How Pinterest coach Cara Chace uses opt-ins and evergreen automations to grow her audience

Many creators build a business because it feels like a better fit for their lifestyle than any other job out there.

This was the case for Cara Chace, who left her career as a Special Agent to build a digital marketing agency. She then narrowed her focus to Pinterest and created the Pin Power Method, a 12-month marketing program she teaches to busy entrepreneurs.

The best part: she markets and grows her Pinterest membership on autopilot thanks to Kit’s automation capabilities. This has freed her up to create a new business avenue: Work Better Live Well, where she shares ways to work efficiently.

“I feel called to share what I’ve learned as an online entrepreneur, because growing a business, working from home, building a side hustle—it’s hard,” says Cara.

For Cara, it’s about finding the tools and systems that help her work smarter, not harder, so she can make a living doing what she loves, even with a compressed schedule.

How Cara Chace uses Pinterest opt-ins to grow an engaged email list

Cara used to be on a content treadmill, publishing one blog post a week and running through a long checklist of ways to promote each one. Now she’s figured out how to turn her Pinterest traffic into a hands-off email list growth machine.

Here’s how she does it:

Create valuable incentives that send her audience to her marketing funnel

After a while, Cara learned that 80% of her traffic was coming from Pinterest.

I realized I was giving all the goods in this post, and people were consuming it and bouncing off because I don’t have anything for them to do right after. So I created a free PDF opt-in about the nine things your social media manager should be doing (this was before I niched into Pinterest). This simple action kickstarted my email list growth.

From there, Cara knew she needed to refresh her approach to creating and promoting content. She says, “None of the Pinterest strategies matter if you’re not doing anything with the traffic Pinterest gives you.” For her, Pinterest simply happens to be the tool she uses to direct people into her funnel.

Everything I pin on my Pinterest leads to a blog post or a landing page with an opt-in that builds my list. Each pin is part of a funnel that supports my business.

An optimized Pinterest profile, regular pinning, and tying every pin to a relevant incentive for readers helps Cara grow her email list consistently:

Pro tip: Cara also makes sure to clean out cold subscribers several times a year.

I want my list full of people that are engaged and excited about what I’m sharing. I don’t want people who aren’t interested, other than grabbing a freebie at some point.

She loves using Kit’s done-for-you automation for cleaning out cold subscribers.

Grab the Cold Subscriber Re-engagement template

Set up evergreen automations and sequences to pitch products on autopilot

Cara’s approach to marketing her Pinterest program is an example of a true evergreen setup.

She promotes her main lead magnet—the 3X Your Traffic From Pinterest free masterclass—across Pinterest and her website.

From there, people can sign up for the masterclass and watch the video on-demand. After that, Cara pitches her paid program with an email sequence about what’s inside the program, testimonials, answers to frequently asked questions, and more.

What happens after?

If someone doesn’t buy the Pin Power Method program, but has opened emails and clicked through to check it out, they get added to a different sequence. It’s an evergreen sequence with weekly emails that keep going for five months and cover different aspects of Pinterest, my own case study, and more.

Cara calls this side of her business an evergreen machine. She doesn’t touch it much because it does an excellent job bringing people into her paid program on its own.

For subscribers, this is either right for them or it isn’t, and both are okay. This sequence and the longer automation help them make that choice.

Send a newsletter to nurture leads for a new business

The automations on the Pinterest side of her business allow Cara to build a new venture from scratch. She started Work Better Live Well to help entrepreneurs plan efficiently, create boundaries, and break free from endless busyness.

Cara is a lot more hands-on in Work Better Live Well. She sends a newsletter every Sunday with a quote, three tips to work better, and three tips to live well:

She grows this newsletter using a newsletter landing page, as well as a free ideal work week printable as an incentive for new subscribers.

Pinterest, of course, continues to be a big part of these efforts:

Work Better Live Well is still in its early stages, and Cara gets to explore how she wants to grow it and promote it—and keep using Kit to hit her goals.

I’m starting to use YouTube as the core content for this side of the business, and building a repurposing system for it—IGTV, Pinterest, transcript for the blog, and more. I’m adding links for freebies in video descriptions. I’m considering live launches for the future, not just the evergreen approach.

The best part is Cara now has a way to set everything up right from the start from incentive to newsletter subscriber. She can reap the rewards of every piece of content she creates because she has an automated system to attract an audience she can help and nurture them into loyal subscribers.

Use Kit to effortlessly grow and nurture your audience with incentives and evergreen automations

Tools like Pinterest can explode the attention your business gets, but it’s up to you to do something with that traffic. Kit can help you turn these visitors into subscribers, so you can keep delivering value to their email inboxes.

With time, you’ll learn which emails your audience resonates with, so you’ll be able to automate emails and entire sequences and do this on autopilot.

Think about it: what will you do with the time you can free up through smart automations?

Click the button below to start building your automations with a free 14-day trial.