SPECIAL LIMITED SERIES: ===> HOW to GROW YOUR LIST?🚽 <=== | BATHROOM Break #7 (COLLAB: The Marketing Millennials + Do This, Not That)

Welcome to a new special series called the Bathroom break. That extra 10 minutes you either have to listen to marketing tips or use the bathroom. Or both. But I don't recommend both. But that's your choice.

This collab is going to be super fun.

We have Daniel Murray from the Marketing Millennials and me, Jay Schwedelson from the do this, not that podcast and subjectline.com each episode in the series, we are going to go over quick tips about different marketing topics. And if you want to be in the bathroom, you fine. Just don't tell us about it. Thanks for checking it out.

We are back for another episode of the Bathroom Break. This is Jay schwedelson from guru mediahub and subjectline.com and I'm here with the great Daniel Murray from the Market Millennials.

Daniel, are you ready for more Bathroom Mania?

Yeah, I'm at off site right now, and I said I needed to go to the bathroom, and they're gonna wonder how long it takes me to go to the bathroom. But I'm doing it for the pod. I'm doing it for the pod.

No one's going to go near you for, like an hour.

All right, before we get into today, we're going to be talking about how to actually grow your email list and your database, and we have some specific ways. Daniel, before we get into it, man, how you doing? What's going on? Are you, like, watching tv? What's your jam?

So Ari is a huge Sex and the City fan, and she got me to watch Sex and the City. And I'm not gonna lie, I'm probably watching some episodes without her, but I also came top of mind. And this is not to hype up Jay or anything.

Jay announced that Sarah Jessica Parker is going to be a guru conference. And I saw Sex in the City and Netflix, and he did it on purpose and got into my head, and I didn't even know he was getting into my head.

And now I'm already on season two and a half of Sex in the City in a matter of a week, so I'm binging hard.

Well, first of all, I love that show. I love sjp. I just finished watching Atlas, which is the new JLO movie, and I gotta say, it is garbage on a good day. It was so bad. I don't know.

JLO needs to, like, figure something out. It's rough out there. But anyway, don't watch Atlas. Let's get into what we're doing here today, because everyone's like, what just happened?

We forgot about how to grow our email list. So let's talk about, we're gonna talk about specific ways that you can grow your, your list.

Daniel, hit us up with the first plan of how we're going to grow our list.

My number one way, and I don't see a lot of people doing this is LinkedIn. And I people are going to be say to me, I know, oh, links get downgraded and post, don't post links on LinkedIn.

There's a couple ways to do this that it doesn't hit your post and helps you grow your email list. One is optimized for attention on that post. So post something that you know is going to get some sort of engagement with your target audience.

So for me, I like to use memes for this or image posts. And what I'll do is five minutes after the post is live and I see it's getting some traction in the algorithm, I will edit the post and say, P.S.

i have a hundred thousand marketing besties in my newsletter. Why aren't you part of the marketing besties crew? Something like that. As a ctn, I add the link and it doesn't downgrade the post.

The second thing I do is on a personal profile that you can do this is now LinkedIn lets you. Which they've been doing for at least like six months, but have a CTA under your name. So adding a CTA under your name. View my website, sign up.

They have those two CTAs. Some people get lucky and can actually say subscribe your newsletter.

I would add that as a cta because every time your post is in a feed they see your face and they see that cta. And that's another way to grow your newsletter. And my newsletter is almost 60% LinkedIn growth just from organic LinkedIn. No paid at all.

And I think that people in general need to wire their brain to always be asking. Every day when you wake up, you have to say to yourself, what am I doing today to grow my list?

Because your list has attrition every year on average, you're going to lose about 20% of your list. Doesn't matter if you're a business or a consumer marketer.

So if you don't have a plan in place every day to grow your list, you're going to have no list. The tactic that I think is underutilized because people, quote unquote, don't like it, are pop up contact captures.

You go to a website, pop up pops up and it asks you for the information in exchange for maybe a piece of content or for a discount code. And a lot of marketers are like, well I don't like that experience so I'm not going to do it. But that is ridiculous.

It might be the most effective way to grow your list. And otherwise people are just going to your website and they're leaving and you get nothing from it.

And what doesn't happen is nobody goes sees that pop up on your site. They don't click that little X and say I hate this website, I'm never coming back.

They just click the little X and then they go onto your site if they don't want to fill it out.

But about 5% of people actually do fill it out for business and consumer websites and, and now you have their information, now you could market to them.

So if you're not leveraging pop ups because you don't like them, you need to really put your own opinion aside and test it because you need to grow your database. So Daniel, what are some other ways you could do it?

Yeah, I just want to add to that. I think B2B gets more scared of this too. I think B2B is, it's so underutilized growing an email list with pop ups.

And I think most people are coming to website for research or something along that line or content. So on your blog on different pages you can have different types of pop ups to capture those people. So I think it's so underutilized.

Another way, which is pretty straightforward to think about, growing your email list is a concept I call like for like. And what that means is co, market or market on a platform that you're trying to have more readers or listeners on that platform.

For example, if you're a newsletter, marketing on other newsletters in your same niche is a really good idea because those, you know, those people are ready newsletter readers, you know, those people already consume that channel. So it's a great way to swap with people who have audiences that are like yours or similar to grow your email list.

It's also a great way for any channel that you're trying to grow on social podcasts because if someone's already on that platform, they're going to do, they most likely will consume on that platform another time. And it's harder to get someone who isn't a newsletter reader to come and consume newsletters all the time.

So let me ask you a question though, exactly what you mean by that. So let's say there's another newsletter similar to your newsletter which by the way, everyone should subscribe to Daniels. It's awesome.

Will you reach out to that person? Say, listen, I got my newsletter, you got your newsletter. Let's mention each other's newsletters in each other's newsletters.

No money exchanging hands. And that's how you do it.

Number one is look for someone with comparable size audience to yours if you want to do an equal swap. If it's not an equal swap, what you could do is someone with a smallest, you want to get some of their audience.

What you could do is do, hey, I'll mention you once and you mention me three times. You just find an equal balance. And I think you also, if you also could pay for this too. I think it's a good paid strategy as well.

I think if nobody wants to do the like for like, you can go and pay another newsletter that is in your niche to capture some emails and there's a great acquisition channel for that channel. So I think there's free ways to do it, there's partnering ways to do it.

Also, I think an underrated one is just make friends with people and they will end up organically mentoring you in your newsletter. I think that's a very underrated tip.

I think for me, I just mention people I like and I read and are my friends because I like helping out friends and other marketers. So that's an underrated way as well.

I'll tell you the number one thing in my business that generates the most database growth, the most emailless growth, and that's having a free tool. And I couldn't recommend this to people more and I don't think enough people do it.

So in my company, we started a website years ago called subjectline.com and this is not a promo for it, but basically the way it's totally free, the way it works is you go there and you can put your subject line and it'll tell you how good or bad your subject line is. And if you want to use it a second time, it's still free. But you got to give give your information, you join our database, whatever.

And I don't care what industry you're in, what it is that you do, there is a tool that you can create. You don't need a heavy lot of programming, doesn't even need to be a tool.

It could be a page that just lists a lot of resources from your industry, whatever it may be.

But the secret sauce of it is you want the URL of that tool to be what I would call stupid proof, meaning that when they hear what the URL is, they will say oh subject line.com that's about subject lines.

It is worth the monetary investment to buy a premium domain that inherently says whatever the tool is because you're not Nike, you're not Google, you're not going to be able to brand something out there at that scale. So spend some money, get an inherent name that makes sense for the tool and then push people to that tool. Keep it free.

It is a great, great way to grow your database.

We use this at Service Titan, Snack Nation, all the companies I've worked with we used to have a revenue calculator tool like revenue expense calculator tool, budget allocation tool just to capture emails. Another thing to add at Jay's point. People are willing to give their email if it's something truly valuable to them.

So don't make a tool that's just like completely useless to them.

Someone who wants to do multiple subject line tests are going to use subject line.com someone who wants to calculate how to allocate budget for their sector and they need to learn that are going to willing to give their email easily because it's they care about that. So make it so useful that giving an email is just nothing to that person.

You're so spot on with the calculators because people are like oh they could just go to ChatGPT and figure out the calculation or this, that or whatever.

But you know what people don't and if you have the plumbers calculator.com right for people that are in the plumbing industry or it's the, the real estate, whatever a calculator, whatever it is, calculators are an incredible thing to create. Super easy to create that you can then gate get that information. You could promote it everywhere. It's free. Love that idea.

And so in general, always be collecting, always be thinking about how to grow your list. Daniel, any final words about this one?

Owning your audience has never been more important than ever. But third party data being harder and harder to utilize.

So having that first party data in your database that you can own, that you can use email to distribute is one of the most invaluable things you could do now in marketing and for the future of marketing. So really consider growing your email database because most people aren't in the market to buy right now.

So that's the best way to keep them top of mind when they are ready to buy.

Spot on. All right everybody, thanks for joining this episode of the Bathroom Break. We're going to be doing this weekly.

Hopefully you check it out, subscribe and check out the Marketing Millennials podcast with Daniel Murray. It's incredible. And then do this, not that with me. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next week. Daniel, come on, man. I got to get back to work.

Get out of there. All right, while he's still in there. This is Jay. Check out my podcast, do this, not that for Marketers.

Each week we share really quick tips on stuff that can improve your marketing and hope you give it a try. Oh, here's Daniel. He's finally out.

Back from my bathroom break. This is Daniel. Go follow the Market Millennials podcast, but also tune into the series. It's once a week, the bathroom break.

We talk about marketing tips that we just spew out. And it could be anything from email subject line to any marketing tips in the world. We'll talk about it.

Just give us a a shout on LinkedIn and tell us what you want to hear. Peace out.

Later.