Ep 162: How Important is Your List Size to a Successful Launch?

“Vanity metrics”, such as revenue, email list size and your number of social media followers, are definitely recognised in the online course world but none of these really matter as much to the health and growth of your business as achieving a profit.

• Revenue does not matter as much as profit.
• How many followers you have on social media doesn’t matter as much as the engagement you have with your email list.
• The quality of your contacts far outweighs the size of your list, every…single…time.

Rather than focussing on vanity metrics you should be focussing on securing and developing the quality of opportunities within your email list. Now there’s a lot of ways you can build your list but bear in mind the methods you use will determine your list strength. You could create lead magnets that are attractive to a broad audience and build your list size but will your list then contain a significant number of people who want to potentially pay you for your services? Most probably not. You need to ensure those on your list are the ones who wish to do business with you. You do this by only running campaigns on topics relevant to your target customer and talking about topics of interest to your ideal audience - you do not need to be all things to all people.

When you run a launch conversion numbers usually represent 1% to 5% of your list size, with the conversion rate typically reflective of how the list was obtained. You need to present your offers to the right people to achieve higher conversions so when it comes to designing your lead magnets, you want them to be perfect for your perfect customer.

Another factor effecting your conversion rate is whether your list of contacts is engaged. When you’re starting out conversions may lean more towards the 5% rate than 1% as until you’re maintaining a list of considerable size, you have more time and energy to build and manage relationships. As your list increases to tens of thousands of people, engagement is much more challenging and email automation such as that available in Kajabi will be required to maintain an ongoing conversation with the people on your list.

Lists are full of people that will opt into something and then unsubscribe which results in wasted time and opportunity. You need to maintain a quality list and keep your list interested in what you have to offer as, after all, the purpose of building a list is to create relationships - if you nurture and develop these relationships the hard sell will become a thing of the past. 

To find out more about list building and learn my 5 tried and tested, most effective ways of building an email list, register for my free list building webinar running on 12th April during Her Empire Builder open week (please register via www.tinatower.com/list).