How to Build an Email List for Free on Social Media

Why You Need to Think About Your Email List First

Social media isn’t just about followers and engagement, a big social media following doesn’t mean anything if you can’t do anything with what you’ve built.

In this week’s video, I’m going to share how you can use social media to intentionally grow your email newsletter audience. In the beginning, it’s all about setting up the right systems and call-to-actions in everything you do on social media, so that you can consistently and passively grow your audience on an ongoing basis.

I use tons of landing pages in my own business and help my clients create landing pages that either collect email addresses to grow their email list, generate leads to grow their service businesses, or sell products to increase their sales.

Landing pages are the ultimate secret weapon when it comes to succeeding online, but what’s the point of creating all of the amazing content and social media engagement without any clear call to action as the next step for your audiences?

Despite being a sponsor for this video, my review of Leadpages is purely based on my own experience of using them from day 1 in my own business.

I loved how easy it was to launch my landing pages in minutes to get them live across all of my social media channels.

Why You Need to Have a Plan to Leverage Social Media to Grow Your Email List

Without a goal and a consistent plan on social media, it can easily become a time-consuming part of your business without much to show for it. You’ll be on a content treadmill to endless feed all the content you are creating with the limited time that you do have through your social media channels but without any tangible link to your underlying business goals. Instead, you need to have a consistent plan and a clear link between your marketing goals and business goals to leverage social media to grow your business.

Because if anything changes with the social media platforms, let’s say the algorithm shifts (which happens all the time with platforms like Instagram), or let’s say any social media platforms disappear overnight, which also happened recently with platforms such as Instagram and Facebook in the great social media blackout of 2021, when all of these platforms were down for 7 hours, then you’ll be at the mercy of the social media platform instead of making it work for you.

5 Ways that You Can Grow Your Email List with Social Media

So here are 5 ways you can start today to grow your email list and accelerating that growth with social media:

1. Include a clear call to action in your social media profile with an irresistible free offer for your audiences in exchange for their email addresses. Emails are very much the last frontier because ultimately we still all check our emails on a regular basis but we are also becoming much more private with who we share our email addresses with, so the offer that you provide, either in the form of a free download, guide or content needs to be providing a quick win for your audiences so that you can demonstrate the value you can provide from their first interactions with you, i.e. your freebie.
   
2. Add your email sign-up forms to your blog posts or online articles and promote these content pieces through platforms like Pinterest or YouTube, by using a vertical pinnable image, or create the blog content as a video, you can share this on Pinterest or as a video format on YouTube to benefit from the organic searches online.
3. Encourage your existing email subscribers or social media followers to share your free content download with their audiences in exchange for a giveaway or prize. By creating an incentive of a prize that is useful to your audiences, you can encourage earned shares of your email list sign-ups through your community and generate that word-of-mouth effect which is very powerful in accelerating your email list growth.
   
4. Hold regular educational webinars for your audiences on a monthly basis in exchange for their email addresses to be included in the loop on future useful webinars like these. One thing I like to do is create 12 webinar topics that my audiences will find useful and then deliver them each month and share these webinar landing pages on my social media channel to collect sign-ups, and then send out the replays to those who couldn’t attend.
   
5. Using Facebook ads to add fuel to your email list growth. Once you have created a free download or useful content that your audience loves by testing through your organic channels, you can then run this as a Facebook ad to help drive more leads and if the ad is created well, you can achieve costs as little as sometimes $0.80 per email lead in my experience, if done well for the relevant targeted audience.