There is a lot of talk online at the moment about list building, about having as many people on your list as possible. “Don’t launch a product with less than 1000 on your list” is one piece of advice that I see floating around. There are tonnes of business owners who are frantically trying to build their lists, to reach that golden number of 1000 people on their list. They are taking our Facebook ads, creating landing pages and working their butts off to build their list.
Because they’ve been told this is what they have to do.
Rubbish. I had less than 50 people on my list when I first launched. My first digital product added 84 people to my list which means that out of the 100 places that I sold only 16 of them came from my list. The rest came from a piece of lead generation work.
I had less than 50 people on my list when I first launched.
If you are busy striving for a list of 1000 people and you are not looking after those you have then the chances are you’ll eventually get to your goal of 1000 and you’ll have a lovely mailing list that you’ve totally neglected for as long as its taken to build it. Because there’s no point doing anything with a little list, right?
Wrong.
This reminds me of Twitter followers. You know those business owners who start a social media campaign and are so desperate to reach 1000 followers on twitter that they are grateful for every spambot that follows them. If you want 1000 followers that badly then go and spend $20 and buy them. Easy. Done. None of them will ever engage with you, buy from you, tweet to you or share your message but you have 1000 followers so therefore you are successful, yes?
No.
I really don’t understand this mindset of needing to be seen to have the right numbers, to be successful. Online marketing should be about lead generation. The only metric you should measure is how many leads did social media bring me this month and did I convert them to customers.
Not even how many new people joined my mailing list, although if you have a good process for converting mailing list signups to customers then this is OK too.
Build relationships. Engage with people. Generate leads not numbers. Understand your process for converting new people into customers.
I would personally rather add 10 people a week to my mailing list and nurture them with value and content and build a relationship with them and sell to them than add 100 who wanted my “free download” and who are unlikely ever to click my emails that I send to them.
Stop worrying about numbers. Stop trying to build your mailing list. Stop trying to get as many social media followers as you can.
Build relationships. Engage with people. Generate leads not numbers. Understand your process for converting new people into customers.
Stop trying so hard to get people to come to you Concentrate on the customers that you have. On the groups that you are in. Get a solid lead generation plan in place and you won’t need 1000 people on your mailing list.
Get out there, add value. Give. Serve. Transform people’s lives with what you offer and the rest will all fall into place.