When building a new service offering for your business, the best way is to focus on building an growing your business by capturing your ideal customers on an email list. The challenge is how to do that from zero when you’re just starting out.

Quality over Quantity

There’s lots of advice around about building an email list. A lot of advice focuses on the quantity of email subscribers as the holy grail – on the basis that a percentage of them will buy your services. But focusing on collecting hundreds or thousands of email subscribers is a worthless exercise if they aren’t ideal customers for your business. You’re wasting your time and money and burning yourself out in the process when email list doesn’t give you the returns you’ve put a huge amount of effort into nurturing.

Focusing on a strategy that attracts your ideal customer should be the goal. What you want are ideal customers who are looking to solve a pain point that you know how to solve. To do that you need a plan to showcase your expertise, gather interest from the right target market, and turn subscribers into paying customers while maintaining low unsubscribe rates (the sign of ideal customer subscribers). Whew!

Let’s dive into a simple tactical plan to grow your email list from zero in [number of days set by your schedule].

The Problem Lead Magnet Trap

When growing an email list many beginners fall into the broad, generic lead magnet trap that doesn’t attract their target audience. Topics like, for example, ‘10 Steps to Achieve Success’ or ‘The Ultimate Guide to Achieving More‘ are way too broad and generic. Success in what? What is ‘more’?

There are two problems with the broad/generic approach:

1. It attracts low-value subscribers looking for quick fixes not necessarily in your niche (ergo high unsubscribe rates).

2. It doesn’t help your target audience (high-vaue) subscribers looking for specific, actionable solutions (ergo misses your target market).

High-value subscribers want a specific solution to a specific problem pain-point. They want something they can consume now, put into action instantly, and see positive results short-term. And when they see positive actionable results from your lead magnet, they naturally want more from you and your work. For example, in both our examples about a niche approach could be narrowed down to, for example, ’10 ways to achieve success toning your thighs at home’ or ‘the ultimate guide to toning triceps without expensive gym equipment’ . See the difference? The broad or generic gets homed in on a specific topic.

A Simple Strategy That Works

The problem you’re trying to solve is the how to build an email subscriber list from zero in a short space of time.

So, the answer is to home in on pinpointing a specific pain point, something you can fix, fast. The more specific and niche you go, the better. PDF downloads are great lead magnets if they are super-specific ‘How to achieve [topic] in 7 days’, but free template downloads are an even better and super-effective way to attract ideal customers. Why? Because they’re instantly actionable, focused, and designed to solve an immediate problem for your target audience.

So, to solve the problem as it relates to your particular business, create a free, simple, downloadable template that helps people [insert the problem here].

That’s it. Nothing fancy. Specific. Focused. And designed to solve a specific painful problem your ideal customer is struggling with right now.

So how do freebies increase your email list? Good question. The answer is that your plan isn’t about the lead magnet itself, it’s about how you distribute your lead magnet, how you position yourself to match your target audience’s specific need at the right time, solve their problem, and establish yourself as the industry expert who can help them with their problem. They subscribe, and if they’re your target audience then they’ll stay subscribed, and hopefully turn into buyers.

Your Simple Action Plan

1.  Find social media platforms where your target audience discusses a problem you can help people solve. Reddit is great for this as uses are more anonymous and open in discussing their problems or questions than on other platforms. Linkedin, X, Instagram, Facebook, Tik Tok etc are also good depending on where your target audience hangs out. A word of caution, be mindful not to exhaust yourself trying to cover all of them because you probably won’t. Focus on 2 at a time over 3 months and see what response you get.

2. Look at the comments to understand specific problems and pain-points people are talking about right now.

3. Create your simple, problem-solving template or PDF (niche, niche, niche!). Be sure to add your branding and contact details to it.

4. Respond to posts about the problem with short comments offering valuable insights (focus on active posts, not old ones).

5. At the end of your post add ‘I built a free template for this — DM me for the link’ or ‘I wrote a 5-step guide to help solve this problem – DM me for the link‘ to each of your comments.

6. Make it easy for people to get your lead magnet without them feeling like they are being sold to or lied to about what your intentions are. Remember the goal is to grow your email list, not sell off the bat. Aim to build trust without using any complicated sales funnels or upsells. A one-page simple google sites landing page is ideal for this.

The beauty of this approach? No hard sell tactics. No complex expensive sales funnels. Just valuable information matched with a relevant free offer to people who are talking about a problem right now that you can help them solve: your target audience. And you get to grow your email list with your target audience. BOOM!

Remember: When it comes to collecting email addresses using a lead magnet, niche beats broad or generic every time. Aim to build trust and keep subscribers.