How To Get Potential Clients To Join Your Email List
In my last post, I walked you through the importance of email marketing for wedding professionals and why I love it SO very much.
But how do you get potential clients to join your email list?
Maybe you have that email sign up form on your site and it’s just not working for you.
Let’s be real. People don’t just join your email list because you want them to. There has to be something in it for them that is obvious and that they want. You have to give them something in exchange for their email address, but what?
Introducing the lead magnet
A lead magnet is simply something you give away in exchange for the subscriber’s email address.
All lead magnets should be easy to consume within 15 minutes and give them a quick win. Don’t write a 50 page ebook. It’ll just sit on their desktop and it won’t help you make sales.
Your lead magnet can be just about anything but here are some things that are working well for my clients:
- A checklist
- Example: A checklist laying out what people need to do at each stage of their planning
- A step by step guide
- Example: How to decide on the wording for your wedding invitations
- A short video
- Example: Show how to look amazing in your wedding photos
- List of tools/resources
- Example: The top 5 planning tools to make your life easier
- Tutorial
- Example: How to choose your wedding flowers
- Cheat sheet
- Example: Questions to ask a wedding photographer before hiring them
- Buyer guide
- Example: Which wedding dress is best for your shape?
- Quiz/assessment
- Example: Which wedding style is right for you?
Just make sure that your lead magnet is specific and addresses a problem that your ideal client is facing.
Here are some examples of lead magnets:
One member of The Wedding Business Collective created an invitation wording guide because as a stationer, she found that her potential clients were really unsure about how their invitations were supposed to or could be worded. She solves that problem for them with her guide.
Another Wedding Business Collective member created an ebook called 7 Smart Ways To Keep Your Sanity While Planning Your Wedding. As a planner, she helps people stay on track with their planning without losing their mind.
One of my former clients created a little black book of recommended vendors in the area because as a photographer, he was getting hired early on in the planning process and his couples were asking him for recommendations. That’s perfect for a couple in the research phase!
In The Wedding Business Collective we have a course called Selling With Email Marketing and the very first lesson digs into figuring out what to offer for free, because it can be difficult to decide and difficult to guess at what people want. Screw guessing, you can figure out what people want and just give that to them.
Creating your lead magnet
It’s easier than you might think and shouldn’t take a lot of time.
If you’re creating a PDF lead magnet like a checklist or step by step guide, you can use a tool like Canva to quickly and easily create a beautiful PDF download without having a degree in graphic design.
Want to outsource it? You can find people on Upwork or Fiverr who will take your text and design a PDF for you.
If you’re going to create a video you can simply use your phone (be sure to use good lighting!) or use a tool like Screenflow to create a screen capture video where you walk them through something on your computer screen.
Giving your file a home
Your file has to live somewhere online so that people can download it. There are lots of options but the easiest ones are:
You can upload the file to any of these places and grab the link to put in your welcome email. Once someone subscribers to your list, they’ll get that welcome email with the link to download your lead magnet.
Promoting your lead magnet
Some people create a killer lead magnet and no one signs up for it because they don’t know it’s there. Keep in mind that no one sees your website the way you do so you need to make it super obvious.
Include a form from your email marketing tool (Don’t have one yet? Get the free guide to choosing one here!) or button/image to click to go to the form in these places on your website:
- Your sidebar
- At the bottom of every blog post
- At the bottom of every page or in the header of your website
- A pop-up or slide in (I love SumoMe for creating these)
- On a stand alone page so that you can share that page on social media regularly (once is not enough!)
You can also create pins to promote your lead magnet, create Instagram posts to promote it and run Facebook ads to your stand alone page promoting it or to a relevant blog post promoting it. Use every outlet you have to promote this baby.
Sales is SO much like dating and people tend not to get married on the first date. Instead of proposing marriage (the sale), propose something that they’re prepared to say yes to (a helpful lead magnet).
I want to help you stay focused and on track while you create your lead magnet so I’ve created this checklist for you. Just click here or on the image below to download it now and get started on your lead magnet!
