How To Get The Right People On Your Mailing List

Calculating the Cash Value of Each New Subscriber

Each new subscriber you acquire should have a potential cash-value associated with them.

• If you sell courses it could be $20 per month per new lead.
• If you have a digital product, it could be $10-$15 per new subscriber (depending on the cost of your product).
• If you’re a consultant or offer services, it could be anywhere from $1500 to $3500 or more a month.

Arbitrarily adding people to your list to reach some magic number where you’ll start making money is a fool’s errand.

Less is more when it comes to email marketing.

Focus on who you want from the get-go, be selective, and you’ll be in a far better position 12 months from now.

Defining Your Target Audience for Maximum ROI

Your goal is to find people that are 1) interested in what you sell / do, and 2) are willing to pay money to have their problems solved.

This is your target audience, the lifeblood of your business. Focus all your efforts on finding these people.

Anyone outside this “target zone” is a waste of effort and resources.

You’ll find these people on Reddit, X, Medium, and searching for stuff via Google, Bing and other search engines.

Your job is to communicate what you do to them, how you can help. You want to pique their interest and get them to interact with one of your landing pages.

How to Design a Hyper-Specific Lead Magnet That Attracts High-Value Leads

In order to target the right kind of people, you need to go hyper-specific with your lead magnet.

Do not be vague, and do not try to please everyone.

Niche down, find a problem that you can solve for someone in your target audience, and create something just for them.

Think of Your Lead Magnet Like A First Date…

And put effort into it. Make it impressive, actionable, useful. You wouldn’t turn up to a first date in your pajamas, looking like sh*t.

And do it yourself, put your soul and personality into it. Do not just have ChatGPT create something for you. There is no value in that.

Your lead magnet is your first date, your one and only chance to make a good impression. Make it count.

It should leave the recipient excited about what comes next, eager to hear more from you, and if you’re smart with your welcome email, it should open up a dialogue with them.

This nicheing-down will require that you know your audience and the kind of problems they have.

If you don’t know this, go back to the research phase.

Avoiding the Common Mistakes: Why Discount-Hunters Hurt Your List Quality

Never target discount-hunters, giveaway addicts, or anyone who is after something for nothing.

These types of subscribers are not worth having, unless you’re an e-commerce brand.

And even then, I’d advise a more nuanced approach to lead generation. Leading with discounts cheapens your brand and its products.

If their first interaction with your brand was based on discounts or paying less, why would they ever want to pay more?

Apple doesn’t do discounts and neither should you.

You can do better than that.

Be Authentic, Ditch The Hyperbole & Avoid Clickbait

Also (and this is incredibly important, so write it down or something): never make claims in your lead magnet copy that you cannot back up.

Authenticity is in short supply these days.

Odd, right? It doesn’t cost anything, it does wonders for your brand, and yet no one seems to care about it.

Instead, they chase the quick bucks through clickbait titles and misleading claims and then, when someone outs them, they blame the algorithm.

Don’t be like these people.

Long term growth, word of mouth, recommendations, referrals and respect only come from one thing: being authentic and trust-worthy.

You also cannot buy authenticity or hack it, either.

Know Thyself, Know Thy Audience…

In a macro sense, your ultimate job is to help your audience solve their biggest problems and fill in the significant gaps in their knowledge.

Your lead magnet, however, should zero in on something more bite-sized, a quick win or an immediately useful solution.

This smaller win must be directly related to the larger, macro topic of what you do.

It should be instantly actionable, deliver clear value, and solve a specific problem.

Ideally, it does all three. People love having their problems solved quickly.

This distinction is why most e-commerce brands I’ve worked with, from small start-ups to enterprise-grade companies, have diabolically bad open rates.

Ninety percent of them use discount-focused lead magnets to build their lists.

While this works well for driving quick sales, it’s a terrible approach for creators because your business is fundamentally different.

You sell knowledge and expertise, skills that took you years, and in some cases, decades to acquire.

This level of specialization and value comes with a price tag and you only want to be dealing with people that appreciate this distinction.