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62 | Results from an Email List Experiment
What happens if you don't have an opt-in offer?
Today, I want to talk about an experiment I've been running with my email list.
My email list is absolutely critical to the way I run my practice. It is my primary marketing tool, the way I stay connected with current, past, and potential clients. It's also a way for me to serve the practitioner community in general.
As you can imagine, inviting people to sign up for my email list is important to me.
Traditionally, the advice has been to offer a freebie or opt-in incentive in exchange for an email address. And I followed that advice for a long time.
Over the years, I started feeling less and less comfortable with it. I didn't want to manipulate people into signing up for my list. I wanted them to genuinely want to hear from me and be interested in what I had to offer.
So, last fall, I decided to try something different. I took all of my freebies and made them available on my website, no email address needed. And, instead of offering a freebie in exchange for an email address, I now invite people to sign up for my weekly practitioner notes if they want them.
It's working just as well. In fact, I've been getting more sign-ups than before (which may or may not be related to this particular change...).
The message here isn't that this is the right way to do things or that you should/should not have a freebie for your email list. Your audience may be different, and you may choose to one or more incentives to get them to sign up.
But, it's worth thinking about.
Do you need an opt-in offer? Do you want one?
Are you clearly articulating the reasons someone might want to be on your email list? Are you following through on those promises? And, how can you make all of this clear when you're inviting someone to sign up?
A bit of food for thought as you ponder your own email list & how you invite folks to sign up for it.
If you're looking to devote some time and energy to your email list in the upcoming months, Monday Mentoring 🌻
-- Leave a voice message for Camille: https://www.intheclinic.com
Thanks for listening.
I'd love to hear from you. Leave me a voicemail with feedback or submit a question (click the pink "Send Camille a Message" button on the side of the page) 💚
Camille's Helpful Links for Practitioners
Transcript
Camille (00:00)
Well, hi there. Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I am a licensed nutritionist and registered herbalist. And in this podcast, I share little tips and tidbits that might be interesting or helpful for other practitioners. I am logging in today to give you a little update on an experiment I've been running with my email list. Now, I want to give you some background about my email list in particular, because I think it might be helpful for those of you who also run a practice and feel like the email list is an important part of that, or maybe it could be an important part of it. So first of all, background. I am, for the most part, not on social media. Every now and then, I'm on LinkedIn, but it's not really a marketing avenue for me. It's more of a social connection, and I'm not super consistent there. So for me, if you want to find out what I'm doing, there are only a few ways to do that. Number one, you can hear about it from somebody else. Number two, you can manually go to my website and check it out.
Camille (01:06)
Or number three, you can be on my email list and I will let you know. That's it. So as you can imagine, for my practice and the work that I'm doing right now, the email list is really, really important. I rely on that to spread the word, to let people know when I have things that are open and available for signing up, to tell people what's going on, and to make offers. The majority of my income is coming from people who hear about what I'm doing because of my email list. So it is a big deal. Now, I've had an email list for a very, very long time. In fact, there are people on my email list who have been on there, I think, for more than a decade now, which is pretty wild to think about. I started the email list many, many years ago with Mailchimp, and I let it go fallow for a long time. Quite frankly, when I stepped away from my practice when my children were little, I just didn't have the bandwidth to be emailing people, nor was I accepting any new clients at that time. So I did nothing with it.
Camille (02:06)
And then not too long ago, I believe in 2018, I revitalized it. I started replying and writing newsletters again. And at that time, I shifted my practice to be more of a focus on mentoring and continuing education. So it was a little bit of a different situation. So that's the context that I want you to understand here. Now, I have always, from the very first time I started my newsletter, I followed the traditional advice, which you will hear from most marketing folks, which is if you want somebody to sign up for your email list, then you need to give them some incentive to opt in. And that is where a freebie or like I said, an opt in offer comes into play where you give me your email address and I will give you this book of recipes or this... In my case, I still have a pregnancy and lactation cheat sheet or a free access to one of my webinars, something along those lines. I bopped along with that for a while very successfully. I don't have a huge email list and I also don't need a huge email list because I've been able to run my practice both as a clinician and as an educator very successfully with just the email list and a pretty small email list because the people that were interested in what I have to offer are there.
Camille (03:31)
I don't have thousands and thousands of people that I need to fill up my programs, just a smaller number. So it's working for me. All right, so that all sounds great. No problem. This is all good. And over the last couple of years, I've been doing lots more thinking about ethics and marketing and all these types of things. And I started thinking that I don't necessarily want to feel like I'm manipulating people into signing up for my email list. I felt less and less comfortable with saying, Okay, I'll give you this thing, but only if you give me your email address. Because, frankly, if somebody is just interested in, let's say, my social media webinar, but they don't really want to be on my email list, I don't want that person on my email list. I don't want to be writing to people who aren't interested in what I have to say. First of all, you have to pay for subscribers, which I'm happy to do if people are getting value and benefit from what I'm saying. But if they're like, I have to just delete this message from Camille every week, I don't want to be paying for that.
Camille (04:36)
I think energetically it's not a great deal either, even though I really have no way of knowing that because I don't look at most of those statistics. But still, that's not the energetic I want for my list. I want people reading my messages who are thinking, Wow, I'm glad I read that today. Oh, that was really helpful to read. Oh, that link really served me, etc. So over time, I was like, Yeah, I don't want to do this. I still do want to provide the free things that I've created for people. I want people to have access to those. And that effect, I want most people to have access to them if they could be of use. And I trust that if they are of use, then people who would like to hear more from me will be like, Huh, why don't I sign up for that email newsletter? Because I think I would like to hear more from this person. So what I did in a fit of inspiration in just one day last fall is I took all of my freebies that I had going, and I think I had five or maybe six at the time, different ones, and I just made all of them freely available.
Camille (05:38)
No email address needed. They're just up on my website. Any old person can come along, get them. There's no tracking, there's no email, there's no nothing. They're just there for anybody who could use them. And then I said, hey, these are freely given. Sign up for my email list for practitioners if you'd like to hear from me weekly, most Thursdays. And so I was thinking, okay, I'm going to do this and probably I'm going to have fewer people sign up, but the people who sign up are going to be more interested. They're really going to want to specifically hear from me, and they're not just going to be on my list because they had to be in order to get this free thing. That was my theory. I was like, I'm just willing to have fewer people on my list because most of the people, if they're going to be, pardon me, manipulated into being there, are not the people who are going to sign up for any programs or get value out of my writings anyway. That happened. Recently, I was like, Let me just look at some of these numbers and check out whether there has been any change in the rate of people signing up for my email list.
Camille (06:44)
What I found is that, no, there's no drop off really whatsoever in the number of people signing up if you look at a monthly basis. In fact, I am having more and more people sign up every month than they were before, even though I don't have any freebies or opt in offers or anything like that, all over my website, it basically just says, if you want to get my practitioner notes every Thursday, sign up here. T here's a little thing about what they are. So of course, it's hard to factor in what plays in here, there and everywhere. I've been on some podcasts and this, that and the other. So I can't say that taking away the barrier to opting into my email list was helpful, but I can say that it wasn't harmful to my email newsletter growth. That's what I wanted to share with you. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't have any incentive whatsoever because to me, the incentive is you're going to get a message from me once a week that is specifically designed for practitioners, that's designed to support practitioners. I think there's a lot of value for the right person who's in the place of starting a practice or running a practice or thinking about starting a practice.
Camille (08:03)
I think my newsletter offers some really great things. And if people aren't in that place, then it's probably not for them. So in my opinion, there still is an incentive to join. But the incentive is not, you can only have this free thing if you give me your email address. And I feel like that's a different energetic. It's a different place to start from. So am I saying that you should get rid of your opt in offer? No, absolutely not, because your people could be different from my people. You can have a different strategy than I have. There's all kinds of reasons that you may want to keep it or you may not want to keep it. My point here is that it may be worth thinking about. And if you don't have an opt in offer, I still think you ought to have, or it makes sense to have a reason for people to sign up. Maybe that reason is I'm going to send you a recipe every Friday or once a month, or my favorite playlist, or whatever your people might appreciate getting, tell them why they would want to sign up. And that's an incentive to sign up.
Camille (09:08)
So a lot of times I'll see people, I'll go to their website or something like that, and I'll see it says, sign up for our newsletter or stay in touch. I'm like, most of the time for me, that's not a very good incentive. I'm like, I don't just want a newsletter. Believe me, I got plenty of newsletters and most of them I don't read regularly. There are some exceptions. Same thing, unless I am just like, Wow, I really want to hear from this person the next time this program opens, I'm not super excited about staying in touch. But if it's a newsletter where it's like, Hey, we scour emerging artists every week and every week we're going to send out one beautiful piece of art or one poem or something to lift your spirits, I might be like, Oh, that sounds amazing. I would totally sign up for that, even though there's no freebie or whatever else. And of course, I anticipate that they would probably be marketing something to me eventually, and that's okay. So I still want to opt in and I don't feel like I've been... The strings haven't been pulled in any weird way where I'm only opting in to get the freebie.
Camille (10:15)
So there you go. No specific action item for you at this point other than just thinking about how are you inviting people to sign up for your newsletter if you have one? And are you happy with that? Is it working? Is there a better way that you could describe why somebody might want to sign up? How are you serving people with your newsletter? And is that clear? Is that clear when people are signing up? Because I think the freebie and the opt in is one thing. But the longer term thing is how are you serving people? What is the value of being on your list? And there's lots of ways you can provide value. They don't all have to involve tons and tons of work on your end. And I'll be talking more about this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. All right, I hope that was helpful for you. If you have any questions about this process or if I haven't explained something clearly, please reach out and let me know. And I hope you have a wonderful week. Take care. Thanks for listening to In the Clinic with Camille. Hey, did you know that I write a weekly practitioner note for herbalists and nutritionists?
Camille (11:24)
If you would like to get that in your inbox, you can sign up at camillefreeman. com/newsletter. I'd love to have you join us there.
Well, hi there. Welcome to In the Clinic with Camille. My name is Camille Freeman. I am a licensed nutritionist and registered herbalist. And in this podcast, I share little tips and tidbits that might be interesting or helpful for other practitioners. I am logging in today to give you a little update on an experiment I've been running with my email list. Now, I want to give you some background about my email list in particular, because I think it might be helpful for those of you who also run a practice and feel like the email list is an important part of that, or maybe it could be an important part of it. So first of all, background. I am, for the most part, not on social media. Every now and then, I'm on LinkedIn, but it's not really a marketing avenue for me. It's more of a social connection, and I'm not super consistent there. So for me, if you want to find out what I'm doing, there are only a few ways to do that. Number one, you can hear about it from somebody else. Number two, you can manually go to my website and check it out.
Camille (01:06)
Or number three, you can be on my email list and I will let you know. That's it. So as you can imagine, for my practice and the work that I'm doing right now, the email list is really, really important. I rely on that to spread the word, to let people know when I have things that are open and available for signing up, to tell people what's going on, and to make offers. The majority of my income is coming from people who hear about what I'm doing because of my email list. So it is a big deal. Now, I've had an email list for a very, very long time. In fact, there are people on my email list who have been on there, I think, for more than a decade now, which is pretty wild to think about. I started the email list many, many years ago with Mailchimp, and I let it go fallow for a long time. Quite frankly, when I stepped away from my practice when my children were little, I just didn't have the bandwidth to be emailing people, nor was I accepting any new clients at that time. So I did nothing with it.
Camille (02:06)
And then not too long ago, I believe in 2018, I revitalized it. I started replying and writing newsletters again. And at that time, I shifted my practice to be more of a focus on mentoring and continuing education. So it was a little bit of a different situation. So that's the context that I want you to understand here. Now, I have always, from the very first time I started my newsletter, I followed the traditional advice, which you will hear from most marketing folks, which is if you want somebody to sign up for your email list, then you need to give them some incentive to opt in. And that is where a freebie or like I said, an opt in offer comes into play where you give me your email address and I will give you this book of recipes or this... In my case, I still have a pregnancy and lactation cheat sheet or a free access to one of my webinars, something along those lines. I bopped along with that for a while very successfully. I don't have a huge email list and I also don't need a huge email list because I've been able to run my practice both as a clinician and as an educator very successfully with just the email list and a pretty small email list because the people that were interested in what I have to offer are there.
Camille (03:31)
I don't have thousands and thousands of people that I need to fill up my programs, just a smaller number. So it's working for me. All right, so that all sounds great. No problem. This is all good. And over the last couple of years, I've been doing lots more thinking about ethics and marketing and all these types of things. And I started thinking that I don't necessarily want to feel like I'm manipulating people into signing up for my email list. I felt less and less comfortable with saying, Okay, I'll give you this thing, but only if you give me your email address. Because, frankly, if somebody is just interested in, let's say, my social media webinar, but they don't really want to be on my email list, I don't want that person on my email list. I don't want to be writing to people who aren't interested in what I have to say. First of all, you have to pay for subscribers, which I'm happy to do if people are getting value and benefit from what I'm saying. But if they're like, I have to just delete this message from Camille every week, I don't want to be paying for that.
Camille (04:36)
I think energetically it's not a great deal either, even though I really have no way of knowing that because I don't look at most of those statistics. But still, that's not the energetic I want for my list. I want people reading my messages who are thinking, Wow, I'm glad I read that today. Oh, that was really helpful to read. Oh, that link really served me, etc. So over time, I was like, Yeah, I don't want to do this. I still do want to provide the free things that I've created for people. I want people to have access to those. And that effect, I want most people to have access to them if they could be of use. And I trust that if they are of use, then people who would like to hear more from me will be like, Huh, why don't I sign up for that email newsletter? Because I think I would like to hear more from this person. So what I did in a fit of inspiration in just one day last fall is I took all of my freebies that I had going, and I think I had five or maybe six at the time, different ones, and I just made all of them freely available.
Camille (05:38)
No email address needed. They're just up on my website. Any old person can come along, get them. There's no tracking, there's no email, there's no nothing. They're just there for anybody who could use them. And then I said, hey, these are freely given. Sign up for my email list for practitioners if you'd like to hear from me weekly, most Thursdays. And so I was thinking, okay, I'm going to do this and probably I'm going to have fewer people sign up, but the people who sign up are going to be more interested. They're really going to want to specifically hear from me, and they're not just going to be on my list because they had to be in order to get this free thing. That was my theory. I was like, I'm just willing to have fewer people on my list because most of the people, if they're going to be, pardon me, manipulated into being there, are not the people who are going to sign up for any programs or get value out of my writings anyway. That happened. Recently, I was like, Let me just look at some of these numbers and check out whether there has been any change in the rate of people signing up for my email list.
Camille (06:44)
What I found is that, no, there's no drop off really whatsoever in the number of people signing up if you look at a monthly basis. In fact, I am having more and more people sign up every month than they were before, even though I don't have any freebies or opt in offers or anything like that, all over my website, it basically just says, if you want to get my practitioner notes every Thursday, sign up here. T here's a little thing about what they are. So of course, it's hard to factor in what plays in here, there and everywhere. I've been on some podcasts and this, that and the other. So I can't say that taking away the barrier to opting into my email list was helpful, but I can say that it wasn't harmful to my email newsletter growth. That's what I wanted to share with you. Now, I'm not saying that you shouldn't have any incentive whatsoever because to me, the incentive is you're going to get a message from me once a week that is specifically designed for practitioners, that's designed to support practitioners. I think there's a lot of value for the right person who's in the place of starting a practice or running a practice or thinking about starting a practice.
Camille (08:03)
I think my newsletter offers some really great things. And if people aren't in that place, then it's probably not for them. So in my opinion, there still is an incentive to join. But the incentive is not, you can only have this free thing if you give me your email address. And I feel like that's a different energetic. It's a different place to start from. So am I saying that you should get rid of your opt in offer? No, absolutely not, because your people could be different from my people. You can have a different strategy than I have. There's all kinds of reasons that you may want to keep it or you may not want to keep it. My point here is that it may be worth thinking about. And if you don't have an opt in offer, I still think you ought to have, or it makes sense to have a reason for people to sign up. Maybe that reason is I'm going to send you a recipe every Friday or once a month, or my favorite playlist, or whatever your people might appreciate getting, tell them why they would want to sign up. And that's an incentive to sign up.
Camille (09:08)
So a lot of times I'll see people, I'll go to their website or something like that, and I'll see it says, sign up for our newsletter or stay in touch. I'm like, most of the time for me, that's not a very good incentive. I'm like, I don't just want a newsletter. Believe me, I got plenty of newsletters and most of them I don't read regularly. There are some exceptions. Same thing, unless I am just like, Wow, I really want to hear from this person the next time this program opens, I'm not super excited about staying in touch. But if it's a newsletter where it's like, Hey, we scour emerging artists every week and every week we're going to send out one beautiful piece of art or one poem or something to lift your spirits, I might be like, Oh, that sounds amazing. I would totally sign up for that, even though there's no freebie or whatever else. And of course, I anticipate that they would probably be marketing something to me eventually, and that's okay. So I still want to opt in and I don't feel like I've been... The strings haven't been pulled in any weird way where I'm only opting in to get the freebie.
Camille (10:15)
So there you go. No specific action item for you at this point other than just thinking about how are you inviting people to sign up for your newsletter if you have one? And are you happy with that? Is it working? Is there a better way that you could describe why somebody might want to sign up? How are you serving people with your newsletter? And is that clear? Is that clear when people are signing up? Because I think the freebie and the opt in is one thing. But the longer term thing is how are you serving people? What is the value of being on your list? And there's lots of ways you can provide value. They don't all have to involve tons and tons of work on your end. And I'll be talking more about this in the coming weeks, so stay tuned. All right, I hope that was helpful for you. If you have any questions about this process or if I haven't explained something clearly, please reach out and let me know. And I hope you have a wonderful week. Take care. Thanks for listening to In the Clinic with Camille. Hey, did you know that I write a weekly practitioner note for herbalists and nutritionists?
Camille (11:24)
If you would like to get that in your inbox, you can sign up at camillefreeman. com/newsletter. I'd love to have you join us there.
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