Want To Grow An Email List? Answer This One Question

Here’s a sentence that should surprise no one: You still need to grow your email list.

In the attention-based economy of the internet, few assets are more valuable than an engaged email reader. After all, 99% of people in the United States check their email every day. More than 50% check their personal email more than 10 times per day.

I’ve been building email lists for half a decade now, for public figures and service-oriented clients alike. These strategies have a pretty direct ROI—in building New York Times bestseller Rachel Simmons’ email list, for example, we were able to generate over $80,000 in online course revenue in less than 12 months. For my B2B clients like the explainer video company Digital Brew, the pipeline is longer but the results are just as attractive: One qualified lead often results in a five-figure contract with the agency.

So, the question then becomes, how do I get more people to sign up for my list? For most smart web users, the answer is easy enough to find: Give something away for free.

Freebies are known in the marketing world as lead magnets, and they’re typically a downloadable resource like a PDF. Sometimes they’re more robust, like a webinar or a bundle of materials.

No matter what form your lead magnet takes, it should always be gated, or hidden behind a sign-up form. When a potential customer signs up for your lead magnet, a Thank You page will ask them to check their email and confirm their subscription. Then—and only then—should your email automation send them the free download.

These are the key tenets of a basic email marketing strategy, the first thing you’ll find when you research how to grow your list.

The problem is, the internet is oversaturated with boring content. It feels like every site offers up a free PDF, a top 10 list, or an “Everything You Need To Know” guide as soon as we try to leave the page.

Even worse, these free offers are usually nonsense. They’re jam-packed with fluff, often offering nothing more than a short, lazily-designed synopsis of whatever article we just read.

The most offensive, in my opinion, are the webinars. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve excitedly signed up for a webinar through a Facebook ad only to find I’ve registered for a two-hour sales pitch. There’s no faster way to lose my trust than to offer me a seminar just to read me a listicle with a dozen ads for your program peppered in.

How many free PDFs are sitting in the graveyard of your downloads folder?

Can you think of the last time a lead magnet offered you something you actually need?

I can’t, and I’m over it. That’s why I work with all of my clients to develop empathic and actually useful lead magnets that build trust and speak directly to their Ideal Client.

The best part is, it only takes me one question to figure out what to offer. And because I’m so fed up with the current content mill online, I’m more than happy to share this question with the world.

So before you create your next lead magnet, please ask yourself:

What Do You Wish Every Client Knew Before Working With You?

When you’re considering what to offer for free to grow your list, you have to be thinking of the buyer—the person at the bottom of the funnel. I recommend completing an empathy map, which is a Design Thinking exercise often used in UX design to connect with the people your business is meant to serve.

Once you have an understanding of what your Ideal Client is hearing, feeling, thinking, and seeing, you can begin to locate where the gaps are between where they are now and where you need them to be in order to successfully deliver your product or service.

Typically this is a mindset shift, which I’ll demonstrate below, but it can also be practical—an intermediate skill-based program may want to offer a recap of the basics, for example.

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say I have a client who wants to develop an online course for Gen X professionals and help them transition into a work-from-home career. Her main offer is a six-week group training that will help participants develop an online portfolio and begin applying for remote jobs.

In researching her Ideal Client (who we’ve named “Martha”), we’ve discovered that her major objection to signing up for the program—besides cost, which will always be an objection—is that she doesn’t believe she’s good enough to pull it off.

In a strategy session with this client, I would encourage her to ask herself, What do I wish every student knew before working with me?

In thinking about this prompt, she may come to realize that she wishes every client understood their limitless potential. As we dig deeper, we may realize not many of her people are educated on the remote job market and don’t feel like there’s enough work to go around.

Her Ideal Client is experiencing a limiting belief: It won’t work for me because there isn’t enough work.

So what can we do?

Well, we could whip up a PDF in 15 minutes, repurposing an old blog post of hers (“15 Ways The Remote Economy Is Exploding This Year”) into a free download.

Yawn.

Or we could invest time and energy into adding a page to her site—gated, of course—that gathers remote work opportunities found on job boards across the web. We could market this page as exclusive to members of her community and, over time, could likely even start charging for listings.

We could interview hiring managers at various companies and ask them what they appreciate from remote workers. We could pepper these in throughout the job board page along with testimonials from successful participants of her six-week program or 1:1 coaching.

When her Ideal Client signs up to see the listings, we could immediately send them a Remote Work 101 Guide listing the key traits and resume phrases companies look for when hiring a remote employee.

Over the course of the next few weeks, we could offer this reader information on paying taxes as a contractor and how to set up their at-home workspace for optimal productivity.

Eventually, my client will open the cart to her online course. By the time this happens, her Ideal Client will have developed a deep sense of trust and, more importantly, confidence in their ability to make a major life transition.

Sure, my client hasn’t made any money off of these free offers. Yes, creating them has likely eaten up a good portion of her time.

But by building an actually helpful digital experience for her people, she’s also building good faith, which will pay off tenfold in the long run. As she focuses on becoming an authority in her space, these robust, well-designed offers will only underline her commitment to delivering on her course’s offer.

To understand the impact, you only need to look at your own internet habits. Whose emails do you open? When was the last time you favorited a page? Purchased a digital product? Trusted a public figure online?

Any business, from a Fortune 500 company to a solo entrepreneur, is capable of building something worthwhile online. All it takes is a little empathy and the willingness to show up for your customers before they hand over their hard-earned cash.