Avoid this crucial mistake in your online marketing strategy
Leslie Means, founder of Her View From Home, reveals one thing she would have done differently.
What happens when a TV news anchor moves from in front of the camera to behind the computer?
You get Her View From Home, a thriving online community of women and writers writing and reading heartfelt stories about life, work, friendships, and motherhood.
Partnering with Control Yours since its inception, Leslie Means started Her View From Home in 2012 to provide a platform for women to tell their stories and feel connected to others. She’s been incredibly successful, utilizing Facebook and nearly 1000 community writers to grow the site’s audience to over 600,000 Facebook followers and 3 million site views per month.
The Critical Mistake
Despite the site’s enviable following, she recently realized one critical mistake she had made: she hadn’t been building an email list.
Leslie explained, “Facebook has been perfect for us, but when the platform was down for two full days this year, I knew I couldn’t continue relying on it as the main way to connect with our readers. I needed to start building an email list so I don’t always have to count on Facebook as we grow.”
To most, her MailChimp email list size of 24,792 is beyond a wild fancy, however, it was only about 4% of her actual readership. When she talked with David, owner of Control Yours, about how to fix the problem, he knew exactly what to do.
Making Changes
“I get really excited about growing email lists and I’m 100% sold on ActiveCampaign as the way to do it. With ActiveCampaign, one can set up beautifully automated email funnels while at the same time provide valuable customer information with their powerful customer relationship manager (CRM). It can seamlessly build, track, and update customer records based on their activity on a website,” explained David.
At the heart of growing email lists, is a marketing format called a “funnel”. Email funnels basically work as a way to develop a relationship with an email subscriber. A visitor opts-in to a website and its content by giving their email address (oftentimes in exchange for some free, high-quality content called a “lead magnet”, which the image below calls a “squeeze page”), and then they receive constant, excellent content in their inbox from the website.
Image credit: Sixfigureideas.com
The Power of List Segmentation
For a website the size of Her View From Home which has several categories of content with readers who visit specific categories (the website houses thousands of articles), she wanted to create email automations and sales funnels that matched up with her readers’ interests. For example, she didn’t want moms of toddlers having to think about those sweet cheeks turning into teenagers every time they opened their email.
So Control Yours was able to do some unique coding with cookies that tracked visitors on Her View From Home to understand what visitors were reading. The cookies provided anonymous information until a visitor signed up for a lead magnet or newsletter and then it automatically correlated their information into a specific contact record in ActiveCampaign. At that point, the automation would kick in and send them a follow-up welcome email and enter them into the weekly newsletter email sequence.
Furthermore, ActiveCampaign can segment the main email lists according to customers’ actions, interests, locations, and much more, enabling Leslie to send customized emails to her subscribers based on the categories they’re interested in.
Leslie expanded, “Our email subscribers are our best readers. They’re active and engaged and I wanted to provide them with the best possible content based on the articles they had clicked on. ActiveCampaign lets me give them what they want in addition to providing me with valuable information to keep improving what we have.”
Seeing the results
Since the email funnels launched two months ago, Leslie’s list has increased by 5,000 subscribers. Her email open rate is 20% and her click-through rate to the website is 3.2%.
By the end of the year, her goal is to reach 50,000 subscribers. To do so, she’s planning on building specific entry points and funnels for each of her content categories with lead magnets for each. That means soon she will be working on an e-book on marriage and brainstorming the best content for her other popular categories.
With all of her success, Leslie’s biggest advice to other small businesses was to choose wisely what to invest in. She explained, “Everything costs money or time, and for us, it was definitely worth it to invest our money into having Control Yours as our base.” She continued, “Her View From Home is in a new growth stage and I honestly couldn’t move forward if I didn’t have David and the Control Yours team taking care of the email campaigns so I can focus on other important things.”
How’s your email list?
While you may not have a following the size of Leslie’s, it is never too early to capture email addresses of your devoted followers and clients. We’d love to get you set up on ActiveCampaign so you can start building out your email list strategy and creating a community of people who love what you do.
Click here to set up a time for a discovery call.
