Unlock The Power Of Email Marketing: Building An Effective Email List

Be ready to take control of your financial future and join Igor Kheifets, an Amazon best-selling author of the List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire, on a journey to financial freedom and location independence. He shares his secrets to building an effective email list and turning it into a reliable income stream. Create engaging content that converts subscribers into customers and leverage automation to streamline your workflow. An email list is like a personal money tree. Plant it, nurture it, and watch it grow. Learn how to build a profitable email list and leverage its power to generate passive income anywhere in the world.

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Unlock The Power Of Email Marketing: Building An Effective Email List

I’m super excited to bring Igor Kheifets to the show. It is 100% self-serving because what he’s going to talk to us about is something I was terrible at for the first 2/3 of my career.

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Igor, thanks for being with me. I appreciate you giving us some of your time. If you wouldn’t mind, tell the audience a little bit about yourself and we’ll jump in with a whole lot of stories and questions.

Journey Of The Email Millionaire

Thank you for having me. I’m a Ukrainian-born Israeli immigrant who lives in Toronto. Pretty much every dollar that I’ve made, I can track it back to an email that I sent out. That’s because I’ve stumbled into this whole idea that you can build an email list of people who like you and trust you, and then you can email them with different offers. When they buy them, you make money. These could be your offers or other people’s offers. It’s called affiliate marketing.

The list is what I rely on day in and day out to make money. It’s almost my own private ATM that I can cash out pretty much every single day. I’m really excited to share with the audience why they should be building a list and how they could build a list. I’m so excited about it that I’ve devoted a good part of the last few years or so to teaching other people how to do it. I wrote this book, which became an Amazon best-seller, the List Building Lifestyle: Confession of an Email Millionaire. We got a podcast of the same name and a big community as well where we teach people how to build a list.

I do want to go a little bit back to the beginning because you didn’t one day decide to build a list. From what I understand, you had some headaches and challenges along the way. First of all, Ukrainian-born then to Israel, and then to Toronto. Tell us a little bit about that journey.

I was born to Russian parents who lived in Ukraine because my dad was stationed in Ukraine for the Military. He graduated from the Civil War Academy in Moscow when he was 18, 20, or something. He became an officer in the Red Army before the world came down. The thing was that you get stationed somewhere away from home. He got stationed in Ukraine, which was maybe 1,000 kilometers away from where he was born.

That’s where my brother and I were born. We grew up there until I turned about twelve or so. That’s when we moved to Israel because my dad made a mistake. He borrowed $10,000 from a local gangster. Back in the ‘90s in Ukraine, that was the Peaky Blinders era in England in the 1920s. The gangsters are running pretty much everything. If you’ve got a legitimate business, then they’re racketeering and you have to pay them for protection. My dad was no different. He had this little tire shop. Next to it, he built a tiny little restaurant. The people who would come in to fix cars would go and wait in the restaurant and would buy something to eat.

He decided at one point to invest in a farm. You might have heard the term called the kolkhoz, which is the state-owned farm in the Soviet Union. After the union fell apart, these got privatized. He wanted to invest in one and grow produce because he had always been somehow involved with food his entire life. He borrows $10,000 from this gangster and he and a few buddies invest together. Six months later, they discovered that the farm, CEO, the head honcho over there, spent all the money on alcohol, gambling, hookers, you name it. He was blown through all the money.

Back in the day, that’s big money. $10,000 is a lot. People get killed for that. We ended up selling our apartment and the car. My dad was really proud of the car. It was a Ford Sierra 2.3 liter diesel engine. He was a huge fan of Western car manufacturing. He was proud of owning a Ford, which wasn’t a common thing back then. We sell everything, pay off the gangster, and immigrate to Israel because of the Jewish connection that we have. Once we came to Israel, about six months after we moved, he felt sharp pain in his chest. He went to the hospital and they put him into an emergency bypass. He undergoes a bypass or a double bypass. That leaves him pretty much unable to find any decent work for the next ten years.

He pretty much goes on and off these positions such as security guard, assistant chef, and things like that but he’s not able to hold onto a job for more than 3 to 6 months. Either it’s too physically intense and he can’t handle it because of his heart or because of the way the law book is written for employment in Israel. If you get hired somewhere and you remain employed for more than nine months, then they have to lock you in. They’ll give you seniority. Nobody wanted to do that back then, so they would hire you for nine months, fire you, bring someone else in in the meantime, and then they can rehire you again in 3 to 6 months.

That was the journey. We pretty much, most of the time, lived off of my mother’s income. I witnessed my mother wake up at 5:00 AM, always stressed out, always smoking cigarettes, always afraid of the next layoff wave, or pissing off her boss. If there was overtime, she never said no because she was afraid that if she said no, she was going to get fired. That was our life. We were always struggling and always asking our relatives for money. If it wasn’t for my grandmother from my mother’s side, I really don’t know how we would pay rent or survive.

Eventually, we asked her to move in with us so we could all live together and we get a tax discount on the property taxes. In Israel, even if you’re renting, you’re still paying the property tax for that property. As a pensioner, you get a 90% discount. This was like a life hack to try and save some money. For my Dad, the only time that he remembers when things were good is when he was in the Military. He said, “You need to follow in my footsteps.”

I got into the Israeli Air Force Academy. I was around fourteen back then. At fourteen, I’m wearing a full-on Air Force uniform, marching like a soldier. I know how to use a rifle and everything. It was like a school with a Military flavor if you will. The path that my parents wanted me to take was to graduate from the academy, which I did with flying colors, and then go and enlist in the Air Force and become a professional or become a contractor in the Air Force. They didn’t foresee this one thing that happened. That is when I accidentally got my hands on Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. I wasn’t a reader or anything but this book was controversial at the time. My friend gave it to me because his dad read it.

With this friend, I was arguing, “I’m going to school. I’m studying hard to get good grades so I can get a good job and I can be rich.” He said, “There’s this guy, Robert Kiyosaki, who used to be a pilot in Vietnam that says that the richest people in the world are not the most educated ones and that you don’t need to get good grades if you want to get rich. There’s something else to it.” I said, “There’s no way. He’s crazy.” He said, “You should read the book.” I read the book and was like, “Why did no one tell me?”

I was young. I was lucky that I read it young. I immediately rebelled against the system and my parents. I realized that I don’t want to be in the Air Force or the Military of any kind because everyone thinks inside the box over there and executes orders. That wasn’t me. I went AWOL. I did a little bit of time in the Israeli Army prison for going AWOL, but eventually, I got out. It took me about six months, but I got discharged from the Air Force with a profile that said that I was unfit to serve. That didn’t matter because the fact that I wasn’t fit to serve in the Army had no influence on my day-to-day life. I was free to start my business.

The book also recommended that if you don’t have a business idea, a business brain, any funding, or anything like that, you should go into network marketing because that’s where you’re going to learn how to sell. That’s exactly what I did. I went into network marketing. I stumbled between a few companies. One time, I was selling a website hosting. The other time, I was selling a little thing that you put inside your gas tank so your car runs for more. They get more mileage out of your car.

Fuel additives.

I ended up messing up my dad’s car with that. He was very upset. I ended up failing miserably with network marketing. The whole talking to people and trying to recruit them wasn’t me. I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t stomach pitching to people either. I tried doing it on social media, I tried doing it in real life. I pretty much alienated all of my friends. My school friends don’t talk to me probably because of that.

Eventually, I stumbled into another concept, and that was affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing was a little like MLM but it didn’t require you to go pitching to people in pyramid schemes. You could choose different offers to promote and get paid commissions without talking to people because you referred people to websites through a special link that a website owner would give you. If I was promoting a website, CocaCola.com, then my link would be something like CocaCola.com slash ID equals Igor.

That’s where I had my big break, but not until I noticed that what we would call super affiliates, people who make $10,000 or more per month with affiliate marketing, all had an email list. They could make money as easy as sending out an email to that email list and telling people to go buy something or refer them to your free report with a bunch of affiliate links in it. That was a big clue for me. That’s how I got into list building.

I tried every way to do it. For the first eight months, I tried doing it with free traffic exclusively, like posting on social media, blogging, article marketing, you name it. If there was a free way to do it, I tried. It didn’t quite work. I learned that free methods were not so scalable. I had very little control over the results. You could go viral with something but you couldn’t control how that would pan out. I was always at the mercy of some sort of algorithm, be it Google, Instagram, or whatever.

That’s how I got into paid traffic. With paid traffic, even though I didn’t have any money, I got a job and got another job. I worked two jobs to have a little bit of money to invest in my business. I was able to invest a little bit, recoup money through my list, invest some more, and recoup again until I grew my list to a point where I could make more money with one email than I was making working full-time for a whole month at my day job. From there, I kept scaling until I felt safe to finally walk away from my job. Incidentally, I didn’t even have the courage to quit. I was fired because I was bringing my laptop and doing the marketing stuff. Eventually, they caught off with me.

At this point, you were still in Israel?

Yes. I made my first t$1 million with list building while I was still in Israel. I had no plans of moving because my whole family was there. The decision to move out of Israel was a difficult one. It took me several years to make it. That’s because I was really attached to my family. Eventually, with the situation in Israel of never getting better, always at war with somebody, there are internal conflicts, Social Security getting bankrupt every few years, and the taxes are crazy because you have to fund the war machine so the taxes of a small business owner can go as far as 60%, I figured, “I don’t see a future here.”

I ended up moving to Canada. That’s where I had another culture shock. I discovered that Toronto was the fourth most expensive city in the world, I believe. The winter is pretty brutal, but the Canadian passport was pretty good. The fact that the country is really safe and has lots of water. All those things played well into what I needed at the time.

Eventually, I figured that it wasn’t the place for me. I’m working on moving back to Europe. The good thing about it though is that I can choose. I was writing an email about this to my list where I was like, “Whether or not I choose to stay here, it’s my decision. I’m not hostage to any conditions, any work, or anything like that.”

I got a buddy. He’s a lawyer, and he’s a really good lawyer. He’s got a great reputation here. He knows what he’s doing. He’s top of his field. He’s making good money. I don’t know exactly how much, but I’m guessing at least $250,000 a year. He’s a lawyer. He’s got a license to print money. He’s a nice guy, which you don’t get both at the same time, a good lawyer and a good guy. This one is an exception.

He shares all of my sentiments about Canada, the West, where the West is going, and how things are not as good as they used to be, but he can’t leave. His entire client base is here. He has to have meetings in person. He has to be here for this to work. Even during the winter months, he’s not able to leave Ontario for more than a week or two at a time to his house in the Dominican Republic or to go on a vacation in Mexico because he has to be here and work.

I’ve been blessed with having an email list that’s hosted online. My income streams are online. I can pack this laptop and go away and no one would tell the difference. I took 6 or 7 trips that included Orlando, Miami, and Mexico. 3 times, I went to London and 1 time to Bulgaria. Throughout all this time, my income remains exactly where it is. I didn’t have to sacrifice anything. I didn’t have to say no to any money. I didn’t have to necessarily shut the door of the income streams because it’s all online.

I was working on this new training that I’m putting together, the Seven Principles of Freedom. I realized how having an email list really is the embodiment of the whole seven principles, which are low overhead costs, location freedom, global reach, and no fixed hours which means you can set your own hours, scalability, and automation so you can work smart, and multiple streams of income. If you have all seven, you’re a free man who can live anywhere and work out of anywhere like you. Even doing this, you’re in an RV. You’re out there somewhere traveling. You’re your own boss.

The question is, how do you get started? Somebody who has not done anything to build an email list, how do they get started? Is there a fast track to build an email list?

Building An Email List

There’s a fast track if you work with somebody who’s done it many times before and they have a system. It would be very self-serving for me to say that I do. If we ever have time towards the end, I’ll share more about that. Fundamentally, here’s something you need to have in place for you to start building your email list. First off, you need to have an offer of some kind, which means you can’t be building a list in a vacuum. There has to be an offer to a certain group of people or a market. That’s where any business starts. That’s how you make money. You exchange value for money. You exchange solutions, services, or your time for money.

Once you have that and you know your target market, you’d need a capture page. A capture page is a one-page website. It’s usually very simple. It doesn’t need to be super beautiful or anything like that. That is designed to grab the visitor’s email address and exchange for unlocking the offer or sometimes exchange for something of value like a lead magnet or anything else. There are many types of lead magnets, and I’ll cover them in a second.

This page will have a call to action of some kind. For example, the three-step system to fixing acne once and for all if you’re a male over 55 years old with diabetes. I’m being very specific here. You’re making an offer of some kind. The prospect has a problem and you’re saying, “I have a solution to that problem.” To unlock that solution, they need to enter their email in a little box.

I’m sure as you’re tuning in to this, you guys have seen this more than once. It is a page that says, “Enter your email here and we will email you more information.” That’s what a capture page is. Sometimes, people call it a landing page. Sometimes, people call it a squeeze page. It’s what it is. It’s a page designed to ask you for an email address.

Once somebody enters their email address, that email address has to go somewhere. It has to go onto a database of some kind. For that, we use something called an email-sending tool. It’s also known as an email autoresponder. The autoresponder simply means that it can send out emails automatically. When somebody enters their email, it goes through the web ether, that software, which is very easy to use. Usually, it’s an online interface. There are lots of software for that. There are hundreds at this point. Some of the more popular ones are ActiveCampaign, Constant Contact, AWeber, GetResponse, ConvertKit, and Keap. There is no shortage of software at this point.

It goes into that software, and then the software initiates a follow-up email. Even if somebody enters their email into your website at 2:00 AM, then that person will get an automated email follow-up right away even if it’s 2:00 AM. This way, you don’t have to manually sit down and type that email for every person who enters their name and email into your form.

The other thing that this software does is it allows you to send out an email blast. For an email blast, let’s say you’ve built a list. Let’s say you’ve been at it and you’ve spent a couple of months doing it. You have a 5,000-person email list. What you could do by using the email autoresponder software is you can sit down at your computer, click a button that says, “Email everybody,” and type in an email with an offer.

Maybe you say hi. Maybe you send them to an article. It doesn’t matter what the content of the email is. You hit send. What that software is going to do is it’s going to copy that email 5,000 times and send it to all 5,000 inboxes. Imagine if we didn’t have that software. We would have to copy and paste that email 5,000 times.

Back in the day, when we were sending out physical letters, we would have to put in an envelope, write on it, lick, stamp, and do it 5,000 times. We live in an age of automation where we don’t have to do it. In fact, as we are speaking, there’s probably somebody opting into my list and getting an email from me and I’m here. I could easily be on the beach, playing ping pong, or watching a movie with my wife. I could be anywhere.

The beauty of this is that it allows you to make money in an automated way. When they say that having an email list allows you to make money by hitting the send button, that’s exactly what they mean, but more so, imagine the leverage you’re getting. Let’s say, for example, you’ve got an email list of 1,000 people. Let’s say you’ve got an offer or a product that you’re selling for $100 and sold on a page using either a video sales letter or a long-form sales letter. It’s selling.

Let’s say you sit down with your email autoresponder and write an email saying, “I’m running a special on my $100 thing. I’m going to raise the price tomorrow, but in the meantime, we can get it here for only $100.” You send it to 1,000 people. Let’s say only twenty people respond and buy. Out of 1,000, 20 people buy. That means you made, if my math is correct, $2,000 with a single email. This is great but it gets better.

Let’s say you didn’t have a list of 1,000 people. Let’s say you had a list of 5,000 people and your response rates and the price of the program remained the same. You send out an email to 5,000 people instead of 1,000 people. You make five times the sales, which means you make $10,000. The beauty of it is this. It took you as much time and effort to write that email and hit the send button. You didn’t have to work harder. You didn’t have to copy and paste that email 5,000 times. You didn’t have to do anything. The software does all the repeatable work for you.

By having a larger list, you’ve multiplied your income by a factor of five. Imagine if you did a great job with your list building and you grew that list ten times. You send out an email and you’re making $20,000. I know it sounds a little bit far-fetched, but I know people who send out 1 email and bring in $20,000. They can make money on demand.

As do I. I know a fair number of people whom that’s all they do. For myself and for many of my audience, we know it’s all possible, but we don’t necessarily know how to do it. I spent no time the first 2/3 of my career focusing on it. I’m kicking myself as I have a show, products, and other things. I threw away a lot of money by not keeping those contacts for all those years.

We got the general basics of how it works. I’m going to go back to somebody who never did it before. They don’t have a product but they know somebody with a product. They can do an affiliate. I’m assuming you’ve done a lot of affiliate work with your list. How does that work in your world as well as somebody who’s interested in figuring out how to do it?

Affiliate Marketing

I have my own products and services, but I still do lots of affiliate marketing. In fact, I put together a promo where I sent out five emails inviting people to a webinar. By the end of that webinar, I walked away with about $12,000 in commissions. The guy was selling a $1,000 offer on the webinar and I got half the money. He walked away with about $12,000 and I walked away with $12,000, which is not bad for five emails if you ask me. Why not?

Affiliate marketing is when you promote someone else’s product and you get paid a commission if a sale takes place. Let’s say I have a product. Let’s say I have a water bottle that I sell for $50. Amazon will give you a commission for promoting a water bottle but they will give you a 3% commission. There are tons of great and lucrative affiliate programs that will pay you 30%, 50%, 70%, or even 90% commission. If you know where to look for them, usually in affiliate marketplaces like ClickBank, JVZoo, and other similar marketplaces, you’ll see that it’s highly lucrative. All you really have to do is drive a targeted visitor to your affiliate link and you get paid handsomely for doing so by the vendor.

The question then becomes why would a vendor give you the line share of the frontend unit or the price? In fact, there are some affiliate programs out there that pay you an equal or greater amount of money than the purchase price. There are affiliate programs, for example, in the supplement space where you promote a package of three bottles of the supplement. Let’s say it costs $50. You get a flat $70 commission for doing so.

Think how absurd that is. The customer buys something for $50 from a website, and for referring that customer, the website pays you $70. The reason they do that is because the most expensive thing by far for any business is getting a new customer. It’s ten times easier to sell something to an existing customer than it is to convince a brand-new customer to transact with you.

This industry goes back many years at this point. Some of the pioneers were the hosting companies and travel companies. Almost every industry is leveraging affiliate marketing. In fact, I was promoting an affiliate program for a company that helps with taxes, entity formation, and estate planning. You’d think this is one of the most boring things you can talk about, but that company pays 15% to 20% commission for referring somebody to use their services.

Since the most expensive thing that a business does is getting a customer, businesses figured out that they can simplify, streamline, and scale by bringing in affiliate marketers like myself and thousands of other people and rewarding them handsomely for bringing in the customer. They focus on working with that customer and turning them into repeat customers while the affiliate goes on to find the next customer.

That’s why it’s so easy to create multiple streams of income with your list even if you only have one product of your own or no products of your own. There’s no shortage of offers you could be promoting as an affiliate that really fits into the universe that you’re building. For example, if you’ve got a list on the subject of weight loss or building muscle, there are tons of weight loss and muscle-building affiliate programs out there that you can pretty much promote every day if you want to.

For my audience, if you have a list, I am more than happy to talk to you about an affiliation with my No Means Not Yet negotiations course. In this space, a lot of us who have our own shows do swaps and go on each other’s shows. That’s what a lot of it is about. It’s creating those relationships. I’m a firm believer that I’m not going to push a product that I don’t believe in or that is not good for my audience, but I love that aspect of what we do.

No one puts a gun to your head and says, “You have to promote this product. You have to promote that product.” You get to call the shots and say, “I will only promote if the product fits these criteria.” When I got into affiliate marketing, I realized that my list had the firepower to make the sales. It was after the very first and big successful promotion that resulted in me making about 17 sales for a $70 product. I was trying to mail my list and make money, but it wasn’t working at first. You have to hit critical mass.

That day, I was expecting nothing. I sat down and wrote a really heartfelt email to my list, talking about my back pain. Since early age, my teenage years, I’ve had some injuries from playing soccer and basketball. I had back pain pretty much for as long as I can remember. I sat down and wrote this rant about how I was sick and tired of having my back hurt and how it hurts when I’m driving in the car for a long time or when I’m on the couch watching the game. I said, “If you are working a labor-intensive job and you have injuries, I wish you didn’t have to. I wish you could make money from home. This program is something I’d recommend.”

The program was called the Deadbeat Affiliate by Dan Brock. This guy had this gimmick. He is always wearing a bathrobe and socks that are twice the size and always holding a PlayStation controller in his hand. He is making an impression of a deadbeat. He built this amazing offer, Deadbeat Super Affiliate. He launched it, and it was awesome. I said, “I highly recommend you look into this thing. It came out.”

I honestly didn’t expect anything. I went to bed. I woke up the next day and I made seventeen sales. That’s the most I’ve ever made in a day. This is so you understand. At the time, it equaled roughly what I was making a week working in the hotel in Israel. I was housekeeping. I was cleaning rooms and scrubbing toilets. I was like, “There’s no way.” I kept mailing the same offer for a few more days. I kept my emails very personal. I spoke about the things that were dear to my heart. I let my personality shine through the email, and it kept coming.

I even ended up landing somewhere on the top twenty leaderboard and winning a cash prize as well, which was amazing. I didn’t expect this to happen. From that point forward, I became very picky about the products I was promoting. Before deciding to mail anything at all, I would go sign up, get the product myself, use it a little bit, and see if I can submit a support ticket and if I get a response back. I was really vetting everything. If it didn’t pass my BS check, then I didn’t mail it.

Is that what you still do, keep your content personal, or is it different?

Not every email will be all about my personal life, my injuries, or anything, but I am pretty personal in my emails in the sense that I am relatable. In other words, I don’t necessarily show photos of my kids. I don’t tell people what I had for breakfast. The values that I express through my emails are relatable values that I know my audience will connect with.

Even if I say something that I know my audience might not see eye to eye on, I’m still okay with doing that because the worst thing you can do when you have an email is to be what I would say vanilla. If you don’t have an opinion, if you are trying to offend anybody, or if you’re plain and not taking sides of any kind, then nobody’s going to follow you. People want certainty. People want personality. People want to know what you stand for. If that is not shining through your emails, whether in the context of your niche or your personality, I don’t think people will buy from you.

eFarming

I would agree. I have been through several marketing companies over the last few years. It’s all sales and all pitchy. It doesn’t sound like me at all, and it doesn’t convert. I’m a very blunt individual. People who know me personally know that about me. I’m not blunt to be mean, but if I feel something, I’m going to say it. That’s when I usually have the best conversions on anything I’m doing. I’m a real estate investor, first and foremost, so a lot of what I’m doing is buying and selling real estate. I’ve got some products. That’s the next phase. It was maybe before we were recording. You mentioned a word, e-farming. What is e-farming?

E-farming is a term I coined to introduce people to list building. Being somebody who has to go out there and sell people an idea such as, “You need to build a list,” I’ve encountered a lot of resistance. When people hear a list or an email list, they think of spamming people. They think that you’re a nuisance and that you’re trying to intrude into people’s inboxes. That’s not true. We do opt-in email list building, which is permission-based. So we don’t email cold. We don’t get a file with a bunch of email addresses and start blasting them. We don’t do that. We have people come to our landing pages, give us their email, and ask us to send them more information.

The term e-farming came when I was working on a webinar where I wanted to do a big webinar to really make people understand how important it is to build a list. In fact, it’s so important that I even started looking up all the different celebrities that do it. I found that Lady Gaga does it. The guy who married Meghan Markle does it. They got a book or something and built a landing page for that.

President Obama uses it for his charities. He also used it in his campaigns to collect donations. Arnold Schwarzenegger has a big email list that’s all about mental and physical health. The list goes on and on. It goes well beyond the digital marketing space. Anyone who’s anyone, you’ll usually find that they have some kind of an email list. For example, Serena Williams or Venus Williams. I always confuse them. They have a clothing store. They have an email list and they email every single day.

When I was working on that webinar, I had this idea that I’ll call it e-farming, which will stand for email farming because that’s really what we do. We farm emails on the internet, and then we nurture them, grow them, and build a relationship with our audience. Like a money tree, this tree grows, and then we email them with offers. It’s like we’re picking apples. It made a lot of sense to me to draw this analogy to farming. What happens is you sow, nurture, and reap. That’s exactly what I’ve been doing for years.

That’s fantastic. How often do you email? What percentage is content and then offer? Believe me. I have been studying this stuff with my own marketing efforts. If people are getting hit with offers nonstop, they’re going to stop responding. Your response rates go down. You start ending up in spam filters. If you were going to send out 10 emails, is it 9 emails of content and 1 offer? Where’s your sweet spot?

Shattering Misconceptions About Email Marketing

I’m going to shatter some bad beliefs, and maybe even make a few enemies. I send out emails every day, sometimes several times a day, and I pitch in every email. Sometimes, this pitch might be an invitation to a webinar. Sometimes, it’s a pitch to download a book. More often than not, the pitch is to go and buy something. The idea that people get mad at you for selling stuff is only true if they feel like they’re being sold or pressured into something. That’s usually created as a result of having very dry sales content, which is straightforward, “Go buy.”

The thing is that if you only mail content or mail content a lot, then you are creating the opposite effect where they stop seeing you as somebody they should be buying from. You’re almost conditioning them not to buy from you. In the same way that when you’re dating or when you’re trying to court a lady, you can end up in what we call the friend zone by being too nice to her, too caring, and then too timid around her.

Similar to how you flirt with a woman and then you escalate to a date and then beyond, when I email my list, there is a portion where I’m being informative but entertaining but then I transition into a pitch of some kind in every email. In some emails, especially if I’m getting close to a deadline of some kind, I’ll go straight to the point, but not in every email.

Most of the time, I use a technique that’s called infotainment, which I learned from my friend Ben Settle. It’s also called edutainment by some people. This technique means that you express an opinion, pick a fight with an enemy, talk about a common mistake people make, or tell a story. Eventually, you transition into pitching something regardless.

That’s very important because if you don’t pitch your list, they learn to not expect you to pitch them. If and when you finally get around to doing that, they are mad at you. They’re like, “How dare you sell me something?” That’s even worse if you always send out free useful content. The biggest mistake by far is not mailing the list at all, which is the most common mistake and the deadliest one because if you don’t use it, you lose it. The second most common mistake is to send out free, useful, dry content, which conditions the list to put you in what we would call the friend zone.

I like that. It’s fresh for me because it’s something that we’re working on. I have more stuff to talk to my team about, which is fantastic. It’s one of the best parts about being a host. It’s self-serving. I’m not going to lie. I gave questions. I got Igor here. I’m going to ask questions. That’s what we do. I want to be respectful of your time. What’s one question I should have asked you that I didn’t?

You asked some pretty good questions. It’s not a question. It’s more of an issue that we didn’t discuss that I briefly alluded to a moment ago. There’s some sort of mental barrier that people have about list building, and that is this. In my community, I help people build a list. We have many different programs to do it. Sometimes, it’s self-educating programs. Sometimes, it’s done-with-you programs. Sometimes, it’s done-for-you programs. I’ve helped lots of people build a list.

I’ve seen this time and time again where people build the list but don’t email the list. They’re afraid to put themselves out there to the list. They’re afraid that the people on that list will be annoyed with them or be angry at them for, god forbid, pitching them with a product or something like that. That’s a key mistake. Once you start building your list, the most important thing is to email that list every single day. Even if you don’t plan on pitching the list with anything, at the very least, communicate to the list.

Another common thing that happens is when people recognize me as a list builder, they always come to me and are like, “I have this list I’ve had for 5 years with 100 people that I’ve met at conferences or 5,000 people that have downloaded this freebie, but I haven’t emailed it in 5 years, 3 years, 1 year, or 6 months. What can I do?” The sad part is almost nothing. They forgot about you. If you email them, it’s like you’re unwanted or unwelcome. They hit the spam button on you. When that happens, your deliverability goes down. The most important thing, once you’ve started building your list, is to mail the list, and preferably mail the list every day.

Earlier, you described yourself as somebody who isn’t afraid to say what he feels, aka the straight shooter. That’s a great quality for anyone who has an email list. Let’s say you’re a coach or consultant and you can be shooting straight about the work you do with clients to your list. Let’s say you’re a hypnotherapist and you were working with a woman who you’re trying to help quit smoking, but she refuses because she’s hung up on this one belief that smoking gives her a sense of control.

Write a straight-shooting email about that to your list, and that will resonate with many people who read it and have a call to action to talk to you about potentially a free twenty-minute hypnosis session or something like that. I particularly gave an example of hypnosis because one of my friends is a hypnotherapist and he uses list building to get appointments.

I got to know because I’m curious. How big is your list? How many people?

Naturally, when you know how to build lists, you don’t just have one. I haven’t met anyone who said, “I don’t need more money, I’m too skinny.” This doesn’t exist. I have many different lists. They are in the millions. What happens is I clean them, purge them, and try to keep only the most responsive people on the list. That’s because if you’ve got a million records, your email autoresponder software bill will be very high and the email deliverability is becoming challenging because you’re mailing so many people at once.

I’ve learned to remove anyone who doesn’t open my emails after about two weeks and focus on the ones who are most responsive. It’s a couple of hundred thousand people and it’s in different niche markets. Some markets will be smaller than others and you don’t need a big list to make a lot of money. There are some markets where the list of 2,500 people will probably result in you making between $7,000 to about $15,000 a month.

My advice would be to reverse engineer what you want to be making to the list rather than trying to build the largest possible list, if you will. Not every list is equal. Not every subscriber is equal. Some portions of my list are really worth more than others. The value per subscriber per month will be much higher by the factor of 10, 20, or sometimes even 150 compared to some of the other portions of my list.

That’s perfect. That’s a great answer. I know where ours is. You talked about deliverability. We’ve had misguided information, which got our emails blacklisted. There’s a lot more that goes into it, which segues me into you’re willing to give a copy of your Amazon best-selling book to my audience.

I thought you’d never ask. I’d like to give you a free copy of my book, the List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire. You could get it on Amazon if you wanted to. You can go there and get it. In fact, if you’ve got Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime, you can get it for free as a part of that membership. However, if you do that, I will not get your email address because Amazon doesn’t like sharing that information. Guess why?

Amazon emails multiple times a day with very targeted emails for targeted products that fit your profile. I don’t want to feed Amazon more than I have to, so I invite you to go to IgorsBook.com and get a free copy of this book. I’ll print it for free and ship it to you. All I ask is to chip in in shipping handling. If you’re in the US, it’s $10 or less than that. If you’re out anywhere outside of the US, it’s about $20.

For your trouble, what I’ll do is I’ll throw in the audible version of the book, the digital version of the book, capture page templates or landing page templates you can use to build your list as well as several trainings on how to generate traffic. I’ll give you some email templates you can use to load into your automated email sequence and lots more. It’s a bonus package that’s worth $3,200 that I’m giving to you for free to ethically bribe you to get the book from me and not get it on Amazon. It’s IgorsBook.com. You can go ahead and get it.

In order to build my list, I will also have a link at TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/EmailMillionaire. That is a better place to go get it while I build my list. I love it. I appreciate you doing that for my audience and your time. We’ve been going for almost an hour. I could talk to you for another hour, but I know that you’ve got other things to do and so do I. I appreciate everything you’ve talked to us about.

It’s my pleasure. I can talk about this stuff for hours. This is what I do for a living. I truly believe that there’s nothing else out there that encompasses all the seven principles of freedom like list building. It goes into the backbone and foundation of pretty much anything, whether you’re doing a podcast, selling, coaching, consulting, or writing books.

I launched this book. How do you think it became an instant Amazon best-seller? I mailed it to my list and said, “Get this book right now.” I set a three-day deadline because there was a window that you had to go with Amazon. I was then like, “I’ll give you a bonus.” people went in. They bought it and I gave them a bonus. All of a sudden, it’s up there in the top 10, and then it was in the top 3. It was the same week that Gary Vee launched his book. When you have an email list, almost anything you do becomes an instant success. You have a platform to carry out that message, and that’s very powerful.

We’re going to wrap it up. Thanks for being here. To anybody who’s tuning in to this show, also check out Igor’s show, the List Building Lifestyle Podcast. For both of us, go out there, like it, share it, and give us 5 stars or 13 thumbs up. Whatever the platform is, wherever you find us, it helps us to expand our network, which will help you as well. Until the next show, go out there, live your vision, and love your life. We’ll see you next time.

Important Links

• Reicot.com
• Gowvoyage.com
• TheGenerationsOf Wealth/fbGroups
• TheGenerationsOf Wealth/Email Millionaire
• TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/YTChannel
• TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/Instagram

About Igor Kheifets

Igor Kheifets is an amazon best-selling author of the List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire.

He’s also the host of List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to make more money and have more freedom by leveraging the power of an email list. He’s also the founder of Igor Solo Ads – one of the world’s top email traffic agencies.

Igor is widely referred to as the go-to authority on building large responsive email lists in record time. Igor’s passionate about showing people how to live the List Building Lifestyle