 How are you guys doing today? Had a good lunch? I love barbecue. So I'm sorry about my voice, actually. I think I'm catching on to something. I was doing all right yesterday, and then I was like, oh my god. I didn't even party. I went to sleep. I got 12 hours of sleep, and thankfully I'm here. So this talk is about how to grow your email list six digits and beyond. I have multiple six-figure email lists, 300,000, 400,000, and more for different one of my websites. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Syed Balki. You can follow me at Syed Balki. I have about 16 different companies. The one that's more popular in this space is called WP Beginner. It's the largest WordPress resource site. I'm also the guy behind List25, a very popular YouTube channel on the blog. It's over 1.8 million subscribers. We had 370 million video views. I have a bunch of WordPress plugins like Soliloquy, Envire, et cetera. But because I've built so many different blogs and publication sites, I knew the importance of building an email list. And I ended up building the tool that I ended up using called OptinMonster. And that gets about 7 billion impressions a month. And we have helped hundreds of millions of email captures for our businesses. So I'm going to be kind of fast because I know I have like 30 minutes for Q&As. We're just going to head outside and do all the Q&As afterwards. I'm going to have a slide at the end that will have all the tools that I use, so you don't need to write down any specific tool because I'm going to be going fast. So what you'll learn, you're going to learn, first, my number one trick to increase email subscribers in five minutes, how I use the psychology principle to increase my subscribers by 785%, just one simple psychology trick. I got that because my wife is a PhD student in psychology, so kudos to her. Have you recovered 55% of our lost revenue with a simple trick? Just freaking crazy the moment I implemented it, I was like, we doubled our sales, holy crap. And how to solve the biggest list building problem before you even encounter it? I bet you half of this room is going through this problem, and you don't know that you're going through it, and you're going to find out in two years, and you're going to be like, oh shit, by that time it's going to be too late. So thank yourself for being here. And the exact workflow that I use to grow all of my email list and a whole lot more. So but before we start, I want to talk about the importance of building an email list and why you need to start today. I don't have an email list. Cool, OK, after this talk, you're going to have an email list. Because over 70% of visitors who are visiting your website, they're leaving, and they're never going to come back. So that means that blog content that you wrote pretty much went to waste. That means that PPC campaign that you're running, that you're paying for ads, went to waste. 85% of shoppers who add to cart do not buy. So if you're a business owner, that's a really big number, right? You're going to spend a ton of money on retargeting ads. Again, they're going to come back, and 85% of those people are also not going to buy. And it's just an endless cycle. So the bottom line is if you're not building an email list, you're wasting like 90% of your dollars in efforts. So in case it's not clear enough, building an email list is important for every business. Instantaneously, you can see a 2% to 15% increase in your sales and your conversions. And more importantly, people are like, well, isn't social media the thing? Shouldn't I be on Snapchat or Instagram or Facebook? Well, guess what all these social platforms ask you for when you create an account? An email. Because those companies understand the value of an email list. So I'm not saying social is not important. Social is very important. But you need to have a direct communication with your customers and your users to build an email list. So a proven five-step list building process that I use in all of my business. So I'm going to talk about a little bit theory first, and then I'm going to go into practical implications of it so you guys know exactly what I'm talking about. Number one, identify your target audience. If your target audience is everyone, that means you do not have a target audience. So narrow it down. Go into your Google Analytics and look at which pages on your site people are clicking on. Where are they coming from? Go into Google Search Console. If you haven't set up Google Search Console, go ahead and set it up first. And then look at what keywords are people searching for when they're coming to your website. And after that, go and research your competitors. You all have competitors. Look at tools like Moz. Look at tools like SEM Rush. Look at tools like BuzzSumo. And do an analysis on what are your competitors' popular pages. Where are they coming from? By this time, you should know that 80% of the things that you're focusing on is not worth it. And the 20% that you are, 10x on those. To create an irresistible offer. What do I mean by an irresistible offer? Ebooks work phenomenally. Checklists are the hottest thing right now in email marketing everywhere. Worksheets are great. Coupons and trials are amazing for e-commerce site. They have to be irresistible. It's not the mode of an offer. It's the offer that really makes and breaks your conversions. And you have to create multiple ones. So don't just have one e-book and say, oh, that's the end of the day. No, create multiple offers based on different buying stages. Because somebody who's in the early stage may be OK with an e-book or a white paper. But somebody in the mid-stage may want a case study. And somebody in a ready stage, in the final stages of the buying process, may want a demo or a consultation or more one-on-one thing. Three, add a strong call to action button. People are like, well, say, what colors work best? Well, the one that stands out. So if your entire page is red, the red button is not going to work well for you. Yellow is going to work well for you. So whenever you read these articles in psychology of color, it's the one that stands out. Here's a good example. In this article, if I had added a red button, it wouldn't have worked. But a green works. Moving on. Have a Targeted Landing Pages. So Marketing Sherpa is a really awesome site. I follow it. Their research shows that 94% of companies find Targeted Landing Pages to be effective. What that really says to me is the other 6% of the people that didn't know what they were doing. Because they're 100% of the time they're effective. So here's a good example. This is a video's landing page for WPBGenerate. It has one clear action. Get admitted into the free video training course. Here's another example. On HubSpot, a free download. One clear thing. Enter your name, email, website, and click download. Targeted Landing Pages have one symbol action. Now you could actually have blog posts and mega guide pages also work as Targeted Landing Pages. Here's one for Moz. Instead of creating an ebook, they created this one web ebook. You can just click from this page and read all the different chapters. But if you look on the right-hand corner, there's a start my free trial button. So this is another example of a good landing page. Number five, just build high converting forms. Collect only what you need. You don't need to ask for people's fax number. Nobody's using fax. If you're not going to call them, you don't need their phone number either. Just an email address works just fine. Because you can always go back and ask them to fill in your name at a later stage. So the less number of fields you have, the higher your conversion is going to go. If you have three fields, first name, last name, and email, make it to name an email. And watch your conversion go up. If it's name and email, get rid of name and only keep email, watch your conversions go up. So you've got to collect only the things that you need. And you focus on behavioral targeting. So whenever I'm talking about best lead capture opportunities, people are like, well, I have a form. It's not about having one form or two form or three forms. It's about having as many touchpoints as you can have. That's the secret of taking a high traffic site and turning it into a huge email list, or taking a low traffic site, turning that into an email list that helps you become a high traffic site and a high size email list. So the number one popular form is the famous sidebar forms. Everybody has a sidebar subscribe form. I have one. Why? Because everybody knows where to look for when they're looking to subscribe. Now, does that mean they work well? No, they don't. Their conversions are probably one of the lowest, like 0.1% conversion, which is terrible. But the reason why you have it on your site is because everybody comes to expect it there. So the 0.1% of the people who are subscribing there because they know what to expect. Two, after post or inline forms. These forms work really well if you have a blog post. Long form content, great. Put it after the fifth paragraph in between your content or at the end of the content. These work really well. This is an example from Michael Hyatt's blog. Three flight scroll triggers slide-in boxes. These boxes, as you're scrolling, slides out from the right-hand corner. You've probably seen it on the web. These are design agnostic. So that means they don't take any space. Once the user close it, they go away. So you show it one at a time. Same thing with floating bars. They're attached at the top or at the bottom. They are known as hello bars, foo bars, et cetera. These are very noticeable, can work well. Well-timed pop-ups. I'm a big advocate for it. Every time I talk about pop-ups, people are like, ew, pop-ups, right? I don't like pop-ups. Pop-ups are spam. Actually, they're not. What's spam is how annoyingly you trigger them. If you click on something and a pop-up shows up because you clicked on it, that pop-up works really well. And I'll show you how. There's different triggers you can add that makes pop-up not annoying and high converting. So it's not the pop-up. It's the timing of the pop-up that matters. And full-screen welcome gates. These have been popular in advertising since the early days. It's called interstitials. Now, the email marketers are starting to use it. And they're like, wow, I added a full-screen welcome gate. And I'm getting 8% conversion, or 10% conversion, or 12% conversion. Imagine 100 people come to your website and 12 of them give you your email address. So what's going to happen the next time you publish an article? You have 12 more people. That means you have your chance to share a score. Contact form and checkout forms. Look, this is a very simple thing I did on my WP beginner site. I have the name, email, website message. And I have a checkbox that says, yes, I would like to receive updates from WP beginner. So when you're asking me a question, you kind of feel guilty that you're not giving me anything in return. So you just leave that box checked. It's psychology. All of it. People don't uncheck this. And then they've seen me here. And they say, dude, I love your email newsletter. Thank you, and you're welcome. This thing works. Squeeze pages. All right, squeeze pages are really cool. Why? Because they serve one purpose. That's a targeted landing page. Works all the time. Joint webinar registration. Doing a webinar with yourself is great. But bringing on another celebrity is awesome, because now they're going to promote it to their email list. If they're promoting, all their subscribers are coming. And then you can swap email lists, or you can just share, or you can do a webinar for them and promote them. So it's a great way to cross promote and grow your list. So don't try to say, I have 1,000 subscribers. I'm going to go to somebody who has 100,000 subscribers and see if they will be able to deal with me. No. Go with somebody else who also have 1,000 subscribers, because chances are 700 of your subscribers and 700 of their subscribers are completely different. And you each are going to benefit from that. Contests and giveaways. Contests go viral all the freaking time. And I love contests, right? There's a bunch of tools out there. Contest domination is one. Heyo is another one. Refle compter is another one. I particularly like contest domination. Why? Because it focuses on email building. When you go to a page, it looks something like that. It has a clock, and it says enter your name and email. But what's really exciting is what happens next. On the next page, it says you'll earn two entries for each friend you refer. Now you're like, well, I want to win this iPad, or I want to win this juicer, or I want to win this frying pan, whatnot. And you're going to refer all of your freaking friends there. You're going to refer your mom, your sister, your aunt, your neighbor, everybody. And then they're going to build on this page. And they're going to be like, holy crap. So in reality, for example, in this result, 8,392 of my website visitors went and joined the contest. So well, they went to the contest page, but 4,000 of them entered. And then 4,000 of those people then brought me 26,000 more visitors out of which 1,100 of them converted. So in reality, my 8,300 visitors converted at 61% if you're thinking about it. Because you're not paying for that 26,000 additional traffic. You didn't pay for that. You didn't pay Facebook, pay for a click. You didn't do any of that. So these contests work really effectively. Next thing is behavior automation. And that's really where you start taking the conversion to the next level. The one that I really enjoy, exit intent, is something that my company was one of the first to do. What it does tracks the mouse behavior as you're trying to take it outside the browser window, shows you a pop-up. It's better known as on-site retargeting. Because what do you do when somebody leaves? Then you start targeting them on Facebook. And you're paying Facebook to show them your ads. But why pay Facebook when you can do it on your own website at the precise moment they're about to leave? 2% to 4% increase right there. Right there. People who are going to leave your website, 2% to 4% of them are going to enter your email list. I put it on wfubeginner and increased my conversion by 600%. That's when I was like, this is an awesome product. I need to launch it. And that's how the idea came about. Scroll detection. So how many of you knew that Google actually used scroll detection as a ranking signal? So how many times, how far people scroll on your page actually determines, is one of the factors that determines how high you rank in search. You're like, well, how does Google know this? Well, guess what? They own Chrome. So marketers figured out that this ought to be important. If people are reading my article all the way through, so maybe I should save and they get to the end of the article. That's when I should show them a pop-up because they're clearly interested. I don't want to show them a pop-up after one second that they entered because that's annoying. Or two seconds, that's annoying. But once they have finished reading, you're not interrupting them. You're like saying, hey, I know you like this. Do you want more? They're like, yeah, awesome. Now, two-step opt-ins. And this is where psychology comes into play. So I wrote an article about how I had five more hours in my day. I gained five more hours in a day. They're like, well, how did you do that? Did you change the clock? No, I didn't. I started using time-blocking and I became really, really efficient at what I did. And I was talking about it at the end. By the way, if you guys want to do it, you can download my time-blocking worksheet. And they're like, cool, I'm going to download it. When they click on it, I could send them to a squeeze page, but why do that? They click on it, and a pop-up shows up. It says enter your name and email, and you'll get a download. This is actually known as a zygonyic effect in psychology. And what it says is that when one person initiates, they're very likely to complete that task. If they don't initiate a task, they're not as likely to complete. So here's the results. So a generic pop-up, as you notice at the bottom, was viewed 195,000 times, and the conversion was about 1%. The content upgrade that you notice at the very top was viewed 377 times in a 61% conversion, the one below it 280 times in a 54% conversion. You can see that this thing works really well. So here's what I would do. I would go in my Google Analytics and look at my top 10 blog posts. I'll see what I can add to that blog post that will add value. So for example, if I have 14-point blog post checklist, I'm going to say, well, you don't really need to come to my blog. What you can do is download this version in the PDF. Or if you have six best ways to do it, like enter your email address and get additional three. Just go and expand that article and offer that as a content upgrade. Some of my friends, what they're doing is they're just turning that article into a PDF and saying, download this article in a PDF. People download it all the time. I guess because they want to print. I don't know why anybody prints articles. Partial form submissions. People don't know when I talk about partial form submissions. They're like, what do you mean by that? So how many of you have been to Amazon? You were browsing something, and then you leave. And then you get an email saying, here are the best headphones that you should be checking out. How did Amazon know? They're tracking you, right? So what partial form submission is, if somebody starts filling out their name, email, they selected what they were interested in, and they never typed, and they left. Maybe because their wife said, it's time to go eat dinner. And then they came back. It's time to sleep. They closed the computer, went to bed. They weren't interested in contacting you. So what this allows you to do is save that entry, even when they didn't submit. So when people were going through our checkout process, they entered the name and email, and then for some reason they would leave, we put them in a drip campaign. They were getting an automated email saying, hey, did you forget something? It's like Amazon does. And we recovered over 55% of our revenue. 55% more sales. Crazy, by just adding partial form submissions. Now, contact form plugins, Vufu does this really, really well, and I like it. Rejoiner is the one that you can use for card abandonment, but it's kind of expensive. Card hook is another one that's a little cheaper. We just built one in our in-house, so we don't have to pay them monthly. OK, targeting and personalization. So the number one rookie mistake that you're making right now is not building a segmented email list. When you go to a talk, everybody says, you need to build an email list, just like I did in my very first part. Yes, you have to build an email list. But see, most of the so-called experts haven't really been doing this for long enough to know that just building an email list is not important. You need to build a segmented email list. And what I mean by a segmented email list is group your subscribers based on interest. Because what happens is, let's say you have 1,000 subscribers, your open rate is going to be 60% or 70% or even 80%. You're like, wow, 80% are the people I sent an email to open my emails. But as that list grows, your open rate starts declining. I know a guy, he has half a million subscribers, and open rate is under 10%. That's equivalent of having 10,000 subscribers, not half a million. So he's paying the bill for half a million, but he really has 10,000 subscribers. Why? Because you're emailing these people of things that they're not interested in. But when you group them, you can only send them personalized offers. And the way you do this is you show targeted offer based on specific pages based on where they're coming from. If you have six categories, that means somebody who's coming to your business category is not interested in your history category. They might be, but more likely than not. So if you send emails about history to the business guy, he's going to unsubscribe, or he's just going to start ignoring your emails. So you need to build smart forms on your site and show them at different areas. So somebody who's subscribed in business gets put in a business section, somebody who's subscribed on history does it on history. And you notice Huffington Post, New York Times, et cetera, they all have that. That's what segmenting is, and you need to start doing it right now in your business. Figure out your target demographics, figure out your customer avatars, and start grouping them. And you can do traffic refer detection. That's another way of grouping them is based on where they're coming from. Are they coming from Facebook? Are they coming from a guest post that you wrote on another blog? If they are, you should put them in a separate autoresponder sequence. And this is what it looks like. If they came from ProBlogger, I'll put them in eBook. If they didn't, then I'll send them a video first. If they open it, I'll do this. And if they didn't, then I'll do something else. You have to start creating Grip campaigns. And I helped one of my friends do it. And he was making about $7,700 a month from his blog. He went from doing that to $48,000 a month. Why? Because he was now sending out targeted emails. And he had this sequence. If somebody didn't open, remind them. Send them an alternative. That's what a Grip campaign is. Before it was known as autoresponders because they were just automatic, but Grip campaigns are smarter because they have a workflow. If this happens, then do this. If it doesn't, then do this. And there's tons and tons of tools out there that are going to do it. So the tools that I recommend are the ones listed here. OptinMonster is the one that I built. Unbounce is great for landing pages. Contest Domination is great for running giveaways. CardHook is the one that does card abandonment. Woofoo is the contact form plugin. It's not a plugin. It's a service that does partial form submissions. But the form that I'm using on my side is Gravity Forms with that little checkbox because Gravity Forms have an integration with just about everything. MailChimp is the email marketing service. For anybody who doesn't have an email list, use MailChimp. If you want to do a little bit more advanced stuff, yes, no campaigns, active campaign. I have a lot of clients who use Infusionsoft. Infusionsoft is really powerful, but it has another name. It's called Confusionsoft. So if you're kind of new to it, you're not going to like it, stick with Active Campaign. But Sumo is a really, really awesome tool. If you have not tried it, give it a try. It's great to research your competitors or your industry. And SEMrush is another one. And then at the end of the day, tests learn and improve. I didn't go to any school to learn all of this stuff. I started building websites when I was 12, and I just start learning from every mistake that I made. And I'm like 13 years later, I'm here. So thank you. If you have any questions, go ahead. Partout is a great tool. So I have a luxury of working with over 30 plus email marketing services. So I've definitely said partout is a great option. No, partout is really powerful, but at the same time, the pricing is a little bit on the higher end. Any other questions? No? All right, cool then. Thank you again.