Episode #92: My Email List Shrank (Here’s What I’m Doing About It)

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:00]:
I’m about to share something vulnerable with you and that is the fact that my email list has not been growing. In fact, it has actually been shrinking. So in this episode, I’m going to walk you through exactly what has gone wrong and the strategy that I am using to turn it around. Welcome to the Soulful Sales show where we talk about believing in the value of your offers, getting them in front of your right people, and selling more of what you do in your unique way.

Hi and welcome back to another episode of the Soulful Sales Show. There was an unexpected week’s break because I lost my voice and I could not record an episode. But we are back and I am going to talk about the fact that my list shrank quite a bit in April. I ran the numbers and I was shocked at just how much it shrank.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:00:48]:
But actually there are very good reasons for it and I have a lot of things in place to make up for it. And I thought that this would be a great opportunity to talk about those feelings that can come up when the list shrinks and the strategies that we should all have in place to make sure we are always reaching new people in our businesses. Okay, so what actually happened now? It’s not actually as juicy or scary as I may have made it sound.

It makes complete sense actually that my list shrank in April because in March I had run the Soulful Sales Summit. And it’s really, really normal when you do a list building event, especially on the scale of a summit. So on average my summits bring in around a thousand new subscribers. So more than that sign up for the summit. But on average around a thousand are usually new to my list.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:01:42]:
Really, really normal that not all of those new to me people are going to stay after I host an event like that. So I always expect a drop after the summit. Whether it’s because people signed up, forgot about it, didn’t know what they signed up for and just unsubscribed or they signed up, they just wanted the summit and then they were done and unsubscribed. It’s all okay, it’s all expected, it’s all very, very normal.

So the first point I want to make is that if you do host your own summits, bundles or collaborations that bring in a nice chunk of people, whenever you do anything that brings in a nice chunk of people, you are always going to have a little bit of a increased exodus of some of those people afterwards. And it really is nothing to wor worry about. There’s nothing that I would necessarily do differently in the case of this. So what I do for my summits is and bundles is I have a little bit of an introduction to me and what they can expect.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:02:35]:
When I’m hosting the summit, I send them one email after the summit is over. I make sure I weave myself into the summit itself so that people get to know me as well as the other speakers. And then I send one email just after the summit has ended, letting them know what to expect and that they’re free to unsubscribe if they want to. And if I am part of someone else’s summit or a bundle, then I have a welcome sequence that introduces myself before I add them to my main list. So basically I wouldn’t necessarily have done anything differently.

I think if as long as you’ve got something like that in place, you are doing the right things and it is very, very normal for people to drop off after you’ve had a bunch of people come in. Having said that, what I realized recently was that I have not been paying enough attention to my numbers. So one thing I noticed when I did my end of year review and yearly plan this year was the fact that I have written down an email list growth goal for probably at least two years, maybe three years in a row.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:03:35]:
And I still have that goal. But my email list has kind of stagnated over time, which means that when you count the regular unsubscribes and the new subscribers I’m getting, it kind of cancels each other out, which is not bad. What would be bad is if my list was shrinking over time. So at least I am bringing new people in to cover the people that are leaving. But I haven’t seen serious growth now for a few years and that has frustrated me somewhat. And what I realized when I checked the numbers, I realized that my list has really shrunk in April, which was making me feel a bit nervous at first. But like I said, it was really explained by the summit was that I do need to be more mindful of what is going on. As in, I need to be looking at these numbers more often and I need to be more intentional about growing them and not just do what I’ve always done, but if I want to really ramp things up in terms of my email list and I need to ramp things up in terms of how I’m bringing people in.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:04:38]:
So the point I really want to make here, for all of you listening as well, is something that I see often, especially in my Soulful Sales Society membership, is that a lot of us are focused on selling to our audience or nurturing our audience, but not enough on growing our audience. So we might be trying to sell the same thing over and over again to the same audience.

Now, I don’t think it’s bad to do that. In fact, I’m a big advocate of launching again and again to your audience because that’s how we learn, that’s how we tweak, that’s how we test different, different ways of launching. And on one launch can be different to the next for unexplained reasons as well. So it is worth relaunching. However, it’s really, really important to focus also on growing our audience. Not just the nurturing and the selling, but growing and reaching new people.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:27]:
Now, I have always been focused on growing. I am usually taking part in other people’s collaborative events. You know, at least once a month. I run my own events. I am working on Facebook ads and all of this. So I do have factors in place to make sure that I am always growing. But I really wanted to point this out and I know it can be a lot to think about sometimes when we are, you know, at capacity and we’re selling and we’re doing all the things. But you really do need to be focused on growing.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:05:56]:
So if you’re listening and you’re thinking, you know what, I don’t think I have been as intentional as I could be, then I want to encourage you to get out there, take part in some sort of collaboration, get visible in front of other people’s audiences is probably the best shortcut that I can give you and or pay for advertising. So when it comes to me growing my list, one of the things that I implemented as soon as I realized how much I was not keeping on top of my numbers is I built myself a dashboard. And this is something that past me would never have thought I would be capable of. So I actually used Claude to help me build automations in air table that pull in data from my Kit account.

So Kit is my email marketing service provider to update twice a month to let me know which which forms are paying off the most. So AKA which avenues people are subscribing from and my overall list health in terms of growth and unsubscribes and all of that. So the thinking behind that is I just need to have the numbers more visible because if I can’t see it, I can’t fix it. If I’m not seeing that things are shrinking, I can’t do anything about it and be more intentional.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:07:16]:
And grow more, or if I can’t see what is bringing people in, then I don’t know what’s working and I don’t know what to double down on. So this is something I’ve implemented with Claude’s help. And speaking of Claude, I do have some very exciting AI slash Claude resources coming up, which hopefully you heard me talk about in the intro to this episode. If not, check out the show notes. But yeah, the first thing that I’m doing to up my game when it comes to growing my email list is actually being more intentional about having those numbers visible and checking them more often.

Now, obviously I can go into my kit account and check all the stats there, but the idea is that the dashboard does some of the thinking and analysis for me. That was another element of this, by the way, that I didn’t mention. But Claude is pulling the data and giving me a summary in kind of human language, a kind of ironic way to put that, since it’s a robot giving it to me.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:09]:
But it’s not just giving me numbers. Basically it’s saying, oh, there was a real shift in how many people came through this form compared to last month, or you seem to have had a lull in this week or whatever. Actually more detailed than that. But that’s the kind of example of the language it is using, which is really, really helpful for me. I often struggle to keep on top of stats and actually use them properly. It’s always been a weak point for me because it just feels overwhelming and too much. And this is one area that AI is really, really helping me in. So I’ve set it up to keep my email growth more, you know, front of mind to make sure that I’m more intentional about it.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:08:46]:
And actually something I talked about way back on the podcast was when I started tracking my income and my money more, I found that it was a massive motivator for my income and my sales actually growing. So hopefully the same will apply to my email list. Now in terms of actually growing that list, I’m going to keep doing what I have been doing before. I am going to make sure I keep participating in aligned collaborative events. But one thing I’m going to do to up my game when it comes to those events is update the post event welcome sequence. So I mentioned that I do send a sequence when people find me through bundles and summits, but I have not updated this sequence in several years now. And I think things have really shifted. My business has shifted and the online landscape has shifted.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:09:32]:
So that is something that I’M doing to make sure that I’m calling in the right people and that what I’m saying they’re going to get from me is actually what they expect and what they get. Because if there is a mismatch between what they think they’re getting and then you send them something else, it’s probably just one of the another one of the reasons that will lead to more unsubscribes and cancellations.

Now unsubscribes, by the way, are not bad. We want the wrong people to unsubscribe, but of course we want to do as much as possible to, to connect with the right people so that they know who we are and that they know we are for them. So that’s my thinking with the welcome sequence. I also have an AI bot now to help me with welcome sequences is actually for sale on my website. If you go to links.ruthpoundwhite.com AI forward slash shop, you will come to my bot shop. And that has all the AI tools I’m using, including that welcome Sequence builder.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:26]:
So AI is making it really, really much easier. Now I will add the caveat here. I never just use exactly what AI gives me word for word. I am always editing it with my voice and my personal anecdotes that AI could never know about me. But I have trained Claude very, very well on my own voice and style of writing and all of that. Again, I have something coming up which is going to help you if you want to train your Claude on your brand so that it actually gives you results that feel like you. So check the show notes for the link for that. So.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:10:59]:
So yeah, keeping the numbers front of mind, rebuilding the welcome sequence, I’m also bringing in a new arm and this is something that’s already been there. But through going through the numbers and having AI evaluate them for me, I realized just how much of a difference this has actually made that I wasn’t actually aware of before. And that is people joining my list from my school community. So I started my school community a few months ago. I have a ZAP set up in Zapier that automatically when someone joins me, that my community adds them to my email list as well. Which I very much recommend, by the way, because building a community is great and growing. That is great. But you want to, you know, back up that asset and have people on your email list as well.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:11:44]:
They can always unsubscribe. I didn’t realize just how many people had come in through there until I had AI analyze my results. And this has been something I have been meaning to put more intentional effort into for a while. So my school community is definitely I’m definitely gonna tie that into my list growth. And the bonus of having my email list as at the core of everything I do is that all marketing activities lead back to my email list. So focusing on growing my free community also leads back to my email list and it’s win win, basically. And the school community, by the way, if you’re not in there yet, is called quietly ambitious. You can go to ruthpoundwhite.com forward/newgroup to join.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:12:23]:
There’s and I actually just hosted a free training on my Claude workflow and how I got it to basically run my entire sale, including creating sales pages, checkout pages, giving me step by step action steps that made it way less overwhelming. The replay is limited. So join the group now if you’re interested in watching that. And then of course there are Facebook ads now. I’m I almost don’t want to talk about it because I’m feeling kind of frustrated and finding it hard at the moment, as people in my extra 10k experiment will know. And again, I’ll link to that in the show notes. But I’m not giving up. I am very much determined to find a working Facebook ad funnel.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:01]:
Now. For a while I was growing my leads through Facebook ads really, really cheaply actually. But I turned it off because absolutely zero of those leads ended up buying. So the thing about growing your list is that it can be a bit of a vanity metric. It felt really good for me to see I had all these new leads coming in all the time from the Facebook ads. But again, looking at the numbers is key because when I dove into them, not a single one of them had bought any thing. Which is wild because I had well over a thousand leads from this ad. I had got it down to less than a dollar per lead.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:13:34]:
This was on a Facebook ad form, but it wasn’t paying off for me. It wasn’t worth the spend when no one was buying from me. So I’m really, really determined to get a new Facebook ad funnel up and running that not only is bringing me all the leads, but also is leading to sales. But you’ll have to watch this space as I figure it out. And if you have done Facebook ads yourself, you’ll know if you it’s not as easy as some people make out and it’s very easy to spend a lot of money very quickly. So watch this space and join the extra 10k experiment if you want to hear more behind the scenes of what I am trying, what is working, what is not working and follow my progress there.

So that is what I am doing in terms of keeping my email list growth front of mind, being more intentional about what I’m doing, improving some of the things I’m already doing instead of just keeping on the same and expecting different results. I really want to encourage you to prioritize your list growth if you’re not already or just do one thing to elevate what you have already been doing and that one thing could even just be checking your numbers and actually making decisions based on real numbers, not just guessing and also having the spikes from running.

Ruth Poundwhite [00:14:43]:
An event like a summit or a bundle is great, but pay attention to what is happening afterwards. Don’t spiral about people unsubscribing after an influx because it’s normal, but build those systems systems in place. Put those welcome emails in place, put the right fit offers in place to help improve the chances of those people becoming clients over time as well. And check the links in the show notes for those AI resources that have coming up and hope to see you there. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of Soulful Sales. If you have a moment to rate and review, know that it really does make a difference and if you would like to get carry on the conversation then you can connect with me in the free community@ruthpoundwhite.com community or my personal favorite, join me inside the Soulful Sale society membership@ruthpoundwhite.com membership and keep doing what you’re doing because your work really does matter.