Normally when a business wants to communicate with its current customers and potential new customers for that matter, there is usually a social media platform in the middle that controls what content is shown to individuals based on some algorithm.

Building an email list can be one of the most valuable things you do for your business or online community. There is a lot to be said for controlling how you interact with your own followers instead of leaving that in the hands of a social media algorithm.

In this blog post, we will look at a simple method of how to build an email list from Ireland.

“The Riches are in your list”

According to Mailchimp, email marketing campaigns see average open rates of 21.33% and average click rates of 2.62%. This is just an average and it can vary from industry to industry.

These stats mean that if you are looking to get 100 of your newsletter subscribers to complete the desired action (e.g purchase a certain product offered in the email) you will need at least 3,817 people on your mailing list.

About 18 months ago I started a YouTube Channel and at that time I was hoping to build a list of email subscribers that I could reach with Newsletters.

I was thinking that if I had a product to sell or an affiliate deal that would benefit me and the end user then a newsletter might just be the ticket.

Unfortunately for me, I just spent a little bit of time making landing pages and lead magnets (using Mailchimp) to encourage people to sign up for my newsletter.

As soon as I made set up these campaigns I completely forgot about them until this week and I was very surprised with how successful one of the campaigns was.

Now let me share the results with you….

Lead Magnet

At the time I created my first lead magnet I was very interested in building Shopify eCommerce stores.

Along my journey, I found some useful code that enabled you to create a page on your website to help customers track the delivery of any orders that they made from your store.

I was thinking this could be a perfect way to get some names on my email list, giving away something of value for free.

I found the best way I could tell people about this Shopify hack was to create a short video showing people how to implement it on their website and then have a link below in the description section where the viewer could access the code in return for their email contact.

Here is the video I created, it was badly put together as it was one of the first YouTube videos I ever made and I had no equipment whatsoever.

At the time of writing, it just got a TOTAL OF 558 VIEWS.

Landing Page

Here is the first landing page I created on Mailchimp, that the viewer would see when they clicked the link on the description section of my video.

It is super easy to create these on Mailchimp.

Results

The results were quite surprising to me when I logged into my Mailchimp account this week.

The campaign resulted in 88 email subscribers signing up — this seems quite large from my limited experience.

16% of people who viewed my video gave me their email addresses.

This has reinforced my belief that the best way to get email subscribers is to give away something of value for free.

Other Limited Campaigns I ran at the same time

I did also run some another campaign recently where I gave away a free guide for capital gains tax returns in Ireland.

This campaign worked even better with just 331 views at the time of writing this campaign managed to get me 130 subscribers so far, a whopping 39% response rate.

This is another indicator that giving away something of value is a successful approach.

Why am I only realising this now 🙁

I am disappointed with myself for not continuing from where I started 18 months ago. It feels like a missed opportunity. I hope this post inspires you to grow your own email list for your community sooner rather than later.

I know that from now on it is something that I won’t be ignored anymore.

Everything you need to know about using Mailchimp for building your email list

First off, Mailchimp has a free plan to help you get up and running to a decent size. With the free plan you get up to 2,000 contacts and 10,000 email sends.

When you exceed your limit, you incur additional charges of $11.00/month per additional 500 contacts (comes with additional 5,000 email sends).

There are further upgrades for more advanced features, insights and support if you want that sort of thing. But there is no need to upgrade straight away.

Whether it is announcements, educational content, surveys, selling products or services there will be templates for all different types of landing pages and email templates. Importantly you can also segregate your audience into different categories if needs be or if you have multiple businesses.

Mailchimp has you covered when it comes to GDPR compliance and all the regulatory worries you may have about storing people’s personal data.

Best of luck growing your own email list.