The email list

Trying to build an email list is like the hottest topic amongst internet marketers this 2020.

There is nothing easy about it. I’ve been on it for two months and it seems to get nowhere. This is almost frustrating…and before you ask, I’ve engaged the usual suspects — a lead magnet usually with a free valuable material which people can download only after they drop their email, cheap but valuable materials like pdf or some other very relevant stuff, promoting my lead magnet…

Maybe people don’t find my ‘valuables’ attractive enough or they simply are playing hide and seek with their emails.

Anyway, today I got a grand total of 1 new email. So here’s what I did — instead of giving away valuables just because they are, I decided to tie my valuables to something people really want — travel to Canada.

So I packaged this nice e-book containing the top most requested jobs for Canadian immigrants. You see, a lot of Nigerians want to relocate to Canada, so this material was designed to appeal to this set of persons…and I ran a promotion onFacebook setting my ad budget to the minimum: just below 500 Naira per day, it is supposed to get me between 12 to 15 clicks daily. My goal here is to spread my thin budget as long as possible and maximize it’s reach.

By the end of the day, around 20 clicks came through and only one person dropped his email! Prepare for this — the person is in Mauritius.

Nigerians, even though want to relocate to Canada, have refused to drop their emails. But the battle is to continue tweaking my strategy until it starts raking in users’ emails like raindrops.

From freebies to cheap lead magnets to entirely free lead magnets to ads to tying the leads to a specific problem, I’m getting better at it.

One more thing, when the ad first started running, Facebook pegged the conversion rate at 20 Naira per lead, now it has reduced to 18 Naira. I guess Facebook’s algorithm learns about my audience over time and adjusts to serve my ads to people who have converted- so the longer my ad runs, the better the conversion rate gets and the lower the cost gets.

For now, my major goal is to build an email list of 1k subscribers. I am light years behind that goal but yes, I have 5 months.

Let’s keep building.

Edit: (18th Nov 2020). I published a follow up story where I pushed the thought that list building has gone beyond email.. Find it here.