Are you struggling to grow your email list? Have you considered hosting an online summit? In this beginner’s guide, we will show you how to use online summits for successful list growth.
In November of 2015, we attended a conference where a speaker presented her favorite list growth strategy- an online summit. At first, we were skeptical and thought it was an old-school approach. But after seeing it done many times online, we decided to give it a try. And we were met with great success!
Here are the tried and true suggestions we followed:
1. Don’t Rush Things
First, we spent about four months letting ideas percolate in a Google doc. This gave us time to play around with different ideas and collect enough information so that we weren’t struggling to find interviews. We were also prepared before reaching out to experts for interviews.
2. Interview a Large Number of Experts
Most large summits are about three weeks long. This allows you to interview a large number of people, which obviously increases the reach of the overall audience. We ended up with 17 interviews and released a different interview each day from June 1-17.
3. Share the Summit Everywhere, Every Day
We blasted social media for three weeks before the summit and the entire month in which we ran the summit. The result? Other people started sharing it too, and there was big buzz around it.
4. Make Your Current List Opt-In
Our goal was to grow our subscriber base but we also wanted to let our current subscribers in on the goodness, without annoying those who may not want a daily email for 17 days straight. We sent a simple announcement to our current list with an easy one-click opt-in.
5. Provide Templates to All the Interviewees
Every expert we interviewed had one job- show up to our interview prepared and share their knowledge. We sent them templates to email their own list, as well as graphics and suggested posts for various social media.
6. Keep Your Emails Succinct
We made each email to the experts as short as possible and gave very clear instructions or requests.
7. Have Something to Sell After the Summit Was Over
After providing a ton of great content and interacting with you regularly, people are ready to buy. And since we didn’t provide anything related to our specific expertise during the summit, we offered an online workshop the following month.
Here’s What We Did Differently:
1. We Didn’t Ask (or Care) About the Size of Anyone’s List
We decided to focus on providing value and variety, rather than going after list size.
2. We Didn’t Sell the Summit Videos
This was more a personal choice but selling the videos would have created more legal hassle and we decided for our first round, everything would be free.
3. We Didn’t Remove Access to the Videos Within 48-72 Hours
We decided to leave all videos up for an entire month, and it absolutely increased the total views.
4. We Didn’t Require Our Experts to Do Any Promotion If They Didn’t Want To
We realized that people hate the “send a minimum of five notices to your email list” type requirement and it makes them say NO. However, they are happy to share when it’s something of value and they see themselves as part of something bigger.
In a nutshell, our approach was to make the summit extremely valuable, easy to attend, and easy to be part of as an expert. If it seemed like something was getting complicated, we stopped and considered ways to simplify it. If we were only doing something because “that’s the way it’s done,” we decided to be an innovator. We also created something we would personally like to attend. If a rule or way of doing things annoyed us, it was out! That’s the whole point of being your own boss, right?
In conclusion, we highly recommend using a summit for list building. Don’t be afraid to do your own thing and follow the above suggestions for successful list growth!
