How to Grow Your Interior Design Mailing List
You have a great lead magnet on your website. It has the perfect placement, it is targeting your ideal client, and it looks amazing. But... No one is signing up for it. In fact, you've got only a few new email subscribers over the past several months, and you are getting a little worried.
If this describes you, stick around. In this blog post, I'm revealing the three primary actions you need to take in order to get people to sign up for your interior design mailing list. You already know this, but I'll say it anyway: You can't set it and forget it. No matter how wonderful your lead magnet is, you still have to promote it in order for it to do its job.
How to Encourage More Signups for Your Interior Design Mailing List
As a designer, stager, organizer, or window treatment professional, you didn't exactly sign up to become a full-time marketer when you started your business, but I'd wager you often feel like marketing is ALL. YOU. DO. So, when you heard about lead magnets, you might have thought,
"Oh good, finally something that will work in the background for me."
Can something be both true and false at the same time? Maybe. Think of it this way: You don't have to push your car down the road. It moves with a little pressure from your foot on the accelerator. Your lead magnet is the same way. Give it the right fuel and motivation, and it will be much more successful than if you just let it sit on your website untouched.
For those of you who are wondering what the heck a lead magnet is and why you should have one, let's pause for a minute. A lead magnet is a fancy term for "what bait can we use to convince someone that they should give us their email address?" Because that is a long name 😉, we just call it a lead magnet.
If you aren't sure why you'd want to capture the contact information of potential new clients coming to your website, especially if you are already busy, consider the feast-to-famine cycle. Design firms, in particular, have the ability to run solely off word-of-mouth referrals for years, decades even. However, those referral sources do dry up. They aren't endless.
Being able to capture the contact info of potential new clients on your website and add them to your interior design mailing list allows you to send a mass email once a month, priming these leads to hire you once you let them know you are taking on new clients. This also allows the other people on your interior design mailing list (friends, family, past clients) to forward your mass emails to other people outside of your list. This happened to one of our clients recently and she ended up landing a project for $300K. All from one, simple email newsletter!
As a business owner, you have more control than you realize over how fast your business can grow. If you set up a sales funnel, which includes a lead magnet, you will be strides ahead of your colleagues who just wait for the next referral. Because not everyone who visits your website will be ready to hire you or even book a discovery call, offering them a freebie in exchange for their email address is a smart, ethical way to increase your potential client base, sell packages, sell products, sell consults... You get the picture.
But how do you get people to sign up for your lead magnet? Let's talk about it.
#1) Share your lead magnet on social media.
Even if you use only one social platform for your business — which should be determined by your ideal client's social habits — you need to post about your lead magnet once or twice per month. These posts can take on a variety of formats, such as...
A screenshot image of your freebie's cover
A mock-up of your freebie on a tablet, as a physical book or magazine, etc. (these can be created in Canva)
A short video of you that lives on your feed and introduces the lead magnet
You don't have to do all of these at one time; start with the one that is the easiest for you to accomplish and then commit to portraying a different format every month or so. Perhaps you do a video one month and a mock-up the next month, etc.
#2) Add your lead magnet opt-in to the end of each blog post.
Blogging is the best way to increase your SEO, which naturally increases your website traffic, which in turn increases the number of qualified people who will see and sign up for your lead magnet. Everything is connected! Your marketing is like one big domino game; each action impacts the next and even determines whether it will be successful.
If you choose to blog, do so consistently, even if that means you are blogging only once per month. One post a month is enough to help your SEO, as long as your blogs are formatted properly and relevant to your ideal client. For more on proper blogging basics, read my blog post: How to Easily Write a Blog Post.
Each blog post you write should end with a link to your lead magnet or an actual lead magnet signup form. For most people, using a link is faster and easier. You will need the direct link to the signup form itself or the direct link to a landing page on your website that contains the signup form.
#3) Pin your lead magnet in various formats on Pinterest.
Pinterest is amazing for SEO and website traffic. Often, a pin from your website will rank higher than your actual website. Weird, huh? I think Pinterest and Google are secretly married at this point or something like that. They are both search engines committed to helping users find what they need, versus social platforms that are blatantly committed to holding users hostage inside their app (I'm looking at you, Instagram!).
To create a variety of pins for your lead magnet, follow this structure:
Create a mock-up of your lead magnet cover on a tablet or smartphone or magazine
Create a spread of your lead magnet pages in a vertical orientation on a solid color background
Create a video (hold your phone vertically) of yourself as you talk about the lead magnet and how it will help people who opt-in
The great thing about pins is that they are evergreen and tend not to get buried in a feed the way a social media post does. Simply create a handful of pins for each lead magnet you offer (you might only have one lead magnet — totally fine) and pin them to your business Pinterest account. Make sure each pin links directly back to your signup page, landing page, or opt-in form.
Your lead magnet wants to work for you around the clock. You just need to promote it in the right places so it can do its job. If you need a lead magnet or graphics to promote that lead magnet, check out the resources below.
Resources
Smart Mockups: Create mock-ups of your lead magnet on devices or physical materials.
The Socialite Shop: Get editable lead magnets that include text and images and are easy to customize.
