Podcast Ep. 20: How to Build Your Email List with Lead Magnets
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
Today’s topic is going to be short and sweet, but hopefully pack a lot of punch in your marketing efforts. It’s something that’s actually fun. It’s a chance to get creative to put your marketing hat on and when done right, it will help you grow your audience for your fashion brand much faster, because that’s our goal: to make sure you have an audience of customers waiting to buy before you launch your fashion brand.
TRANSCRIPT
Today’s topic is going to be short and sweet, but hopefully pack a lot of punch in your marketing efforts. It’s something that’s actually fun. It’s a chance to get creative to put your marketing hat on and when done right, it will help you grow your audience for your fashion brand much faster, because that’s the goal right? That’s our goal: to make sure you have an audience of customers waiting to buy before you launch your fashion brand.
Customers first, money second, production third. That’s the Factory45 way.
One of the ways to make sure you have an audience of customers before you launch is by growing your email list. Your email list is a way to communicate with your audience as a business in a way that’s different from social media.
Remember you don’t own your social media audiences. You don’t own your social media accounts. You don’t own your social media content. Once you click post or publish you don’t own it anymore. Your instagram account could go away tomorrow. TikTok could get shut down next month and as we’ve already seen, Facebook went from being a free marketing platform to being a very expensive advertising platform.
But with email marketing you own your audience. You own your audience, and that’s why it’s worth investing in it.
The only problem is it may feel hard to grow it. It can be really hard to grow your email list if you’re only getting a couple of new subscribers to your list per week. It can really feel frustrating and kind of like a lost cause. But before you throw in the towel, I’m going to teach you this one marketing trick that you can implement immediately to get more subscribers on your email list.
This is a strategy that is said to increase your conversion rate by 15% in some cases so it’s definitely worth exploring. We’re always experimenting as entrepreneurs, testing. So that’s what I’d encourage you to do with this.
So what is this marketing trick? It’s your offer.
It’s your offer so before you have anything to sell, while you’re still in the pre-launch phase and building your audience, your offer is a free gift, a freebie or (in industry terms) a lead magnet that you use to entice someone to sign up to your email list.
I can bet every single one of you has done this as a customer yourself right? We can kind of reverse engineer this a little bit here.
You go to a website, or a landing page, or an online store and you sign up to that brand or person’s email list – usually in exchange for something free that you want. Whether it’s a discount code – free shipping is a big one, a free download, a free guide… There are tons of different variations of this.
If you joined me during our 4-day workshop in March, then you’ve already heard this example… but it’s worth repeating because I think it really does paint the picture of the lead magnet offer so well.
When AppleTV came out, my husband and I didn’t subscribe to it. We figured we had Netflix and HBO max and Showtime… you know how many different channels there are. How many different channels can you possibly need?
Until… we started hearing from friends and family about this great new show on AppleTV about an American football coach that goes to coach soccer in England and how it was just the greatest show on TV and the feel-good viewing that we need in our lives right now.
Do you know what happened? We signed up for AppleTV with the sole purpose of watching Ted Lasso.
And we weren’t the only ones! I heard similar stories from family and friends who jumped on the bandwagon. We just signed up for AppleTV to watch Ted Lasso, which means without being intentional about it, Ted Lasso is AppleTV’s lead magnet.
At least, it was for us and for many of my family and friends. It’s one piece of content that hooks you into the whole. It’s one piece of content that makes you opt-in.
Because now we’re watching other shows on AppleTV: The Morning Show, Severance, movies. We’ve immersed ourselves into the content of the brand and they probably could have gotten us even sooner if they gave us the first two episodes of Ted Lasso to watch for free.
That’s what your offer is… your lead magnet. It’s a free piece of content that introduces someone to your brand and hooks them into the rest of your content. Hopefully that non-fashion example kind of paints a picture of what the strategy is, so you can use your offer to grow your email list.
You really just need a place for it to live online. All you need is a basic landing page with your logo or your brand name, a header, a sub header explaining what your brand is, who it’s for, why the person who just landed on your landing page should care, and when your brand is launching.
Then this is the key part: a call to action or a CTA that entices your ideal target customer to sign up to your email list to receive your offer or your lead magnet. (They’re the same thing: offer and lean magnet.)
So eventually when you have a new collection, or products to sell and you’re out of the pre-launch phase, the easiest opt-in offer is free shipping or a discount code (10% off) that’s the opt-in offer that you’re probably most used to seeing or signing up for yourself.
But when you don’t have anything to sell yet, there is still the opportunity to get creative, to design some sort of freebie or offer that is perfectly designed for your ideal target customer. It goes so much farther than just saying, “sign up for updates or subscribe to be the first to know!”. We see all these kinds of cliche phrases and attempts to get people to opt in, but it’s nothing compared to offering something that is free that was perfectly designed for your ideal target customer.
And this does not have to be overwhelming! It doesn’t have to be a burden. It doesn’t have to be professionally designed. There is lots of software out there now where you can make quizzes by dragging and dropping and they look really cool! You can make a checklist. You can host a challenge. You can offer screensaver downloads or any other downloadable pdf or digital file that provides value or entertainment to your ideal target market. You could offer packing checklists, or curated gift guides. You could whip one up really quick for Mother’s Day! Style quizzes, digital artwork… this should be fun!
It’s a time to get creative and experiment as an entrepreneur.
Again, these freebies are called lead magnets and while they take a little bit more extra effort than not having a free offer at all, they will just really drastically increase your conversion rate and the number of people signing up to your email list.
So think, how can you provide value to your ideal target customer in a way that entices them to sign up to your email list to hear more from you? That’s your offer.
So just think of Ted Lasso!
If you’re interested in learning more about how to make these strategies work for your fashion business goals, book a call to speak with Hannah, our director of enrollment. You can figure out together if we’re the right fit for each other and see if our goals align. Just go to factory45.co/apply – I’ll also put the link in the description below this episode.
