Gillian Perkins makes multiple six figures working only 20 hours per week and says setting up the right automations in Kit is the single best tool that’s helped her work less and scale her impact.
This is how she does it.
The challenge: Slow growth on social media
Gillian Perkins started a digital marketing agency in 2017 but soon realized it wasn’t the right business for her.
My personality was not quite suited to doing service work for clients. It didn’t really play to my strengths. I was an educator at heart.
A longtime music teacher, she wanted teaching to be at the heart of her business, especially when she realized the ads she was placing for her clients would only take them so far; what they really needed was better positioning and, sometimes, better products.
I could run ads for them and get impressions on those ads, but at the end of the day, I couldn’t guarantee people would buy their products. I wanted to teach them what they needed to change to be able to see a lot more success.
What did they need to change?
A lot of them conceived of a product idea and created it without getting outside feedback.
Gillian pivoted her business towards teaching people how to validate their products through a program called Validate and started a membership called Startup Society.
To grow her business in the early days, she tried to grow an audience on social media but struggled.
When you’re trying to build your audience on social media, it can feel like two steps forward, one step back, where one day you’re getting more reach, and your content is spreading and even maybe going a little viral.
But then that stops.
And yes, you still have some followers, so I suppose you still made progress, but you’re not getting many likes on your posts anymore.
And there’s little you can do to affect that.
The solution: Build an audience using email
Then she heard a podcast episode where Pat Flynn interviewed Nathan Barry, the CEO of Kit, about email.
I immediately thought, “I need this.” I wanted to own my audience, not just be building it on some other platform.
I liked that Nathan was a real person. It was a small company, and I could tell he was passionate about making the software as good as it could be, so it was an easy yes.
The strategies: Patience, YouTube CTAs, creator partnerships, and tagging
1. Patience
Gillian signed up for Kit and started growing her list through self-publishing a book. Email growth was slow initially, but she prized consistent growth over sudden growth.
I was only getting a handful of new subscribers each month, but I still loved that I was able to make steady forward progress.
I found it very encouraging that even though it was very slow at first, I never went backward. I was always slowly growing my list bigger and bigger.
It would be baby steps forward, and then something would work, and I’d take a big leap forward (like self-publishing my book on Amazon, doing a podcast interview, writing a guest blog post, doing a lead magnet swap, or posting a YouTube video that took off). That was really encouraging. Slowly, those successes started happening more frequently until the successes became the norm.
And then my list was growing by hundreds, if not thousands of subscribers every month.
2. YouTube CTAs
To grow her email list now, Gillian primarily uses YouTube.
For a long time now, YouTube has been my number one list growth strategy.
I’ve found YouTube viewers convert into email subscribers and paying customers at much higher rates than on any other social media platform that I’ve tried and much higher than organic traffic from Google.
For example, if a thousand people visit a blog article, 10 of those people might sign up for my email list, and that’s if a nice lead magnet is offered to them. So one percent of blog visitors might sign up for my email list, and that’s healthy.
But, on the other hand, if a thousand people watch a YouTube video, 100 of those viewers might choose to sign up for my email list. So, the healthy opt-in rate we strive for is 10 percent, and I’ve seen it be even higher than that. That’s been my perennial tried and true strategy that has added hundreds of thousands of subscribers to my email list.
3. Creator partnerships
Cross-promotions with other creators Gillian loves have also been a huge driver for list growth.
They share my lead magnet with their audience, and I share their lead magnet with my audience, and we both grow our audiences at the same time. That’s worked really well and is something I’m working on scaling even further.
To build partnerships like this, Gillian says:
Focus on quality, not quantity, when creating content. People and brands are way more likely to collaborate with you if your content looks professional and high-quality. A pretty website might not make a successful business, but…it helps a lot.
She also says she started by reaching out to brands and partners with small audiences, and then worked her way up to creators with larger audiences.
4. Tagging
Once people are on Gillian’s email list, she uses tags and automations in Kit to turn subscribers into customers on her own terms, and theirs.
One thing I do in Kit that has a really big impact on my revenue is tagging. In my evergreen sales funnels, I have a system where I typically do not try to sell to a lead unless they click a link that indicates that they are interested at that time in maybe buying it.
Gillian has an automated email sequence of valuable free educational content that occasionally promotes her evergreen webinars or waitlists for her programs. If someone clicks on a link to sign up for a webinar or a waitlist, she has another automation set up to tag them as a potential interested buyer.
And what that tag does is it bumps them over into a sales automation. So the product will go on sale for that specific customer at that specific time, when they’ve indicated that they are most interested in buying and they are engaged at that time. We see a much higher sales conversion with that strategy.
One of her automations selling her YouTube course, Creator Fast Track, brings in about $10,000 per month.
The result: Earning multiple six-figures working less than 20 hours per week
Gillian’s current email list consists of over 60,000 highly engaged subscribers.
I have probably gotten at least 200,000, if not more, over the years, but we are very diligent about list cleaning. Keeping my open rates high is very important to me.
At least twice a year, we do a thorough list cleaning using Kit’s guides and automations which have been really helpful and made the process simple.
Having such an engaged list that’s still consistently growing, as well as custom tags and automations, has led her to consistently bring in six figures while working less than 20 hours per week.
But for Gillian, it’s less about the money and more about the time her business gives her, the same kind of time she wants to give to the audience she serves.
I run my own business and work from home because I have five kids, and my highest priority is being a great mom to them. My mission in my business is to teach people how to start online businesses, and the motivation behind that is most of my audience are parents.
I want to enable them to spend as much time with their kids as they can, and Kit helps me do that.
If I didn’t have Kit, I would not be able to communicate effectively with the hundreds of thousands of people in my audience at all. It would simply be impossible.
Isa the Senior Writer at Kit and an award-winning writer, author, and producer who has profiled incredible creators and artists including Oscar, Grammy, Emmy, and Tony winners. When she’s not writing she’s probably walking her dog Stanley, working on her next book, or listening to the Hamilton soundtrack for the 300th time. (Read more by Isa)
