How To Build Your Email List Using YouTube
Want to grow your email list on YouTube? As the world’s second-largest search engine, YouTube offers a huge opportunity for business owners to generate more leads. In this guide, we’ll share how to build an email list for your YouTube channel.
Did you know that YouTube is the third most visited site after Google and Facebook? There are 3.25 billion hours of video watched each month. If you aren’t getting a piece of that pie, you are missing out on a lot of email subscribers.
Unfortunately, most YouTube channels aren’t optimized properly for email subscribers.
What is an Email List?
Put simply, an email list is a collection of subscribers who choose to receive content and updates from you via, you guessed it, email.
Sometimes people call email lists “subscribers lists” or “mailing lists.”
You can start an email list or grow your existing email list in several ways that we’ll cover later on.
First, let’s take a look at why email list building is essential for your online business.
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Why Is This Important?
Because email is the #1 channel that consumers use daily and prefer for both personal and marketing communications. That means if you want to use your YouTube channel to sell your products or services and grow your business, then you’ll need to focus on getting viewers off of YouTube and onto your email list.
If you still aren’t convinced, check out these Email Marketing vs Social Media Performance Statistics. I think it will be a real eye-opener for you.
How to Build Your Email List with YouTube
Building your email list will take a few tools, including:
- time
- effort and dedication
- communication skills
- ability to relate to people
- an internet connection with access to YouTube
- one YouTube account
- a word-processing program, such as Word, Notepad, Pages, etc.
These are all things most people have access to. If you do not have a YouTube account, I suggest you make one. It will benefit you in the long run.
Let me show you how to build your email list using YouTube comments in just five simple steps.
1. Put A Compelling CTA In Your Channel Header
Noah Kagan, a multi-million entrepreneur, found that 400x more people subscribe to his channel from his channel homepage, as compared with videos.
He changed his header with social proof, optimized for “people aren’t familiar with his name yet.” His goal was converting the casual YouTube traffic into channel subscribers.
In our case, we want to convert casual browsers into email subscribers. Hence, you can do something like Miles Beckler does in his channel header shown below.
2. Find Relevant Videos
When you are on the YouTube homepage, you can search for any video topics you choose. I recommend you pick a topic based on your industry or genre—these will be your best potential leads to become customers.
The top videos that pop up all look great, but we want a recent video. Try to look for one that was done in the last year. The video I picked is the most recent, at 5 months. Click on it.
If you find a video that doesn’t have many comments, or the comments are older than a year, pick a different video or narrow your search.
3. Create a Lead Magnet
The very first thing you need to do is to create a lead magnet.
A lead magnet is a valuable incentive that you offer to your YouTube viewers for free in exchange for their email addresses. Lead magnets usually offer a small but action-packed piece of downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, a report, an eBook, a whitepaper, a premium video, etc.
The reason this is important is that people don’t simply give away their email addresses for no good reason. You need to motivate them by offering them something that they will absolutely love.
One of the most effective types of lead magnets is the content upgrade. A content upgrade is a lead magnet that you create specifically for a particular YouTube video.
4. Contact or Comment
Now that you have a lengthy list of commenters to choose from, select your best candidates and click on their usernames.
This process is the same process you go through with the YouTube video creator.
What you can expect from this process is to repeat it until you build your list.
- Click on their username
- Click on the About header
- Land on the About page
- Initiate contact
Some commenters may not have an About section set up as part of their YouTube account, meaning there is no easy way to contact them. In this case, it’s best to select your next commenter and continue from there.
5. Add Annotations
YouTube Annotations allow you to layer text, links, and hotspots over your video. These can be used to add a link to your lead magnet with a compelling call to action (and you can customize the way they look too).
Here’s an example of an annotation that tells the viewer to subscribe and learn how to create a sales video.
To create an annotation, follow these steps:
- Go to your channel Video Manager.
- Next to the video you wish to edit, click the down arrow to the right of the Edit button and select “Annotations”.
- Click the “Add annotation” button on the right.
- Click “Apply changes” when you’ve finished creating your annotations.
What is YouTube Handle and How to Change It?
6. Link to Your Website From Your Videos Using Cards
YouTube allows you to link to associated websites by using cards in videos – so long as they meet its community guidelines.
First, you’ll need to join the YouTube partner program and associate your site with your Google account.
Once your website is associated with your account, then you can add cards by going to the Video Manager. Here are the eight steps you need to follow.
Note that you don’t need to always link to the homepage – you can also point your visitors to specific pages (think landing pages) on your website that are relevant to the video.
