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Every day, finance influencer Ellie Diop, aka @ellietalksmoney, helps women start and scale their businesses after doing the same for herself.
Ellie turned a $1200 pandemic stimulus check into a million-dollar business in just 10 months and helps other women do the same. “We’re focused on teaching women how to get funding and build wealth with their business,” says Ellie. “I love what we do.”
One of her secret ingredients for scaling her own business so quickly? Email.
“I’ve been using Kit since I started,” she says. “It’s always been super user-friendly and integrates with all the other platforms I sell on. It’s got so many great tools to help grow your email list.”
Now, she has an email list of 62,000 people interested in her business, investing, and personal finance tips. Here’s how she uses Kit to keep growing:
Building an email list to 62,000 from scratch
Ellie uses a combination of social media and a series of free offers to build her email list from scratch in 2020 to a 62,000-strong list in 2023, treating email as the first “product” they purchase.
“Whether you sell physical products or digital courses, you need to market your email list as an offer in your content,” she says. “Those people that sign up are truly an audience that you own, rather than followers.”
With Kit, you can easily track subscriber growth month over month.
She promotes her email list at least three times a week on social media and has several free offers to encourage followers to join her list, netting 20,000 new subscribers in the past year:
- Free live webinars teasing content from her courses
- Free workbooks that go along with YouTube videos
- Giveaways for free coaching, products, or other partnerships
Of these, the most successful is her webinar series. “These free webinars vary on topics based on what my followers want to know more about,” says Ellie. “Last week, we did a free webinar on business credit with 4,000 registrants. Some of those are already on the email list, but about 50% of them are brand new. I run these webinars every week, alternating live and recorded versions.”
Ellie hosts her webinars on WebinarJam, which integrates directly with her Kit landing page. That way, any new registrant is automatically added to the email list and can get reminders about attending the webinar or watching the recording.
Kit’s easy-to-use landing pages integrate with multiple webinar providers.
What matters with these webinars is consistency and alignment. “Before I create a webinar, I do a series of polls in my stories or email list, so I know exactly what my audience wants help with. For example, as we entered into a new year, many people wanted to know more about getting funding.”
Leading up to each webinar, Ellie promotes registering on her Instagram and TikTok channels.
Instead of a complicated call to action, she asks followers just to DM a specific word and then uses a third-party app to auto-reply with the link to register.
A daily email flow to increase engagement
Once someone subscribes to her email list, they receive several email flows powered by Kit Automations. First, a five-email welcome series to introduce them to Ellie’s brand and products:
- The first email welcomes them more generally
- The second email talks through Ellie’s background and story
- The third, fourth, and fifth emails advertise an offer and showcase testimonials
“Once they finish the welcome series, they’re dropped into our regular email flow,” says Ellie. “Every week, we focus on a particular topic. We sell one to two products one day out of the week, and the other emails drive subscribers toward other platforms like YouTube.”
At least once a week, though, Ellie makes sure to talk to her audience and solicit feedback. This takes advantage of the intimacy of the inbox. Unlike social media, where followers know it’s a broadcast, email has the chance to feel like you’re being spoken to directly. Says Ellie, “Typically, we ask the audience for feedback between two things, like cover art for a new product or a new YouTube topic. Those get a ton of engagement.”
The other way to increase engagement is to get real. It may seem simple, but you have to remember why your subscribers signed up in the first place: You. “When I talk about my story or lessons I’ve learned, I get a ton of replies,” she says. Typically, she sees an open rate of 45%, well above the industry average.
Using segmentation to nudge toward the sale
With an email list as large as 62,000, Ellie and her team use Kit’s segmentation and tagging features to deliver more targeted messages outside of their weekly flow. While some of these segments are demographic — for example, Ellie runs a second community just for moms — generally, the team focuses on behavior.
“One of our segments we do is for people who click on our sales emails but don’t purchase for whatever reason,” says Ellie. “For them, we send them into a deeper automated sequence for a week or two about the product to convince them to buy.”
This behavioral-based automated sequence is easy to put together in Kit.
Ellie’s team runs this sequence every time they send a sales email, and the six-email sequence runs until they purchase or the two-week time limit passes, which drops them into a different, softer retargeting campaign.
“We include testimonials about the product, ask them if they have any questions for us, give them a few examples of what they’ll be able to do once they enroll, and then on the last day, we offer a 10% coupon to sweeten the deal,” says Ellie. “We find that after two weeks if they haven’t purchased, we give them a break before restarting the sequence.”
Email is the secret to success
While she’s built her business primarily through social channels like Instagram and YouTube, it’s email that’s the channel she cites as key to her success. “Followers are great, but they’re just followers,” she says. “You don’t own them.”
Instead, she recommends investing in a marketing channel you do own. Anyone that opts in to an email list is someone raising their hand and saying, “Hey. I want to know more.” That’s the kind of person that will ultimately decide to purchase one of your products.
With Kit, you can easily create landing pages for freebies and webinars, send automated sequences to capture your audience right when they’re most excited, and sell your digital products directly — all in one platform.
Says Ellie, “Email is really a best-kept secret.”
