Tips to Grow Your Email List with Angel-Marie from Convertkit

Have you ever wondered what the top bloggers, eCommerce store owners and affiliates secret weapon is?

It’s usually their ability to
? Drive Trafic
? Drive Sales
? Promote offers

On Demand!

There is an old saying in the online marketing world – ? The money’s in the list ?

This has never been more true or relevant than in 2020.

In this episode I speak with Angel-Marie who is a content creator and educator over at Convertkit.

She is an entrepreneur advocate who enjoys the art of teaching, culture, music, film and creative entities. She loves getting to know different people and their passions, helping them succeed and exploring the beauty in the online world. When Angel is not producing and hosting a webinar for the amazing creators who attend, you can find her traveling, reading a book, singing, watching a movie (and critiquing it!), or developing her own personal blog.

So WTF is Convertkit?
Convertkit is a leading Email marketing & landing page platform for entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners. Their purpose is to make email easier and more robust for professional creators like you.

Who should use Convertkit?

If you have a website, blog, podcast or just about any business – you could benefit from leveraging email marketing to help grow your business, drive repeat custom, or simply to keep people updated about whatever it is you blog about!

With a ? New FREE PLAN (say what!?) ? – it has never been easier to sign up and get started with Convertkit. Switching from other email marketing provider is also super easy so don’t sweat if you are with one of those platforms.

Podcast Talking Points :

– Intro to Angel-Marie and what she does at Convertkit

– Working remote for Convertkit

– Why email marketing is such a powerful tool for business owners & bloggers

– Why Convertkit is the GO-TO Email Marketing tool for entrepreneurs in 2020

– Tips for people looking to grow their email list 

-Making money by promoting convert kit with affiliate marketing

Follow Convertkit and Angel-Marie Online!

https://www.instagram.com/convertkit/

https://www.instagram.com/angelmarieofficial/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/itsangelmarie/

Transcription:

Adam Finan: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the digital nomad cafe podcast. I’m your host Adam Finan. And today’s guest is Angel-Marie, who is a creator and educator over at ConvertKit.com. ConvertKit is a leading email marketing and landing page platform for entrepreneurs, bloggers and business owners. And their purpose is to make email easier and more robust for professional creators like you. 

Hello, Angel. Welcome to the show.

Angel-Marie: Hi, Adam. Thank you so much for having me. Yes. As said, I am the creator educator with ConvertKit and I’m just happy to be here today.

Adam Finan: So creator and educator at ConvertKit. Can you talk a little bit more about what that looks like? I know you do a little bit of webinars and you have a lot of information to help people with their email marketing. So are those the sort of topics where you will be creating content around?

Angel-Marie: Yes. My responsibility is to teach creators, bloggers, freelancers, designers, anybody who has an online business or wants to create an online business from scratch, it is completely my job to be able to show them how to do so. And a lot of those steps and strategies that I teach, I always tie it back to email marketing since that is the service that we provide. And of course, we truly believe in the value that email marketing has on a business which is why we’re just so passionate to teach it.

Adam Finan: I see it every day with regards to the e-commerce who work in Shopify and it definitely is very powerful for e-commerce store owners. But when you speak with any bloggers or influencers or online business owners like coaches and consultants, and even just bloggers, it could be blogging about vegan recipes, it could be blogging about construction tips, whatever it is, having an email list gives you an opportunity to drive direct traffic over to your new content, to your offers. And it’s often been said that money is in the list. It’s about having that list of people who know, like, and trust you and who open and engage with your stuff. And this is where the power of building that list. It also helps because you don’t end up relying on the likes of maybe your SEO is good but maybe Google did this week, they change the algorithm and maybe your traffic drops.

Angel-Marie: Yeah. Exactly. 

Adam Finan: If you have a good list, then you own the list. It’s an asset that you own and you can also use it then to create remarketing data and Facebook so long as you’ve acquired those email addresses legally, as you will do if you’re using something like ConvertKit.

Angel-Marie: Yeah, exactly. And that and that is 100% true in what you said earlier just about the money is in the list. It’s so true. We’ve seen it happen for millions and millions of creators and business owners and online entrepreneurial adventurers who have just taken email marketing seriously, because they know how huge the effects are that it has on their actual business. Google and Instagram and Facebook, they all have their own algorithms going on. And technically, the following that you have on all of those social media channels, you don’t own that, right? Facebook owns that. Instagram owns that. But when it comes to your email list, that’s what’s so amazing about it. It’s because you actually own your email list. Those are your people. It’s incredible.

Adam Finan: That’s it. When you’re working with all these entrepreneurs and business owners, have you seen it be such a powerful tool for business? Have you seen a change in drive revenue and in drive engagement back to their websites and their offerings?

Angel-Marie: Absolutely, absolutely. We actually did a lot of research on that and we came to find that a lot of the creators and online entrepreneurs that we work with, a lot of them saw a huge skyrocket in their overall sales, just because they dove deep into email marketing, and just really took it seriously. And just by calculating that and doing our research, we’ve discovered that when it comes to making income with your online business, it was about like, $7,000 without email versus $40,000, using email, and that’s a huge difference, right? Huge major difference. So this is how we know it works. It has worked for tons of people that we know. And, again, that’s just a huge passion as to why I want to teach it so that people can know the value that it holds and, of course, set themselves and their businesses up for success.

Adam Finan: That’s all brilliant, and I’m 100% on board. But let’s unbox a little bit. When people are starting out, I feel like people can definitely struggle with regards to building your email list. Maybe they don’t know what’s the best way to do it, maybe they’re not very good at technically setting it up and everything else. It can be a little bit overwhelming for somebody who’s new. So when you get somebody who’s a new blogger, or they’ve just set up their website and they know that they need to build this list, with all the different people you’ve trained, what are some of the strategies that people would use typically at the start to build their list? Like, were they paying by traffic and sending it to a landing page? Or would it optimise your website? What tends to be what you see work for people and not to one thousand, you’re just trying to build it up in the get go. What has worked in your experience?

Angel-Marie: There are tons and tons of different strategies that do work. And I would just say it completely depends first off of your audience, what your audience is, where they’re hanging out online, where can you find them, your reach, how far you’re expanding. So every strategy is going to be different for each and every person. I will say that when it comes to starting off, to grow your email list, if you’re in those beginning stages, is to just take advantage of the channels that you currently have. So for example, you mentioned landing pages earlier, Adam, let’s say you create a landing page and that link to that landing page, you could easily put that in your Instagram bio or you could easily Facebook message it to the people that you know. So definitely utilizing the channels that you currently have. And then just finding and discovering new methods of how you can reach more people, such as using Pinterest and using an ad campaign inspired of Pinterest to have Pinterest help you expand your actual reach. There’s so many strategies and a lot of them really do work. I would just say in those beginning stages, testing a lot of those strategies out whatever it is that you’re finding, especially when it comes to the channels that you’re currently using, testing them out and seeing which ones work the best for you. And then once you find the channels and the methods that work the best for you, double down on that so that you can grow your list even more and even faster.

Adam Finan: So, I guess what we’ve touched on there is that ConvertKit isn’t just an email marketing platform, it also provides the ability to build landing pages that are conversion optimized. So you don’t need to worry too much about the tech side of things. Like you’re saying, you can create links and landing pages to send people to, like you’re saying, from your website, or Facebook and it just makes things easy for them, really. Compared to what it used to be where you’re trying to connect the boxes and you’re setting up the PI keys. 

Angel-Marie: Oh, yeah. And all of that coding.

Adam Finan: I know from experience. I’ve been around the block a while so I’ve done all those other methods. And it can be a little bit frustrating. And this is where I think ConvertKit really separates itself from some of the other providers and stands out as a unique and powerful solution, especially for bloggers. I see a lot of bloggers who like to use ConvertKit. And for the automations and if they stand out, logic that can be built in further down the line. We’re not going to go too deep into that stuff today, but that’s what I see. The ability to quickly and easily create landing pages without having to pay for a separate software like LeadPages or Instapage, or Click Funnels or whatever. There are other options that people use for building these landing pages, but specifically, the builder list converter gives you pre-made templates that you can go in and easily customize and makes this easy. So that’s something. I’m passionate about helping people get off the ground quickly without the technical debt. Honestly, 10 or eight years ago, when I really got into this, I think things were a lot more difficult in terms of technical debt and the learning curve that you had to have. But now with the likes of these drag and drop page builders for WordPress, like you have your element or which is the number one page builder in the world, I believe, and that’s what a lot of freelancers and business owners use. And it just made it easy to use templates and made it easy. And it’s the same here now with the email market. So if you want to grow your list, and if you want to create landing pages that convert, it’s all part and built into the email marketing provider in essence.

Angel-Marie: Yeah, exactly. And that’s the beautiful thing about it is that the interface is so user friendly. It’s so easy to simply go in there, create those landing pages, see how well those landing pages are performing. So you can see the conversion rates. And then from there, just double down on what’s working best. And this is all a free tool too when it comes to creating those landing pages inside of ConvertKit. Super easy. You don’t have to be too tech savvy. I know when I first started out when it came to my process and my path in chasing after my own side hustle, I was a bit confused just about email marketing and how do I do this, and how to do that. The online world is so amazing, right? But it is so big, meaning that it’s filled with so much information and sometimes it can feel overwhelming just trying to understand what should I do first or how do I do this in order to get to this next step or next level in my business? But this is a great starting point is growing your list and using a very easy user friendly interface like ConvertKit to get that done.

Adam Finan: Absolutely. And I know people can get caught up in it. And I’m guilty of this too. It’s not this is me, this is listeners, this is most people I know and a little bit of paralysis analysis. Which is the best email marketing provider for me? Is it MailChimp? Is it ConvertKit? Is it Clavia if you’re e-commerce, or maybe some of these other verticals? Sometimes I just kind of think like they all work, but it depends on what you do with it. And this comes down to also what they provide within the software and the solution. And this is where I feel like, as I mentioned, I think ConvertKit stands alone. And in terms of its uniqueness. And the landing pages, I mean, some of them are absolutely beautiful, and they’re super handy. And for a lot of business owners, and bloggers, and for people, some people don’t need to have, if they’re doing lead generation for their business, they may not even need a website.

Angel-Marie: Right. Exactly.

Adam Finan: For them, it might be sufficient to just have a landing page to collect data, like email, name, phone number, whatever. Then they follow up with these people and that’s how they promote their services. I was speaking with somebody about this yesterday. You don’t need a website. You just need a landing page and an email provider. That’s all you need. 

Angel-Marie: Yeah. It is seriously one of the biggest pieces of advice that I give to every single aspiring entrepreneur or every single person that’s in those beginning phases of growing their business is the fact that you don’t need a website. And I think that that is a very large misconception is that people think that they need this or they need that to start growing your email list or to really just start your business off to such a great start. And that’s not true. And that is the beauty of landing pages. That’s the beauty of starting an email list even before you feel like your business is fully ready. Because once you’re able to collect those groups of people and their email addresses, you already have a fan base. You already have a group of people that you know are going to love your work, love your blog, love your content, love your product or service and are actually going to buy from you because they signed up. They were there from the very beginning before you even reached success with your business, before you even had anything to sell yet, before you even had a website. It’s definitely worth it and there’s just so much value there.

Adam Finan: For sure. Everybody always says, last time I was there, it was five years ago. 

Angel-Marie: Yup, exactly.

Adam Finan: If you’re listening and you don’t have it, but even if you’re a freelancer. Some people think, “I’m not blogging about certain things. I’m just a freelancer.” There’s massive value in building a freelancer list, too. I’m a huge advocate for that. Thousand true fans. I can’t remember was it a book or a video or something, but I remember watching a bunch of stuff on it and it was talking about, when you have that thousand true fans, you can run a business and be location independent and have success, if you will, in terms of like financial freedom by building that thousand true fans. Your email list is a powerful way to help grow towards that thousand true fans from the get go.

Angel-Marie: Absolutely. 

Adam Finan: I’m definitely a big fan of that. So what are some of the best landing pages you’ve seen work for bloggers?

Angel-Marie: I’ve seen so many. I saw one that specifically was catered towards an email course. And this was a free gift. So a free giveaway that they were promoting on this specific landing page. And it was an email course teaching people how to start your actual blog. And they got so much success with this because not only were they bringing value and bringing results to those people that were signing up, but they were also teaching everything that they knew about the blogging world in order to help somebody else. And that’s amazing. Being able to transfer the knowledge that you have, and putting it into somebody else’s mind, that means that they respect you. They’re getting value from you, and therefore they’re going to want more from you. They’re eventually going to want to buy from you. That’s how you grow those personal relationships and really just maintain the consistency of having those super fans. So landing pages that are about free gifts, helping people, teaching people something new that they may not already know. I’ve seen that works so, so well for bloggers. And it could even be something as simple as, let’s see, one time, I saw a blogger who had a landing page that said, ‘Read all about the 10 strategies to become vegan’ or ‘The 10 strategies to get fit’. And once people signed up for this landing page, it just redirected them to their blog post so that they could gain traction. So sometimes, it’s not always about giving away something, like a free gift or an incentive or selling something like a product or service, but maybe you just have a landing page telling them about something that they can read from yours. And then once they’ve read that post, that blog post, they’re going to learn something new. And that’s super refreshing and can help you gain so much traction to that actual blog. So yeah, Adam, I’ve seen a lot of amazing ideas and great landing pages.

Adam Finan: From my own experience, I feel like lead magnets tend to be what most people use. Like you’re saying, a piece of content, but to get access, you need to give away your information, your data. And that could be like you’re saying, ‘Best email tips to get from zero to 1000 subscribers’ or ‘Best tips to grow your blog to 10,000 traffic per month’. I’ve been in a little bit of a Pinterest deep dive myself lately. I’m actually doing a course on Pinterest because I see a lot of opportunity with cheap traffic on Pinterest. And partially for merchants who I work with at Shopify, I’m just trying to become a little bit more familiar with it. Pinterest has grown. It has more users than Snapchat. A lot of people don’t know that.

Angel-Marie: Yeah. It’s amazing.

Adam Finan: It has more users than Snapchat. People who have money, like actual adults, not just teenagers. As somebody who works in e-commerce, They’re like, “This is a growing platform. There’s a lot of traction over here.” It’s not for every brand. It’s not for everyone, but it’s for a lot. But I’ve kind of uncovered that. Like you were saying, there are a lot of people speaking about ConvertKit and promoting ConvertKit and using it. I’m talking about a lot of these mom bloggers, a lot of these girl bloggers scenarios. There’s a lot of people on Pinterest who are definitely advocates for promoting ConvertKit. So, I guess, we can kind of chat a little bit about that too. Because I know that as an affiliate for ConvertKit, I’ve seen in the resources that there’s the likes of Pat Flynn who is like the golden boy of online business. He was talking about niche sites. He’s probably the first blogger I ever followed.

Angel-Marie: Yeah. He’s great.

Adam Finan: He’s a great face to have on the part of a book just for people, if you are using a software like ConvertKit and you’re using it and you like it and you’d like to recommend it to other people, you can sign up to be an affiliate as well, can’t you?

Angel-Marie: You sure can. You can easily just go to Convertkit.com/affiliate and you can sign up for that affiliate program.

Adam Finan: One of the big things about ConvertKit that people didn’t like was maybe that there wasn’t a free version that you could use. So now there is actually a free version for the landing pages. And if you come in and refer a friend and you can get the sense broadcast or email providers. Is that correct?

Angel-Marie: Yes, exactly. So as you said earlier, Adam ConvertKit was a paid plan only. There were some options, but they were all a paid plan. So we’ve recently launched a free plan which gives more creators, especially those beginning creators and online entrepreneurs, the chance to start building their email list right away completely for free. And one of the best ways you can do that is with landing pages. So this free plan gives you the ability to create as many landing pages as you want. There’s multiple different templates to choose from. You can even create thank you pages to then and move them further down the funnel. And that of course, there is an option inside of the free plan where if you refer a friend of yours or a family member of yours to sign up for ConvertKit free free account, then you will then unlock other features such as email sending to, at this point, you not only can build your list with the landing page, but you can also start emailing them once you unlock those features. So a lot of great things inside of the free plan account including a ConvertKit community which allows you to be redirected to our Community base and interact and engage with thousands of other online entrepreneurs and freelancers and creators just like yourself. You can ask for help in there, you can collaborate, you can be a part of certain groups and follow certain topics. It’s awesome. A lot of ability in that.

Adam Finan: Yeah. I’ve seen it. You do have a very passionate, kind and helpful community. That’s how I would look at it. Very kind and helpful people. Everybody’s trying to do the same thing. The outcome is the same. They’re trying to build a business. They’re trying to collect emails, relevant customers and market to these people in the best way possible. And when you share this information, a lot of people would have the mentality of rising tide lifts all ships. Everybody comes up and everybody learns together and it benefits the group as a whole.

Angel-Marie: Yes, it’s amazing. It’s definitely awesome.

Adam Finan: So there’s one thing I would like to touch on with regard to this. And it’s something that I have seen people struggle with. And that’s like if they’re migrating from another platform. So let’s say I have Mail Chimp and have surpassed my free.I just had like 500 subscribers. I could be wrong. The last time I looked, it was 500. It scares people when they move email, because they’re worried like, “Oh, is my deliverability gonna drop?” or, “Well, I still have my list.” I know from ConvertKit, it’s more robust from the backend, in my opinion, personally. So I’m just curious, like when, when it comes to migrating over to ConvertKit, is it easy? Is it difficult? What’s that process look like for somebody who was looking to make a jump?

Angel-Marie: Oh man, it is so easy. It’s so easy. One, ConvertKit has multiple articles on pretty much every single email service provider, a step by step of how you can switch from them to us. Super easy to find them super easy to follow. But on another hand, we have an incredible support team too that are actually inside of your ConvertKit account. They’re in the app. You can ask them a question. You can ask for help with anything you’re wanting. They will definitely be there for you, including helping you migrate over and sending you any articles and step by steps that you need to ensure that your email list is being moved over safe and sound, you don’t lose anything, your deliverability will not decrease. This just gives you the opportunity to be able to switch over within a day because we want to help you out as much as possible.

Adam Finan: That’s awesome. Because I think that’s one of these things where you build it up in your head. You’re like, you can build it up to be this big deal, but it’s not actually a big deal. It’s like moving servers.

Angel-Marie: Right.

Adam Finan: You’re just downloading a bunch of files and putting them in a different place. That’s all it is. It’s not that big of a deal.

Angel-Marie: And I understand that that could be maybe somewhat scary to take a list of people that you’ve grown and you work so hard to get and to move them over to an entirely different service provider. But I promise you, it is very easy and will take great care of you.

Adam Finan: Look, it’s good to know. And that’s why I felt like I really wanted to ask that question because it’s something I’ve seen other people say, ‘better the devil you know.’ But that’s not the best solution. You should move. You really should. But then they’re like, “Oh, but I don’t know how. It’s going to be complicated. What if there are issues?” No, it’s actually really easy. You just need to, like you’re saying, speak to a support team, read an article that explains the step by step. But I just feel that there’s fear of the  unknown. People will often stick with a solution that isn’t the best thing for them, but it’s purely because they’re like, “Oh, well, it works.” But does it work as well as it could? I’m a huge advocate for email marketing. Conversational commerce too, I interviewed somebody very recently, Paul Ace. He’s doing Facebook Messenger chat bots where you sign up for your Facebook Messenger or run ads on Facebook Messenger. And one of the first questions is actually is this your best email? And it pulls your email in from Facebook and you can connect that to your ConvertKit account to many chats. So you can build your SMS chat list, and your ConvertKit.

Angel-Marie: You sure can.

Adam Finan: — and your phone number as well if you want at the same time. It couldn’t be any easier. You literally copy and paste an API code into your manager account. I have it set up on my own website. And that way you’re building two lists. You’re essentially building a messenger broadcast list and a ConvertKit list. He’s on Episode 26. He has worked with a number of bloggers, big bloggers, and high profile. You’re talking to your Amy Porterfield, your John Lee Dumas, the big people. He chose reversed engineering, flipped it on its head. Like, you always put the email on the front end. And what he did was messenger, and then email, and then it ended up growing the entire list overall. And it was very effective. It integrates. There’s other ways for your email list to grow and to be integrated. And it’s really not very difficult to get these things set up and in place. So I just think it’s worth mentioning that as well. 

Angel-Marie: Yeah, absolutely. Just exactly what you said, there’s so many things that you can integrate inside of your ConvertKit account to make everything work together for your best interest. And I believe you can find all of that at convertkit.com/integrations. When you go to that, you’re going to be able to see as many things that you could literally integrate with your account so that everything is flowing together simultaneously. You don’t have to worry about a thing. It’s a beautiful tool.

Adam Finan: Absolutely. So Angel, if people, after listening to this episode, if they were looking to learn more about how they could get on board with ConvertKit or see more of the education that you’re providing for ConvertKit, where would they find you?

Angel-Marie: If you go to Convertkit.com, you will be able to go to a drop down menu and see all of our upcoming live trainings. ConvertKit does take a very much educational approach in order to make sure you’re set up for success when it comes to email marketing and your business and just within your ConvertKit account, too. And more than likely, I will be the one teaching those. So I’ll be in that with you and just teaching you as efficiently as I can. So you can definitely go there just to watch some upcoming live trainings. And then of course, if you’re wanting to sign up for ConvertKit free plan, we do also have a link for you. You can easily just go to convertkit.com/AF23 so that you will be able to try it out for yourself and see how you like it.

Adam Finan: Perfect. Thank you, Angela. Absolutely appreciate it. I appreciate you for coming on and sharing this. And thanks to all our listeners and make sure to tag us on Instagram if you’re on there, @digitalnomadcafe.com where you are tuning in from. Thank you, Angela. 

Angel-Marie: Thank you, Adam.