How to grow your list with qualified leads, and not freebie hunters

A question comes:

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“How do I grow my email list with qualified leads, not freebie hunters?”

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Great question.

There’s two ways I know of…

The fast way and the slow way.

The slow way is to only add people to your email who’ve purchased something. But the problem is, you’re only relying on the 3% of people who have the problem you solve being ready to invest in a solution right now. And before you ask where that number comes from. Here is the answer…

Across all industries, and niches, blah blah blah, the average conversion rate is 3%.

That means, on average, when presented with a sales message, people end up buying 3% of the time. What roughly translates to the idea that only 3% of the people you can help right now, are actually ready to buy right now.

So if you only add buyers to your list, you miss out on the other 97% of people who need a little nurturing, a little education, or a little trust built up first before they buy anything from you. And you miss out on the added benefit of being probably the first person to effectively educate those people about their problem, and show them that there’s suitable solutions to them, long before those people ever thought there was a solution to their problem in the first place.

So now, when they are are ready… you’ve already become the easy and obvious choice.

No need to shop around.

Because they’re already sold on you.

So in my onionin, you miss out on all that by only adding buyers to your list.

Never-the-less, some people swear buy it and have done quite well for themselves with it, so I feel it’s worthwhile to mention it here and if anyone reading this has had madcap success with only adding buyers to their list and never offering anything free ever, then write in, I’d love to hear about it.

That said…

The second way, is what I call the fast way…

It’s where you offer something free in exchange for their email. Or where you invite people to your free newsletter where you regularly give valuable insights and information. Or preferably both.

Yet some list owners are rightfully frustrated by this.

“No one is buying anything!!!! They’re all a bunch of freebie seekers!!!”

To that I say there are two solutions: 1) make something better, or 2) believe in yourself more.

Here’s what I mean…

If your freebie isn’t a complete solution to a narrow problem in about one page or less, most people will never consume it, and never get results with it, and thus, never really see the value in anything else you create whether paid or not. So make something better, more valuable, more concise, more relevant to what you have to offer in your paid stuff.

On the other hand…

Maybe your freebie is great, but you don’t promote your other offers often enough, or well enough, or consistently enough for people to say, “Okay, you got me, I believe you, let’s see what this is all about.”

Sometimes that’s just it.

You can verify this one on google, but different sources say people need to interact deeply with your content 8, 12, 16, 22 times or more on average before they’ll trust you enough to buy from you.

That’s just the way it is.

Anyone can whip up a social media account and pretend to look like an expert overnight.

So people are skeptical.

Unscrupulous marketers with persuasive messaging and poor delivery on the back-end only make matters worse.

All to say….

If you want to build a list of qualified leads instead of freebie hunters, make better freebies and make better offers.

Test, track, and analyze your results. Not just opt-ins, but what eventually leads to sales and why?

Do this with your content too.

Test different ideas. Don’t get attached to something that’s not working. Treat everything like an experiment. This is the part of marketing that almost everyone overlooks. And I’ve made this mistake myself many times before too. Putting an excessive amount of effort into creating something that wasn’t validated and doesn’t work, and getting frustrated by it.

Not realizing there is a better and lighter way to create.

This is one of the reasons I’ve taken one of my best performing freebies and turned it into a more in depth and valuable paid training.

Here it is in it’s original form.

Buy it now, and get access to the upgrade next week. It will give you everything you need to go through this process on your own creating organic content on threads to bring people who are good fit for your offers and what you do into your world and onto your email list.

https://kevinhood.me/legendary

Kevin Hood