns
- Compared with social media, email is deemed 40 times more effective in acquiring new customers
Having a strong email list and creating great email content allows you to showcase your expertise, stay connected with your customers between gigs, promote your upcoming events, webinars, keynotes, and more.
So, logic dictates that the bigger and stronger your email list, the more potential buyers you can reach.
And as a professional speaker, this can help you take even greater control over your sales funnel and not leave booking new gigs to chance.
13 Tips for Building a Strong Email List
We’ve made the case for creating a strong email list, but the biggest question becomes: how?
Here are the 13 tips you can use to build a strong and engaged email list.
- Create Great Content: The first thing you need to prioritize if you want to build a strong mailing list is creating outstanding content. Remember, a mailing list — no matter how big or small — is only valuable if your subscribers are engaged. And if you want people to subscribe and remain engaged, you need to provide them with content that offers them value.
This can include:
-
- Blog articles
- Videos of you speaking
- FAQs
- Book, blog, and podcast recommendations
- Industry insights, expertise, and data
- Weekly emails
- Monthly newsletters
The best content comes from a deep understanding of your target audience and what matters most to them. The goal of any content you share should be to bring value for your audience.
- Create a Landing Page: It’s a good idea to create a dedicated landing page to support your email acquisition efforts. This should be a standalone web page that aims to convert prospects into customers. It isn’t intended to educate or provide information. It just needs to provide enough incentive for visitors to sign up. That takes us to our next tip.
- Incentivize Sign-Ups: A great way to get people to sign up for your newsletter is by providing them with an incentive to do so. This can be something like a free gift or a discount, or a helpful resource like an eBook or whitepaper that requires them to provide their information to download it. You could also offer a referral program for former customers who have had a great experience with you and who are willing to refer you to their colleagues. For each new gig booked by way of a referral, you could offer a kick-back to the referrer or a discount on a future gig.
- Add Pop-Ups or Slide-Ins for Specific Pages of Your Site: While these might seem like they’d be annoying, including pop-up or slide-in sign-up forms on certain pages of your site can be a great way to drive email acquisition.
The best ways to do this are:
- On your blog, About, or Speaking/Services pages after the visitor has spent a predetermined amount of time there
- Exit pop-ups that appear when a guest tries to leave the page
- Scroll pop-ups that appear after a visitor has scrolled a certain amount of the way down a page
When used tactfully, pop-ups or slide-ins can be extremely effective.
- Promote Your Newsletter on Social Media: Don’t underestimate the power of social media. You can and should frequently promote your newsletter and encourage sign-ups using your social media platforms, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Instagram. Just ensure that your posts promoting your newsletter are highlighting the value your prospective customers can expect to receive from your correspondence. You can also consider utilizing paid ads on social media in order to get your name out there.
- Include a Subscribe Button in Your Email Signature: This is a simple tactic but an important one: include a brief line in your email signature encouraging your recipients to sign up. Make sure to include the value proposition of doing so.
- Include Social Sharing Buttons on Your Content: On your email newsletters, marketing emails, and blog content, make sure to include a link for your readers to share the content on their social media channel. If you’ve done your job well, your readers will want to share your content with their audience which can in turn generate referral sign-ups.
- Run a Contest: Another form of incentivizing email sign-ups is to run a contest. This could be something like announcing that you’ll be selecting five winners from your next 100 email newsletter sign-ups to receive a discounted rate on a speaking engagement. Share this with your network and blast it out on social media. You can get creative with contesting based on what will resonate with your target audience.
- Make Lead-Capture Forms Short and Easy: Sometimes, asking for too much information on your email acquisition forms can act as a barrier to entry. People may want to sign up but, if they see ten fields they need to populate, may deem it not worth the effort. Instead, consider exactly and only what you require from them right off the bat and ask for that. It could be as little as first name, last name, and email address.
- Send Follow-Up Emails to Keynote Guests: One of your greatest opportunities for email generation is by following up with guests at your keynote addresses. Whether you’re personally requesting business cards or you have access to the email addresses of attendees, sending a brief, personal follow-up email can go a long way. Consider taking this opportunity to thank them and let them know that, if they enjoyed your presentation, they can get more information like that for free by subscribing to your newsletter.
- Include CTA in Your Keynotes: Another opportunity to drive email acquisition is to add a brief CTA at the end of your keynote presentation. Using the same approach as the last point, thank your audience and make a quick mention that, if they enjoyed the presentation and would like to receive free insights, they can sign up for your newsletter. Then, give them the link to your dedicated landing page.
- Invite Existing Contacts: Don’t be afraid to dive into your proverbial rolodex and send emails to your existing contacts encouraging them to sign up for your mailing list. Simply connect with them in a concise and tactful way, letting them know that you think they’d love the email content you share and tell them why you think it would be valuable to them. Make sure to include a link to your registration landing page.
- Use a CRM to Help Manage Your Mailing List: As you receive email sign-ups, you might want to consider using a CRM like karmaSpeaker to help you manage them. This way, you can automate processes such as creating contacts from webform sign-ups and tracking your most recent engagements with contacts. You can also manage and scrub your email list to ensure your contacts are up-to-date and your correspondence is reaching your target audience (for more on this, check out our blog article about why it’s important and how to do it).
Collecting email addresses can help you build your profile and credibility, grow your audience, connect with your existing and potential customers, and generate excitement for your keynotes. And if you aren’t already building an email list, there’s no better time than now.
If you’d like to learn how a customer relationship management platform can help optimize your sales process and help you book more gigs, get in touch with our dedicated support team or start a free trial of karmaSpeaker today.
