What is Your Email List Actually Worth?
Do you ever look at your email list and think you don't have “enough” subscribers? I know people with 30,000 who think the same thing.
Th vvalue of an email list is about much more than size.
When it comes to online marketing, there are a thousand different techniques―and hundreds of channels―you can use.
So why is building an email list my favorite?
It's simple: I love helping people reach their goals.
An email list is the most effective way to genuinely help people on a large, sustainable scale.
On top of that, building an email list has been very profitable for my (still new) business.
- When launching my first course, I built an interest list of 250 subscribers―which generated $10,000 in ten days.
- From that same course, we then generated $3,000 a month from less than 200 subscribers―with ConvertKit's automated email sequences.
- In the last week alone, I earned nearly $2000 selling affiliate products to segments of my email list.
I think you get the idea… building an email list works.
Before I understood this, I wasted a massive amount of time building a following on Facebook, Twitter, and every other social media site.
I spent two years blogging consistently with the hope that “one day” I would make an income from my blog.
That day only came when I refocused on building a targeted, engaged email list.
The Big Difference Between Social Media and Email
The internet has done a lot to change the way in which we interact, but the core element of what we do online is still the same as it was long before the internet:
Human people interacting with human people.
Social media is great for meeting new, interesting people―like a park or coffee shop offline―but if your relationship never grows beyond coffee shop banter, you have no real relationship to speak of.
Giving away your email address is like handing over the physical address of your home.
There’s a lot of trust involved in handing someone your home address!
If you give someone your address, you're typically thinking one of two things:
- “You seem nice, why don’t you come hang out?” or
- “Please, send me cool stuff!”
When your customer gives you their email address, they're give you an opportunity to reach them directly―there's no longer a need to wait in common ground for your customer to show up.
Interestingly enough, studies have shown that an email subscriber is 15 times more likely to make a purchase than a social media follower.
What Determines Email List Value?
If you have 2,000 people on your email list, who are all interested in pottery―how will that help you when you're ready to sell something unrelated, like a video game?
If you have 5,000 people on your email list, but they always ignore your emails―what good will that do your business at all?
It's only helpful to have a big email list if the list is high quality as well.
Quality, in relation to email lists, can be related back to two questions about your list:
- How engaged is your email list? (You can measure this by open rates, click-through rates, and even replies)
- How clearly defined is your content focus? Could your subscribers explain what you're about?
Ready to grow a list that's both targeted and engaged now? I thought so!
Does that mean changing your focus in any way? Let me know in the comments below.
