How to Start an Email List — Tutorial Video #1

Key Takeaways

what's up guys pat flynn here from smartpassiveincome.com and welcome to your email marketing tutorial i'm here to help you grow your email list so we'll start from the beginning I'm going to walk through an outline on exactly what you're gonna learn here and then I have a few things to say before we get started so this video is going to show you how to set up your email service provider the little tool you're gonna use to start collecting your email list and then I'm going to show you how to create an opt-in form and place it on your website in video number two I'm going to show you exactly how to create lead magnets which are little incentives that you can create to gather more email subscribers and also I'll show you exactly where on your website you can place an opt-in form and video number three I'm going to give you some more advanced strategies that some people are using to start to scale the list building process then in video form to show you exactly how to use your autoresponder which are emails that you write ahead of time that gets sent out to your subscribers after when they subscribe and then in video number five I'm going to show you how to actually create broadcast emails that get sent to your list and then finally in video number six I'm going to show you some more advanced segmenting and tagging strategies so you can really start to do some ninja things to really deliver some amazing content to your audience and obviously get better results so before we dive into an email service provider and I show you how to create an opt-in form and place it on your website I want to talk really quick about why emails are very important now when I was starting out I didn't really think collecting email addresses were very important I was more focused on creating content on my blog and actually getting traffic I didn't really care about emails because well I didn't have anything to sell or I didn't even know what I was gonna say well the one big thing that I would change if I could do it all over again would be I wish I could start my email sooner my email list sooner and the reason is because it's not just because you can have then a list of people that you can share things with in terms of selling and recommending products yes that's part of it and actually it's a very small part of it more so you're able to build a deeper relationship with your audience you're able to teach them and give them information and provide value that will help you build that trust that's very important before any sort of transactions happen it's a way for you to keep your audience informed when things happen there there are so many benefits of an email list besides just you know having a list to sell to and actually your audience can help tell you exactly what they would buy that's the beauty of an email list more than anything is you're able to use that list of people who have given you permission to some stuff who know that you were there to serve them you can ask them hey what can I do to better serve you that can inform then what blog posts you should write what podcast episodes you should create what videos you should do and also what products to sell so your email list is way more important than just you know what can you sell yes that's going to be the end goal for a lot of you but please make the end goal to be better serving your audience and you're gonna get better results throughout and you know as you're going through this process and you're starting to build your email list you're going to check your email numbers every single day how many subscribers you got how many people are opening those broadcast emails and all those sorts of things and yes those numbers are very important but you gotta remember throughout this whole process every single person on your list is a real human being right it's not just about having a thousand subscribers it's about having a thousand human beings on the other end and even if you're starting out and you just have let's say 50 subscribers compared to others that might seem like nothing at all but imagine a room full of 50 people who are there because they want to hear from you now that starts to put into perspective exactly what we're doing here so treat your numbers like actual human beings and you will better serve them and you will get more results that way so just want to get that out there let's start the tutorial now so let's dive into an email service provider and I'll talk about my favorite one convertkit and then we'll get into how to create an opt-in form and place it on your website now that being said it doesn't matter what email service provider you end up using whether you go with convertkit or a completely different one it doesn't matter all of these principles in this tutorial throughout the entire six videos are gonna be useful for you so let's dive right in alright so what I want to do is walk you through the beginning stages of how to get started with an email service provider no matter which one you end up going with there are universally some really important things that you need to do the moment you sign up and set up your account that are vital to your success with email marketing and I'll show you those things in just a moment I do want to speak on really quick why I choose to recommend why I choose to use and why now I'm actually an advisor for this company convertkit they're my ESP of choice because they are the easiest to use the best designed ESP out there they also have a lot of amazing advanced features that I've always been looking for that are gonna be really helpful for you to maximize your results and I'll show you the in later videos within this email marketing tutorial I will say however if you'd like to check them out go through my link smartpassiveincome.com /ck and that is my affiliate link so I do get a commission from that just want to be up front but it's at no extra cost to you so you can get started and give them a shot and of course being an advisor if you have any questions or comments feel free to ask me I'm here for you now what I'm gonna do is click on the get started button here and set up a totally brand new account I'll see you on the other side after I fill out my billing information and get everything set up so hang on be there in just a second after you sign up there's going to be a few more details that you need to include and it starts with your address again this is universal no matter which email service provider you use you will not be able to send any emails unless you include an address and the reason is because there are anti-spam laws into place that require you to have that address at the bottom of every email you send out now keep that in mind when you might be thinking about putting your home address on there I actually wouldn't recommend doing that if possible put a business address there or a different address because you want that information for your own home private of course so keep that in mind but whatever the case may be you need to include an address there for sure then you can include information about your website whatever that website might be and then finally your default email settings which are going to be your from name and your reply to email address now the from name is going to be what people see in terms of where or who is sending this email and you might be inclined to put your brand name in there or your website name in there but I would highly recommend against that I would recommend including a real person's name hopefully your name if you are the one that is corresponding with your email subscribers and the reason for that is because when you see an email come into your inbox you are more likely to open it if it comes from a real person and as I always say the more human-like you can be online the easier it is to connect with people and for things like opening emails and for clicking through the links within the emails the more you could become a person the easier it's going to be for you so I would include a real name in here so I'll just include mine and then the reply to email address is where people will reply to so if people click the reply button on an email that you send out that's the email that will receive those replies from your subscribers so once you all once you have all that filled out click on save your information and we'll keep going and next up we're going to create a forum a forum is something that you embed and place on your website so you can begin collecting new subscribers you may ask for a name but no matter what you're definitely going to be asking for an email address and we'll show you how to set that up really quick here in convertkit and then finally I'm going to show you actually how to embed that form onto your website we'll save a lot of these other things in this handy checklist for the later videos but for now let's start by creating a form to create a form all you have to do is click on the create form button at this point you choose whether or not you want to build a landing page or have a form like which I said earlier then you can then embed on your website a landing page is essentially a website a single page that convertkit will provide for you that has a form on it so you can even begin collecting subscribers right now without having a website this is extremely useful if you are setting up a website very soon but you want to start collecting email subscribers now like a coming soon page for example well this will be really helpful it's also a great way to collect email subscribers on just a full page about a particular incentive which we'll talk about in the next video some sort of reason for people to subscribe so that they don't have any other option but to either subscribe and check that thing out or or exit so if you want to just try that you can but for now I'm going to click on a form here and we'll be able to show you how to set that up and then put it on your website from here you can choose the form style on the left you can see that there is a form that you can embed within a post for example or within a page that is in-line with the actual text there and you can add a few more things like a headline and a sub headline that will incentivize people to subscribe here in the middle you have a little bit more options in terms of customizing the text and images around your subscription button here and then finally you just have this plain and simple name and email address subscription line with no texts around it that you can choose as well so for now I'm just gonna choose this first one and we'll show you how to set that up here you're gonna see a preview of the form but it's also editable so I can change the headline to get your free gift for example I can change the subtext to something else if I'd like I could even change this text down here and even what it says within the box best email address sometimes works out really well even what's in this subscription button get it now so once you do this you want to click Save whatever it is that you end up changing you can also change the colors here as well so let's let's say I have a more of a red color instead that I want to highlight for the border there and then I'm going to click Save to make sure that that is saved now before I embed this on a website and you can always end up changing these options later I do want to mess with the settings a little bit and what I mean by that is by clicking on settings I can change the forum name which is going to be really really helpful for organizational purposes later on so I'm just gonna make this the primary offer on let's say about page for example you can get very specific with this if you'd like and then for now we're just gonna keep it as a form on the website instead of a full landing page again like I said you can change any of these settings that you previously set up later on I'm also going to click on style here to show you that you can always change the style you can go back to the full form style which includes the images and a little bit more room for text or you can go to the naked one that which is just the name and the email and the subscription button you can even have it become a modal window which means people click on a button or a link to then have the form pop-up or you can have it slide in but for now we're just going to keep it as an inline there's some some other options here as well you can delete or archive it if you want you can duplicate the form if you have the same form but you want it on different pages you can integrate it with other fancy more advanced tools which we'll talk about later but for now I'm just going to click on save form to make sure we have that it should change the title as you can see here primary offer on about page now what I'm going to do is show you what this looks like on the dashboard of convertkit really quick I'm going to click back on forms here and you're gonna see that form show up you're also going to see the timeline of your subscribers here which will change over time this is where you'll be able to start to get into the analytics and you can create as many forms as you'd like there's an unlimited amount that you can create in here not convertkit if you want to do that again just go through the same process as we did before now I want to go back and edit or actually select one more thing here in this form so I'm going to click on that and you'll see the form there I'm gonna click on settings one more time and I'm gonna go to embed because now we're gonna take this code and place it on our website so that we can see this form and then get our first subscribers so you can do this in a couple of ways you can do it using the JavaScript code which you can then copy down here and then put on your website you can get the raw HTML which the more advanced people like because they want to change a few things and style it up a little bit more those are for people who are a little bit more technical and then finally if you have a wordpress website convertkit has a wordpress plugin which makes this even easier for you so that within your page or your post you can just simply place a shortcode and that's all you need to do after that WordPress plug-in is installed for now I'm just going to click collect the JavaScript code and hit command C here on my Mac so I can copy it and put it on a website and I'll show you what that looks like in just a moment okay so here we are at green exam Academy comm which is the very first business that I ever created back in 2008 still alive today still generating an income and I'm here on the about page noticed that I didn't have a signup form and even though the website is different and it's a different different account I just wanted to use this as an example because a lot of my other sites are very customized where it would actually change the look a little bit but I wanted to show you just how easy this was so here's the edit page section in WordPress with whatever editor you end up using even if it's wordpress or not where you insert text there should be a place where you can then switch it over to HTML meaning the code that then generates that text and shapes it in the way that it looks online and in WordPress all you do is when you're editing a page or post you click on the text tab here and now you can see codes like different websites and links and whatnot so at the bottom I'm just gonna simply paste the JavaScript just like that and I'm going to hit update and then I'm going to go back to my about page here and refresh it for you to show you and as you can see here it is there on the website very easy to do if I wanted to change its change its position I can highlight this and cut that and then maybe I'll put it after this paragraph here and then I'll hit update and then I'm going to refresh on this page and you should see it move up the page like that so this is a great way to get in front of your audience when they're on your website so that they can then be incentivized to leave their email address which will then be collected and convertkit we'll get into how you can look at even more information about your subscribers where they're at what they're doing in later videos so that's how easy it is to do now one more thing I want to show you is you can also embed this particular form into the sidebar using a widget on your page especially if you're using WordPress this is quite easy so I'm going to go back to here to edit page I'm going to go to appearance and click on widgets I'm going to open up the right sidebar here and I'm gonna find the text where we can add arbitrary text or HTML I'm just gonna drag and drop that in there open that up in the content section I'm going to paste that same exact script and save now when I come back to this page that should insert itself down here it should resize in a proper way may look a little funky sometimes you have to tweak it a little bit however this is really cool because then it should be live on every single page where that sidebar shows up so I'm gonna hit refresh and see what happens there it is I it kind of laid itself out perfectly for me there well that's great so that's how you can put it on every page on your website let's go to just another page to see what happens so this is a page that I set up for people who are brand new and yep it's right there too so people should see it all the time now before we finish up I have one more thing I want to do and that is actually subscribe to this email list and show you what that's like so what we're gonna do is actually type in my smart passive income email address now and hit get it now now there is no free gift yet or anything like that you will see in the next video what kinds of incentives you could give to your subscribers in exchange for their email address and that's going to be what neck the next video is about there's a number of different things you can do not not all of them are very difficult so we'll get into that in video number two but for now you can see I just subscribed it says success now check your email to confirm your subscription and what that means is that Pat at smartpassiveincome.com is going to get an email that says hey are you an actual human being click here to confirm and then you will be into the bit you'll be subscribed to the list now you can have it so that people don't have to have that email and click through it in order to subscribe but I would highly recommend doing that that's called your double opt-in and when you go here to the main settings of your form you will see that actually not it's not there it's incentive email you can click to turn this off and remove that double opt-in email for new subscribers that is actually not a good idea yes it's an additional step but this way you know that people on the other end are human beings who subscribe because they will have to click through to say yes I am a human I want the emails and the more you can actually make sure that the person who's subscribing is a human the better that's going to make sure that you have quality email us it's not just about the quantity it's about the quality it's also going to help make sure that robots aren't signing up to your list just to get those free incentives that you're gonna offer which like I said we'll talk about in the next video so at least when you're starting out always click yes to this click click that on and then you'll see what this email looks like this is actually where you can craft this email and you know update this text if you'd like later on in the next video I'll show you how to include your incentive here and all those really important things so that's gonna be really cool but yeah let's see what happens so I am going to go to subscribers and there are no subscribers yet well that's because smartpassiveincome.com has yet to subscribe so let's go into my email right now and then click on that link okay here's that email that came through it actually is from Pat Flynn and you can see that there's this button here and also pay attention that address is there as well and there's always every single time a way for people to unsubscribe there's no way to get rid of that and again that's cuz of the law now I'm gonna click confirm your subscription and it should take me to a generic page a generic Thank You page you can customize your own Thank You page that people can land on after they click to subscribe which is a great way to continue that conversation but for now just starting out keep it simple you have your subscription confirm confirmation here now what I'm gonna do is go back to convertkit and I'm gonna refresh my subscribers page and it should show my email address there and that also dates the time of this tutorial by the way but I promise you I will continue to keep this updated and I can actually click on the subscriber and get information about this person so the email address and the first name if you're collecting it if you do want to collect first name you would have to change the form to one that actually includes the the name on it it can actually show me which form they subscribed on so I can see that Pat subscribed on the about page on this date and it is an active email meaning it's somebody who had clicked that confirm your subscription button I can also see a history of the activity that this particular email address has had in the past so there's only one email that was sent out and it shows that it was that confirmation email as you saw however every time I send a sequence or an autoresponder email which I'll get into in video number four for you every time I send a broadcast which will talk about how to craft and create the perfect offers in video number five you will be able to see whether or not people have opened them whether or not people have clicked the links in them it's a really powerful tool and then finally you'll see here on the right hand side tags we'll get into tagging and some more advanced segmentation items in video number six in this tutorial which will allow you to even categorize your email address to create different groups and hierarchies that all that will allow you to better serve your audience too so until then just congratulations on getting this far thank you so much for watching this video if you want to get involved with convertkit and try them out again i'm an advisor i just want to disclose that for the company you can go to through my affiliate link which is smartpassiveincome.com slash c k again smartpassiveincome.com ck and if you happen to be watching this on youtube and you want to get access to all the other videos in a very convenient place where there's some additional information for for you to help you crush it with your emails head on over to start an email list calm that will redirect you to my site and all the videos and this complete tutorial which is again free I'm not even asking you for an email to sign up for it I suspect that if I give you enough value through this tutorial you'll want to subscribe to get more stuff for me from me so that's my goal here so tell me what you liked about this video and I look forward to seeing you there at start and email list com congratulations once again and I'll see you in video number 2 hey thanks again for watching this video if you want to move on to tutorial number 2 which is all about how to create lead magnets you know little incentives to help get even more subscribers you can click on the video over here and if you're interested in seeing the tutorial page on my website which has all these videos laid out more information even some giveaways that you can get you can click over here video video 1 it was lots of fun and now it's time for you to go to video 2