5 Ways to Build Your Email List with YouTube | Ep. 3

Ignoring the building of your email list when you're just getting started on YouTube or you're just starting your content creation business is one of the worst things that you can do if you want to build a sustainable long term business. So how can you build your audience and your email list with YouTube?

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Transcript

Meredith  0:00  
ignoring the building of your email list when you're just getting started on YouTube, or you're just starting your content creation business is one of the worst things that you can do if you want to build a sustainable, long term business. So how can you build your audience and your email list with YouTube? Let's talk about it here in episode three of the video brand infusion podcast. My name is Meredith Marsh, and this podcast is your resource to infuse the best video marketing strategies into your business for consistent sales of your course or program without ads, or constant selling, or running time consuming five day challenges. Anyone done a five day challenge? Oh my gosh, they are so much fun. But there's so time consuming, you know, they're time consuming to put together and then they're time consuming to run. Anyway, I started list building, within a couple of months of starting my channel, because I thought I knew what I was doing enough to know that building an email list is a critical component of a sustainable online business. You know, it's funny, looking back to 2015, there's so much that I didn't know about what I was doing. But I knew enough to start an email list. And I'm so glad that I did. Because it's honestly easier to get started. When you're just starting, it's easier to get started where you're at now, then, in the future, when you have an even bigger, bigger audience. So your your list can grow with your audience. So because I started my email list from pretty much the beginning and allowed me to have direct ish direct ish access to my audience to pull them or send surveys, asked for feedback on video topic ideas asked like, what are you struggling with right now, which helps me come up with video topic ideas that were actually helpful and useful to my actual audience. Or if I had a video idea that I really wanted to get out to as many people as possible, I can email that to my list and say, Hey, new video, go watch it, you know, blah, blah, blah. I mean, we, we do more than that in our emails now. But you get the idea. But it became sort of almost kind of addictive in a way this, this kind of having people actually respond to emails, like, yes, you publish a video, you might get comments, you publish a, I don't know, a tweet a tick tock reel, or whatever, you might get comments. But you know that when you get it a reply in email that I don't know, it just is a little bit more. It's like, it's a little bit more personal or something. And so I remember when I first started my list, and I had like, 10 people 10 or 12 people on my list. And I remember sending, I would send an email every time I published a video, we'll talk more about that in a minute. But I would send an email every time I published a video and one time, somebody responded back, and they really great video things blah, blah, blah. And they had a question about something. And I was like, oh, oh, people are actually getting these emails and opening them and reading them. And hitting reply. I was like, Oh my gosh. So I was like blown away by by that that sort of became kind of addictive. To me that connection. That conversation, the idea that I had created enough value for somebody even just had a such a tiny little audience. And I really didn't really know what I was doing. But I had created enough value that they hit reply in their email. And that kind of became addictive to me. So if you have been putting off growing your list, or you're like, oh, that's something I'll do down the road, when my audience is bigger when I have more time when I have more time. Come on. Really, when my audience is bigger when I have more time when I have less things on my to do list. Yeah, right. At some point in the future, I will start my email list. But I think when your audience is small, it's actually the most beneficial to put the time into just setting up an email list and start growing your list. So I want to share five really easy ways actually easy ways to get people to join your email list with your YouTube channel. And the second one is probably the easiest no brainer like you can all do this. No excuses. And the fifth one will actually lead to sales of your course or program. So let's get into this. Number one is the thing that everybody does that everyone's been doing since the beginning of time since the beginning of email marketing time, I guess and And that is to create some kind of a freebie, also known as a lead magnet, some kind of a PDF, ebook guide, checklist cheat sheet, something like that some kind of a tool or a resource that you create, you give it away for free in exchange for an email address, I gotta tell you, I have created a lot of cheat sheets over the years on my channel. And people love cheat sheets, people love cheat sheets, and I create them. And I'm just like, I'm just putting the info. There's like boiling down information into a one page PDF, and making it look halfway decent. And giving it to people for free. In my mind, I'm like, This is not that valuable, but people love it. They love a cheat sheet. And it's one of the easiest things for you to create, honestly. So in my crush on camera series, here on my channel, I have had about 400 500 ish people join my email list from the freebie from the was it a cheat sheet or a guide from that guide that I created. And the guide goes along with the videos. So every video in this series, I can like refer back to like, go download the guide, right, and it's got all everything in there. But I had like four or 500 people join my list and around the eight of those people actually ended up buying my program, even though the series is not really directly part of my YouTube funnel. But it's a just a guide of like you're watching a YouTube video, if you want to have something tangible in your hand that you can print out or a PDF that goes along with what is being said in the YouTube videos. People love that they love it, it's a great way to grow your list. And you don't necessarily have to create a new one for every video. I feel like this was sort of a this was a strategy or tactic from a while ago, like years and years ago, when I was a baby YouTube creator, it was pretty common to create a like a content upgrade, where every single piece of free content you created every podcast episode, every YouTube video, whatever, you would have like a guide, a written guide that went along with it, people put in their email address, they can download it. To me that sounds like a lot of work. It sounds like a lot lot lot of work. But I think it probably does work to grow your list. It's just like, I don't know, I don't know that I would have the time to adopt that tactic. But if that's something you do, let me know, in the comments, or shoot me a message or something because I'd be curious how that's working for you. So number two, this is probably the easiest thing. If you're like, yeah, yeah, Meredith, I get it. I get that I should have an email list and everything. And I Yes, I can set it up and all that stuff. But I don't have time to email my list. I do not have time to write emails, I don't want to write emails. I don't want to do email marketing. This is the easiest thing you could do. This is an absolute no brainer thing for you to do. Just tell your audience Hey, if you want me to email you, anytime I publish a new video, if you want to be the first to see it, the first to hear about it, then join my list. Is that going to get a whole bunch of people flooded to your email list? Probably not. But it is going to get your most engaged viewers on your list the people who really do want to get your videos as soon as they're published, so that they don't get lost in the algorithm or like something like that, right? At the very least, you can email your

Meredith  8:54  
list when you publish a video and say, Hey, here's my new video. Here's a couple reasons why I think you should watch it. Here's a link and you're on your way, it's if you can create a video and upload a video, you can send an email to your list, letting them know that you have a new video, I'll put an example on the screen of what my emails look like. But we're talking about an email subject line, which might just be the same as the title of your video, we're talking about a little bit of a blurb, which might just be the same as what's in your YouTube description, and then a link to the video and I use ConvertKit I love ConvertKit for email marketing and they have a free account. If you're just getting started, I think for the first 500 to 1000 email subscribers. I think it's free. I'll I'll put my link down in the description so you can check that out for yourself. But I use ConvertKit. So if I take my YouTube video link, take the URL and plop it into the email it it auto populates the thumbnail. And it's clickable, it's not going to play inside of the email, but it's clickable and and clicks through to that video. And this works it, it works. I send out emails like to older content like evergreen content that's still useful. I will every once in a while I'll if you're on my list, you'd see what I send out emails to older content. And I always get an uptick in views on older content. When I send out those emails, it works, it really does work. It also helps then to build your channel. So this is why I say like, if, especially if your channel is small, especially if you're just getting started. If you're struggling to get views, when you upload your videos. And you have your most engaged audience, on your email list, get the people from the email list to the videos. Now there is a caveat to this. So I don't want you to just immediately publish a video and then send out an email. There's a caveat to this. And it applies to everyone, whether you have a small channel or a big channel, and I will get to that in just a second. But number three is an email newsletter. Especially if you have a newsworthy in niche like AI, for example, if you want to be like the go to person of anything new happening, I newsletter might be something that you want to look into. And I'll be honest with you, I posted on threads the other day, I hardly ever use threads. I just opened it up. And I was like, It's funny how email newsletters have become a new trend. Because it's not a new trend, like email newsletters used to be the thing that businesses would do, like, you know, like your local chiropractor would like send out an email newsletter and and then it became the dominant messaging around email marketing was like, Don't send newsletters people don't want newsletters, just write an email, have one link just send people to one place. And like that became the the dominant sort of strategy for email marketing. And now all of a sudden, it's like, oh, yeah, email newsletters are where it's at, you got to have an email newsletter. And there's a couple of newsletters that I subscribe to that I do actually open. I do actually open and read it because I know that there's multiple stuff in there. And not I just it's just funny to me how the evolution, right the evolution of everything, we send out an email newsletter to thriving creators, society members, that's my membership. So it's not like I would not call it a paid newsletter. But it only goes to my paying, you know, active members of thriving creators society. But other than that, I just send out regular emails, they're they're definitely not classified as newsletters. Now, number four, I don't do this one either. But if this might work for you, if you have an active Facebook group, or community discord slack circle, if you have a community that's off of YouTube, that you're trying to grow, instead of just sending people Oh, go join the discord, go join the Facebook group, ask for an email address in order to get link. Now they're on your email list, and they're in your community. Now this last way to build your list is I think, the most genius way to build your list, because it actually leads your leads to a sale, not everyone only if it's right for the person, but it actually leads to your course or program or offer, or whatever it is, instead of just getting people to your list. First, let's talk about what when do you actually email your list because I mentioned, you don't just want to send an email as soon as you hit publish on a video. And the reason for that is because we as YouTube creators, we want the YouTube algorithm to do the YouTube algorithm things. We want it to recognize who's watching this video, like as soon as we hit publish, who are the viewers? What is the behavior of those viewers? What are some other viewers that are kind of like them that might like to watch this video. And we want the algorithm to be able to like have laser vision on its own data, if that makes sense. So when you send your link when you send your video link out to your email list, or even to Facebook or Twitter or something, now you have this influx of other or viewers that the algorithm is like, Oh, where did these people come from? Are they even logged into YouTube? Or is it just a random viewer? Is this person even subscribed to this channel? Or is it just a random viewer. So if you think about it, your most engaged subscribers on your channel, maybe they have the bell notification turned on, your video is going to go out to your most likely people to watch it. That's how the algorithm works, they're going to see it, they're going to watch it. And for the for, like the next tier of engaged people who are on your list. They're gonna be like, Oh, cool. Maybe they didn't open up YouTube yet. Maybe they only know about your videos through email, they're gonna see it and be like, Oh, cool. Here's a video for me to watch. So it's not like you have to send an email to your list to get those viewers you know what I mean, you want YouTube to know who your audience is, as soon as you hit publish, and then, you know, five minutes later, an hour later, two hours later, five years later, you want YouTube to have that data, that information. So when do you send the email, my general advice on this for a new channel is to wait three days, which might be hard, you hit publish, you won't be able to see it, you want to send it to your audience. But I think in general, with a smaller channel, I think it's more beneficial for you for the longevity of your channel for the algorithm to do its thing for the first couple of days. And then if you have an email list, and you want to send people to that video, then go ahead and do that. Hopefully, in an ideal world, the people on your email list are logged into YouTube, and they hit that link, and they go to YouTube. And YouTube is now tracking their viewer behavior, which helps YouTube know more about your audience, which then helps YouTube get your videos in front of more people like them. That's what happens in an ideal situation. But you don't want to put yourself in a situation where you only get views when you're emailing your list. If that's the case, then the the algorithm just doesn't know. It's like I don't I don't know who to put this in front of, I guess we'll just wait for her to email her list. It's not like the algorithm is a person deciding those things, you know what I mean? But if that's the case for you, I would say, give the algorithm a little bit more time to understand who your audience is. And don't just continuously feed viewers from your email list. Because then the algorithms not doing the algorithm things for you. Right? And then it's like, you're, you're missing out on some of the power of the YouTube algorithm. How many times have I said algorithm so far, you're missing out on the power of YouTube, if the algorithm isn't working for you, you know what I mean? For me lately, what I have been doing is sending an email, the day after a video is published, or a couple of days after it just that just kind of depends on

Meredith  18:09  
how quickly the video gets turned into an email usually, but it's like one day one to three days ish or so. But it's never the same day. Unless it's like some special situation where I publish a video that I need to get eyeballs on it real quick, for some reason. In that case, yeah, I will send an email that the same time that I publish it, but the algorithm like the longevity of the algorithm is so much more powerful than my eeny weeny, teeny tiny email list compared to the two you know two and a half billion people on YouTube. It's Eeny meeny. So let's talk about the one type of way to get people on your email list that actually converts to sales that actually gets people to your course it's called a secret video strategy. Because it's a video that's not available on your channel, your audience, your ideal customers have to opt in they have to give you their email address in order to watch the secret video. This is a critical component of the YouTube funnel system because your secret video gives people a reason to want to be on your email list. This is one of the reasons why building a set it and forget it YouTube funnel is the simplest way to generate consistent sales of your online offer. So if you want to hear more about the secret video strategy in episode number one of this podcast I broke down exactly how my YouTube funnel system operates, what it looks like how the secret video strategy fits into it, and how to create it for you on your channel so that it works for your business and you can generate your course sales on autopilot consistently with the simplicity of organic evergreen traffic from YouTube so you can Take a bite of complicated launches, and you know, maybe even five day challenges and just focus on creating connection and community with your audience and your clients and your customers. So you can dive into Episode Number one, you can follow me here, because in our very next episode, we're going to talk about what to post on your channel for free when you have a course that people pay for. And I'll see you there. If you like this episode, come on over to YouTube to follow me there. So you can watch these episodes for an even more dynamic experience with you know, like facial expressions and stuff. Just search my name Meredith Marsh on YouTube to find my channel or head to the show notes for this episode, and you'll get a direct link. Also, in the show notes, you'll find a direct link to episode number one where I lay out my entire YouTube Funnel System, which to be honest, is better on video if I do say so myself. Either way. I'm glad you're here. I hope you stick around and I'll see you soon.