What would you do if social media disappeared tomorrow? Is this your main source of marketing and reaching new customers? Do you have another way you could connect with your customers without social media?

I don’t imagine social media will be disappearing in the foreseeable future, but diversifying your marketing strategy and finding other ways to reach your audience other than social media is super important.

I spoke about Email Marketing as an effective marketing strategy in last month’s blog, but now I wanted to give you some practical tools on how to actually build an email marketing list so you can start taking advantage of this strategy. Because sending a monthly email to a list of 10 of your super supportive family and friends is nice, but not very exciting for your business, right?

So what can you do to grow your email list from your social media?

Create a FREEBIE!

I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m not giving my email away so my inbox can be filled with a heap of ‘junk’ mail. But… I would be likely to give away my email if it meant I got something in return that I need or would benefit from… see where I’m going with this?

Think about your ideal client; what problems do they have? What can you help them with? What’s something of value, that would be worth giving their email away for?

Now I’ve got you thinking… you’re probably wondering what can you give away? Well, this is totally dependent on your audience, your industry, what you think your target market would benefit from and what you have to offer.

Here are a few little ideas to get you going!

If you’re in a service-based industry:

• An ebook with your top ten tips on ‘X’
• A video series on how to get ‘X’
• A workbook to achieve ‘X’

If you’re a product-based industry:

• A discount code for your online store
• First to know about new products and exclusive offers
• A special ‘members’ lifetime discount
• A free ‘something’ next time they visit you

When you’re trying to decide what to give away as your freebie, put yourself in your customer’s shoes and ask yourself, what resources or special deals are your ideal customers looking for? Then ask yourself, what am I trying to sell? What value do I have to offer potential clients?

Once you’ve nailed those couple of questions I bet you’ll be getting close to knowing what a good freebie will be!

Want to know the best part? You can automate it all! With a program like MailChimp, which is what we use for our email marketing and our clients, manage your mailing list, create email marketing campaigns and design easy landing pages for your leads to add their name and email. Once they’ve filled in the form, they will be added to your mailing list and can automatically download your freebie or will receive an ongoing email series in relation to your freebie, depending on how you set it up.

How amazing would it be to have a lead magnet/marketing tool running autonomously for you in the background? All you need to do is send people to the landing page and the rest of the work is done for you! Giving you another little ‘call to action’ to add to the end of your social media captions, or the perfect tool for your next Facebook Ad!

I’m going to leave it there because I could talk about email marketing all day, but I don’t want to lose you, and you’re probably keen to go take some action, yeah?

So what do you need to do from here?

1. Decide on your freebie and create it
2. Setup your landing page/email management system
3. Start using the freebie to direct potential customers to your landing page
4. Use your growing mailing list to market your business! Not sure how to do that? Our blog on Effective Email Marketing Strategies will help.

AND/OR join our Facebook Group – Tasmanian Online Marketing Support where we are providing Tasmanian businesses support and training in all areas of online marketing. We discuss Social Media, Facebook & Instagram Ads, Google Ads, Blogging, Email Marketing, Websites, and more!

Of course, if you need any support with setting up an email management system, if you need help designing a freebie, you have your freebie but not sure how to run a Facebook Ad to promote it, all you just want the whole lot taken care of, get in touch with us because we love this stuff (actually, we do it for a living) and we love talking to new businesses about their marketing ideas and helping them bring it all to life.

You can book a complimentary marketing chat with my whiz-bang Marketing Manager, Sam. She takes care of not only all our clients marketing here at The Island Creative, but she also does the majority of the marketing for our business too, so I can tell you she knows her stuff and you’ll love her ideas!