"I wish I had started building my email list sooner."
This is one of the most common regrets of health practitioners (and healthpreneurs in general), so if you feel behind the curve... you're in good company!
In this video tutorial, I highlight how to build an email list from scratch, and the eight key steps to supercharge your list-building efforts.
The last two weeks have been a true rollercoaster for many health practitioner colleagues, with FB ad accounts getting randomly closed, entire Instagram accounts disabled, and Google’s June 3 algorithm change hosing organic search traffic by as much as 80% for many larger websites in the healthcare space.
Yes, you have to play on these social media platforms... but when that’s your only play to build your practice, you expose yourself to massive risk.
That’s why you should always focus on owning your media as much as you can... like your email list.
Now, there’s actually several more reasons why building your email list is smart business:
Your email list, or more precisely, the relationship that you have with the people on your email list, will be one of your most valuable assets in your practice.
If you only remember one concept from this post, it's the idea that consumers are very careful with their contact information and they really only opt in for those email sequences where there's a clear perceived value.
So when you're considering why people are subscribing to your email list, why do they open your emails, it's really about this concept of relevant value. Said another way:
If your email list isn't growing, it's simply because you're not providing enough relevant value.
During the opt-in, it's critical to make it crystal clear to visitors why they should subscribe to your email list and what they get if they do. This is why a generic "sign up for our newsletter" is a really poor call to action because it doesn't specify what type of information they will be receiving (and nobody wants more irrelevant emails in their inbox). So don't do that.
The other key aspect is to establish relevance and value right away. You can't let your audience figure this out over the course of 10 emails – instead, your thank-you page (after optin) should open with a video that introduces your practice, your mission and explains the next steps and what they can expect. That way you start out the relationship on the right foot.
Working with integrative medicine practitioners, we always recommend a "10 Ways In 10 Days" email autoresponder that pre-educates your audience over the course of 10 days about how you are different from conventional medicine practitioners (click here to download our guide with the 3 email automations every integrative practitioner should have in place).
In the video above, I explain more of the details – but the more relevant lead magnets you provide, the easier it will be to build your email list.
At the end of every blog post that you have, there should be some form of content upgrade that they could opt-in for (in exchange for their email address). As an example, my wife created a turmeric recipe booklet - yet nobody opted in for it when we sent people straight to the landing page.
But when she wrote a blog post about "How to Cook With Turmeric", her readers had sufficient context that made downloading the turmeric recipe booklet the logical next step (to the tune of over 20,000 subscribers!)
This is especially important for high-traffic pages on your website. So go into your Google Analytics and identify your most popular articles, and decide what lead magnet to feature there.
The more lead magnets you have on your site, the more ways people can get on your email list. It's that simple.
In all likelihood, you won't know if a given lead magnet is really converting well until you test it out, so don't spend too much time perfecting your lead magnets... go with the simplest possible version until you know that you have a winner.
When you're trying to build a list, every little bit helps... that's why optimizing the language on the buttons is critical (watch the above video for details).
In the above video, I cover in much more detail why you should use a popup triggered by clicking on a button (a so-called "click-pop") rather than showing the actual signup form.
You should use popups that trigger after a user has spent a certain amount of time (15 seconds) on your page, or scrolled a certain percentage (75%) down the page.
If you match the topic of the popup to the page content, then the lead magnet will feel like a relevant content upgrade. As an example, one of my wife's recipe pages on "Crockpot Apples" garnered for 5 years running between 30,000-60,000 website visitors each month - so we offered a "recipe booklet with 20 additional crockpot apple recipes".
Again, watch the video for details... but in a nutshell, the more places you feature your lead magnets, the more people will opt-in for your lead magnet.
If you're looking to build your email list with ideal patients in your local community, consider running Facebook & Instagram ads for your lead magnets.
This works even better in the context of retargeting ads, where you show ads for lead magnets only to those people who have already visited certain webpages on your website:
So if you enjoyed this content and you want more of it, make sure you go ahead and...
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