Carrot
In this post I’m gonna tell you a quick, simple and free way to grow your lists with MailChimp… a popular email marketing system that InvestorCarrot integrates with.
(You can use these tips with any contact management software with similar features, but the screenshots are from MailChimp. InvestorCarrot actually integrates with MailChimp, Aweber, iContact, ConstantContact, Zoho CRM, and more!)
But first I want to tell you why it is so important that you grow and manage your lists right.
Here is the short answer: Nurturing a great list will make you huge profits for years.
The long answer is slightly more complicated… let me illustrate.
Let’s take the average “house flipper” – let’s call her Jane.
Jane gets leads in a few ways: some from signs, and most from her 2 Step Opt-In Forms on her InvestorCarrot site – she posts often on Craigslist and other free classified sites.
Here’s a quick breakdown of her traffic and conversion rates:
So Jane’s doing pretty well, making an average of $5,000 per deal. Her conversion rates aren’t the greatest, but they aren’t the worst, either.
For the sake of this fictional comparison, let’s assume her traffic and conversion rates stay exactly the same, except she starts growing and nurturing her list of leads as they come in each month.
All Jane has to do is to send emails out once a week to her list… it’s really simple, and I’ll show you some great tricks to make it super simple on ya in just a sec.
First, let’s look at the insane amount Jane is earning because she’s starting to really nurture her list:
As you can see, I assumed that Jane is converting about 5% of her existing list into deals each month, while still doing an 18% deal-to-lead ratio on the new leads that are coming in.
But who cares about the math?!?
In 6 months, Jane is making $75K each month instead of $25K!
Sure, it’s just a fictional story… but the results are real, trust me.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be working (alongside Trevor) with our investor members to help them build sales funnels that nurture leads to create scenarios like these almost automatically with some free tools like MailChimp and their InvestorCarrot sites.
If you’re a member, definitely sign up now for next week’s live webinar, and if you’re not a member, watch this demo now to learn how we help our members to get killer online marketing results.
In the rest of this post, I’ll show you a few easy steps to connect your InvestorCarrot website to MailChimp and start nurturing your leads right away… plus some email headlines that got the highest open rates in MailChimp’s study of over 40,000,000 emails sent on their system.
First, you’ll need to open a MailChimp account. It’s still free for lists up to 2,500 email addresses.
Next, you need to get your unique API key from MailChimp and paste it into the right spot on your InvestorCarrot account. Here is a quickscreenshott:
Then you take that API key and paste it right into the Forms section. (You may want to use these more detailed instructions from our tutorial)
And here is a super neat bonus tip… you can connect the Feed from your InvestorCarrot site back to your MailChimp account so that every time you submit a new blog post, it’s automatically emailed to your entire list. This page has a full tutorial with complete campaign instructions.
Just enter your your URL followed by /feed in the RSS form (screenshot below), pick the times and you’re ready to automate.
And just to prove that you don’t even have to be interesting to do super effective content marketing, check out the list below of the email headlines that got insanely great open rates when MailChimp analyzed over 40,000,000 emails sent thru their system:
| Best Open Rates (60%-87%) | Worst Open Rates (1%-14%) |
|---|---|
| 1. [COMPANYNAME] Sales & Marketing Newsletter | 1. Last Minute Gift – We Have The Answer |
| 2. Eye on the [COMPANYNAME] Update (Oct 31 – Nov 4) | 2. Valentines – Shop Early & Save 10% |
| 3. [COMPANYNAME] Staff Shirts & Photos | 3. Give a Gift Certificate this Holiday |
| 4. [COMPANYNAME] May 2005 News Bulletin! | 4. Valentine’s Day Salon and Spa Specials! |
| 5. [COMPANYNAME] Newsletter – February 2006 | 5. Gift Certificates – Easy & Elegant Giving – Let Them Choose |
| 6. [COMPANYNAME] Newsletter – January 2006 [ *|FNAME|* *|LNAME|* ] | 6. Need More Advertising Value From Your Marketing Partner? |
| 7. [COMPANYNAME] and [COMPANYNAME] Invites You! | 7. [COMPANYNAME] Pioneers in Banana Technology |
| 8. Happy Holidays from [COMPANYNAME] | 8. [COMPANYNAME] Moves You Home for the Holidays |
| 9. ATTENTION [COMPANYNAME] Staff! | 9. Renewal |
| 10. ATTENTION [COMPANYNAME] West Staff!! | 10. Technology Company Works with [COMPANYNAME] on Bananas Efforts |
| 11. Invitation from [COMPANYNAME] | 11. [COMPANYNAME] Update – A Summary of Security and Emergency Preparedness News |
| 12. [COMPANYNAME] Jan/Feb 2006 Newsletter | 12. Now Offering Banana Services! |
| 13. Website news – Issue 3 | 13. It’s still summer in Tahoe! |
| 14. Upcoming Events at [COMPANYNAME] | 14. [COMPANYNAME] endorses [COMPANYNAME] as successor |
| 15. [COMPANYNAME] Councils: Letter of Interest | 15. [COMPANYNAME] Holiday Sales Event |
| 16. [COMPANYNAME] Coffee Exchange – Post-Katrina Update | 16. The Future of International Trade |
| 17. We’re Throwing a Party | 17. [COMPANYNAME] for your next dream home. |
| 18. October 2005 Newsletter | 18. True automation of your Banana Research |
| 19. [COMPANYNAME]: 02.10.06 | 19. [COMPANYNAME] Resort – Spring into May Savings |
| 20. [COMPANYNAME] Racing Newsletter | 20. You Asked For More… |
| * Study only included campaigns sent to at least 100 recipients. | |
See the trend there?
All the great open rates had pretty darn basic email subject lines (but the thing is that they were timely).
That data taught me a lesson, how about you?
Let us know how you’ve been doing on building your lists in the comments below, and we’d love to see your website and a few notes about what’s been working really well for you… or any challenges you’re experiencing.
Next week we’ll be looking at a few of those challenges live with our members on the Coaching Call, and we’d love to see you there!
If you’re a member, definitely sign up now for next week’s live webinar, and if you’re not a member, watch this demo now to learn how we help our members to get killer online marketing results.