The 3-Step ‘No Traffic’ Formula for Growing Your Mailing List

If you have been hanging out with me for a while, then you will know that I am obsessed with encouraging small business owners to focus on growing their mailing lists. Newsletter marketing is where my clients get their most reliable sales and to have a successful newsletter marketing strategy, you need a good mailing list of future customers.

A mailing list belongs to you, it’s good old-fashioned relationship marketing that trumps all other promotional strategies. It’s also an incredibly low cost way to grow and nurture your audience and warm them up for future sales.

But what if you are starting from ground zero as many people do? If you don’t have much traffic to your website, then it becomes almost impossible to build a mailing list and you are stuck in a bit of a vicious circle. 

So where do you start when you are starting out? I’m going to lay out the exact steps that I use to help my clients grow their mailing lists and whilst each step requires a bit of knowledge and work, it is overall a surprisingly simple formula.

The 3-Step Formula for growing a mailing list (when you have no website traffic)

Step One: Create an Amazing Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is a really helpful piece of content that you give away for free that helps your audience solve a problem and is directly related to a product or service that you sell. It can be in the form of a PDF download, a video or a series of emails. 

What you choose to produce and how you present it will depend on what your zone of genius is, what product or service you are aiming to eventually sell and your ability to create a lead-magnet (it doesn’t need to be that complicated - simple is best).

Examples: A free 30-day Social Media Content Planner (that’s mine!) from a marketer, a Business Personality Quiz (this is what I created for my membership hub), a free Pinterest checklist by an Pinterest specialist, 5 Steps to a Killer Presentation Opener by a presentation coach.

If you need some ideas for a lead magnet, check out this article that includes 100 different lead magnet ideas. 

Step Two: Create a Landing Page

You can (and should) add your lead magnet to a pop-up on your website for people to sign up to when they visit your site - in fact you should add it to several places around your website so it cannot be missed. However, if you do not have so much website traffic yet, the chances of getting sign-ups this way at the start is going to be quite low.

So, you need to create a simple landing page on your site that includes a form to collect an email address in exchange for your amazing lead magnet - this form needs to be connected to your email service provider so that the email drops into your mailing list and you can deliver the lead-magnet (or direct to a success page where it is available for download). 

Once someone is on your mailing list you should be nurturing them by providing regular, valuable content.

I usually recommend Mailchimp as the ideal email service provider for anyone starting out - it’s simple and free for the first 2000 email addresses and will help you to be GDPR compliant without any additional stress.

Examples: My landing page is this one here https://www.myoutsourcedmarketingteam.com/free-social-media-content-planner/

The landing page for the Business Personality Quiz is here: https://theunconventionalbusinesshub.com/whats-your-business-personality-quiz/

Both pages are deliberately simple with very few distractions because the goal is to get someone to complete the simple form to get the freebie, or in the case of the quiz to take it then get their results per email. 

The landing pages do not require any other distracting details because it is used only for step three…

Step Three: Create a Facebook Ads Campaign

Promoting your lead magnet via a Facebook ads campaign is an incredibly powerful way to get new leads on to your mailing list very quickly. 

You need to allocate a budget to this but it’s targeted advertising and much cheaper than any other kind of paid promotion. Plus you can monitor your budget and your results and adjust accordingly. If it’s doing well then you can add more budget, if not so well then adjust your ad or your audience targeting and try again.

These are the ads I am running for the Business Personality Quiz.