Hi, I'm Jasmine Huff and I'm going to teach you how to start and grow your email list from zero. Now make sure to listen out for all of the top mistakes that I call out because if you make these mistakes you could get banned from a lot of different email marketing software and of course stick around until the end because I want to tell you my top tips for continuing to grow your email list once we get it started. So your first question maybe who needs an email list and actually everyone needs an email marketing list these days whether you're planning a party or doing a fundraiser starting maybe your first merch line starting a YouTube channel or just asking someone to donate for your dog's birthday. An email list is a great way to communicate with a large group of people. Now say if you know you're never going to want to communicate with more than 10 people at a time you probably don't need an email marketing list. But in the long term you may have an offering, you may have a workshop, you may have a book, you may become a coach or consultant and want to share that with a larger group, a larger part of your community. An email list is the easiest way to get your message out to a large group of people. And I know what people say like, oh, I hate email emails overwhelming, there's so much email, there's so much spam, it's just never going to get read. Well the truth is a lot of what we're posting on social media is not getting read either. There's less folks are spending less and less time logging on and reading updates on social media. And so if we want to get our message out we need to send it out to folks in our community. And so that means either something like a text message or an email marketing list. You don't want to be contacting folks individually every time you have something nice to announce or a resource to share. And an email marketing list is what you're going to need. So the first step in starting your list is just to start a spreadsheet, I use something like Google Drive and list the columns that you'd like to collect the information that you'd like for the people on your list. Now obviously the first column is email, you got that right. Now the next column I like to use is first name, the next column could be last name, but that's optional. Some lists you don't actually care who the individual identities of every single person is on your list, you may not collect last name. Now if you're into events or if you do things that are different by different local say maybe you have an event on the East Coast that's not offered on the West Coast, it's amazing if you can collect your list. List members zip code or state and that'll help you divide the list up later once you get a larger list going and you have different things going by different geographics. If you don't think you'll do a lot of local events or a lot of events and a lot of locations, you can totally skip this step. There's kind of endless amounts of things you might want to collect about people on your list, maybe their birthday because you want to send a birthday blessing out around that time. Maybe something to do with how they met you or a reminder for yourself for that list of information that you need. So go ahead and put any of those columns in your spreadsheet and that's where we're going to start. Filling up your list when you have zero names on that list, I know it looks really scary, that spreadsheet looks really, really blank right now. Don't worry, you actually know a lot more people than you think. You have a bunch of emails already, they're just in your email account somewhere and you're going to do some fishing around your email account and around your computer to find email addresses of people you want to add to your email newsletter. Now the key is you don't want to just add every email address you've ever had access to to your email newsletter. No, you want to add folks who want to hear from you, folks who look forward to hearing from you, folks who say have done events with you, have worked with you, friends, maybe team members, people you've met through meetups, etc. So what you're going to do is go ahead and open up your email account and go to the send folder and just start looking at the emails that you've sent out. And a lot of the people that you've emailed, you're going to add to your email list. As long as you've emailed them, you probably have a real connection with them. It's overwhelming to look through your inbox and try and find all the people you know, but if you've emailed them back, you probably have a connection. Maybe they want to hear from you. Go ahead and look through all those emails you've sent and add any of the folks you think you would like to hear from you on a more regular basis to your spreadsheet. Next, go ahead and search your computer for any hell of lost spreadsheets or guess lists that you might. You can search for the term email or search for a different mailing list on your computer. And just see maybe you did an event in the past where you collected emails and you can add those email addresses to your newsletter now. You would also check things like your Google Drive or Dropbox and see if there's any spreadsheets that again have the word email in it or are appropriate for your newsletter. Another trick is if you've sent calendar invites out to folks say you want to add everyone that you've had a client meeting with in the last year or two newsletter because you're going to send those folks additional resources. We'll go into your calendar and the email addresses, the folks that you've invited to different meetings are going to be listed in those calendar invites and you can pull those over and add those to your list. Next place that you can look is linked in. Now the process for this changes every once in a while. So I'm not going to show a screen recording or anything but head over to LinkedIn, head up the help files and ask how you can export the data that you have on LinkedIn. Now you won't be able to export the email address of everyone that you've connected with on LinkedIn. That's a privacy setting that depends on what the LinkedIn person you've connected with has decided. So you'll be able to pull some email addresses from LinkedIn but not a ton or maybe you know you look at the list and you use that list and you message those people individually on LinkedIn and say, hey, I'm starting my email newsletter. I'd love to have you on it. What's your email address? Now the next place that you're going to want to look is in your contacts app or your address book, whatever you use. You can also check things like WhatsApp and Signal for friends that you have in your messaging pretty frequently. And again, with all of these platforms, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Signal, be brave. Ask folks who are the email addresses. Most of the times folks would love to hear from you honestly. They want to find more ways to connect with you. They don't want to be shy. They're not logging on to social media as much. They understand you don't have time to message everyone individually. So be brave. Ask your favorite contacts. Ask all your friends, hey, I'm starting my email newsletter. What's your email address? I'd love to add you. The next step after you gathered your emails that you're going to market to and you've gotten some friends to add to your list. You've gotten some permission. Now that you've started to build your email list, the next step is to start talking to your email list. It's certain messaging folks. Now, there is an old marketing saying that you can either build your email list or you can sell to your email list, but you can't do both. And so at this time where you don't even necessarily have anything to sell to your audience, this is actually the perfect time to start your emails newsletter. You want to start an email newsletter really focused on helping your audience out. You see, your audience gets advertisements from everyone and people want them to buy all sorts of things from the internet all the time. You don't want to be another advertisement in their inbox. You want to be a newsletter that your audience looks forward to. You want to plan out an email newsletter strategy that allows you to deliver real value, real content to your audience. For example, you can talk about how you got started with your special skill or your industry. You can talk about what you learned by doing something you need. You can talk about how to do things that your audience might want to learn how to do. Or even as simple as just new recipes that you're cooking in the kitchen. It's really important to invest in your audience before you expect them to invest in you. So don't be afraid of giving away too much information. Information is pretty well available on the internet right now. Become that trusted go to source for information by giving really great clear how to information to your audience via email. You started your email list. You started to message folks. Folks are interested. They're responding. But oh my gosh, it's a little scary because also folks are unsubscribing and emails are coming back, bounced or dead or vacation messages. Just know that on average on my friends tend to change their corporate email addresses maybe every one to two years and they change their personal addresses every couple of years too. It's really normal to have a certain percentage of your email addresses expire over time unsubscribe, bounce, stop or don't worry. That's normal. What you need to do is continually refresh your email list with new folks that you're meeting. Thanks for sticking around until the end because I want to make sure that you leave here with my tips on how to continue growing your email list. So you're not stressed when you get those unsubscribe requests at all. So you can continue to do those tips that I mentioned at the beginning where you're harvesting email addresses out of your inbox, out of your calendar invites. You need to get really great at inviting people to join your email list. That means when you're on social media instead of maybe giving away information, download for free, you can say, hey, send me your email and cell phone number and I'll text it to you. I'll email it to you. And that way you've got their email address for future communication. If you are offering a workshop, say in person, make sure there's a sign up sheet at the beginning of the workshop where folks can put on their email address or say you're giving a presentation in a situation where you don't get a copy of the emails of the folks who registered. Make sure you make an offer to the audience like, hey, email me to download my slides or email me your questions. And that way as many folks in the audience as possible email you with the end of that presentation. You can add those folks to your list. Hope with all those tips you can grow a really healthy, active list of folks who are really, truly interested in what you do and how you offer it. I'll see you back at the Jasmine Hub channel for more marketing tips or head over to jazmanhub.com to download my free marketing how to guides.