
Why You Really Should Start an Email List (even if you don’t sell a product)!
Just so you know, I may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post, but it won’t affect the price you pay at all! I have a full affiliate disclosure that you can find here.
It doesn’t matter what you sell, if you do one thing for your business, I recommend starting an email list now. Heck, it doesn’t even matter if you don’t sell your own products or services, you still need an email list. Example, I just launched my first course, but I had an email list for months prior. My list has been crucial in helping me to grow my blog and my affiliate income. Plus, it helps me to further connect with my community and provide them with more value.

Way back in the day, in college (I have BBA in Marketing), we learned a lot about supply and demand. Essentially, it doesn’t matter what product or service you sell if no one wants what you’re offering. And having a mailing list represents (some of) the demand for your business.
Many of the biggest successful businesses today even establish their mailing list (or subscribers) first before their product is released. It helps to build credibility for your business and generates excitement.
What if you’ve already established your business or blog, but you haven’t started an email list yet?
Let Go of the Guilt and Take Action
So you have a blog or a business and don’t have an email list? Feeling bad about not ‘doing all the things’ isn’t going to help. In fact, I had a successful online business and never got around to starting an email list. Whoops. I am not trying to make you feel bad, I simply want to help you learn from my mistakes as a small business owner and blogger. Running your own business is hard, and life is hard. Try not to waste precious time or energy on feeling guilty, and give yourself some grace. You’re doing the best that you can!
Ready to Get Started?
I recommend starting with creating a free account on an email newsletter site so that you’ll be creating a list that’s compliant with all of the current rules and regulations. Personally, I use SnapRetail, but there are a ton of great email services available.
If you want to learn more about email list options, what a lead magnet is, and get ideas on how to create content that your audience will love, here’s our podcast on the subject. Plus, Michele M. Bradley, creative genius and branding extraordinaire, is offering a 511 Workshop on Optimizing Your Facebook Business Page Cover Photos, which will you to get more clicks to your site and more sign-ups for your lead magnets!
If you’re having trouble prioritizing your business tasks, check out my strategies to help with consistency here and sign up to receive my free prioritizing ruthlessly checklist too if you’d like. Guess what? That checklist signs you up for my email list as well. It’s called a lead magnet. Creating a lead magnet or an offer that will interest your target audience is an excellent way to start building your own email list.
Lead magnets don’t have to be fancy or complicated! If you download mine, you’ll see that it’s quite simple, but it’s a tool I already used myself and thought you’d find helpful. I created mine in PicMonkey, but there are various tools where you can make PDFs or printables.
You may have seen another effective way that I’m growing my email list when you came to the blog today. I’ve installed an easy plugin called MiloTree that shows visitors a quick pop-up inviting them to join my newsletter. It only pops up every two days (you can update the settings to show as often as you like). Plus, it rotates the newsletter with my other social media platforms (also customizable). It’s been, by far, the easiest thing I’ve done to grow my email list!
It’s been one of the things that has helped me the most to DOUBLE my list this month! You can get a free 30 day trial for your blog or site here.
An email list is also an excellent way to get people to come back to your site. In fact, I’m totally going to link to this blog post in my next email!
Successful e-commerce sites or blogs depend on returning visitors to account for a major part of their traffic. Returning visitors are easier to convert into paying customers, because the more often they return to a site, the more trust they have in that site. So even if you don’t have a product or service to sell, and you haven’t started affiliate marketing yet, start now on your email list. I wish I had started sooner myself!
If you have an established business, what do you wish you’d done sooner?
And if you’re new to email lists, feel free to ask questions about email lists here or on my Facebook Page!
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