How to Start Your Email Marketing List from 0 with Free Tools

This is a tip for all my artist and entrepreneur friends. If you plan to do anything in your future and invite people to donate/attend/whatever...the highest converting method is an email. Not Twitter, not Facebook, not an ice bucket. Sending personalized email to people who know and like you will help you accomplish your goals. The only messaging medium that I’ve seen perform better than email is personal text messages (so collect cell phone numbers if you can). Do this pre-work now and reap the rewards for years.

1.) Start Your List

You can track as many pieces of data for each contact as you like but keeping it simple usually helps. Start a new spreadsheet (I do mine in Google Drive) and label the columns: email, first name, last name, zip code, state, cell phone. Do you best to fill in whatever info you have. You don’t need to collect zip code/state if you don’t do any in-person events. I also never use the last name field in emails but it helps me know who is on my list.

2.) Fill Up Your List

You’re going to take some quality time to really comb through your emails and contact apps to start your list. Here’s places I’ve pulled email contacts from in the past that you might try…

• Looking through every email I’ve sent (sent folder)

  • I look through my sent mail instead of my received mail for new contacts. I figure if I haven’t emailed you back then you’re probably not a real connection.

• People who have purchased or attended something I’ve done

  • Search your computer for anything you’ve done in the past where folks may have registered with an email.

  • Check your Google Drive for any spreadsheet with the word “email” on it.

  • If you’ve sent calendar invites to folks, you can find their emails on your calendar from past events.

• LinkedIn

  • You can export your first-degree LinkedIn connections and get some emails. Use these instructions from LinkedIn.

• Contacts App / WhatsApp / Signal

  • Add folks from your phone to your list. Message people and ask them for their email if you don’t have it.

3.) What can you teach your audience without selling to them?

You can either build your mailing list or sell to your mailing list. Basically folks love building support for something until you ask them for money. So if you have no plans to sell anything anytime soon, this is the perfect time to start building your list.

Sometimes a lot of resistance comes up when I tell people to teach to their list for free. Play with what is an even energy exchange with your audience. People are bombarded with advertisements everyday in every way. Many of us have started to ignore anything that looks like an ad before even opening it.

I don’t expect anyone to invest in reading my newsletter if I don’t invest in them first. I teach something to my audience in every newsletter. When I have something to sell them, they already look to me as the expert.

Here’s some random ideas on content you could be sharing to invest in your audience before you ask them to invest in you…

• How to Get Started With [my special skill]

• What I Learned [doing something your audience is intrigued by]

• How to [do something that your audience wants to learn]

• New Recipes

4.) How to Deal with Changing Emails

People’s emails change. I’ve found that my friends keep their corporate emails for about a year and they keep their personal emails for about 5 years. This means that up to 50% of your list may be changing emails every 2.5 years.

Any decent email newsletter app will track which emails are no longer working and let you know. If I know the person with the bad email, I’ll try to reach out to them for a fresh email. If I don’t know them, I just remove them from my list.

You can’t stress about people changing email accounts or no longer checking an old account. You CAN invite new folks to join your list. And you CAN put out such useful content that you subscribers take you will them to their next email.

5.) Invite People to Join Your List Everywhere You Appear

Wherever your name appears, invite people to join your private list. If you’re speaking at an event where you don’t get the email list of attendees, end your presentation with an invitation to email you for something (copy of the slides, lecture notes, check-list.)

If you are offering content on social media, ask folks to send you their email address and cell phone number for the download.

Add an invitation to join your mailing list to your website and all social media accounts.

If you do any in-person events, make an event sign-in sheet that collects emails of anyone who didn’t register in advance.