Q&A: Waitlist Growth, Cold Audience Strategy & "Am I Being A Nag?"

Hi, Kelsey.

My question is, if you had to start creating a waitlist without an existing audience, what would be your focus and how would you prioritize the specific or the different strategies available for audience building? And how long would your warm-up period be before you open cart and make that offer? Thank you.

Hey, Eugenia.

Thank you so much for your question.

I think this is a question a lot of people get, especially when you start growing a waitlist.

It's kind of like, "Where do I start? Where do I begin? How do I make sure that I can get the right people on my waitlist?" So this is a really good, um, question to start with.

Okay.

So first I'd say everyone starts from zero.

We all had a moment in our business journey when the only people who followed us were our mom and our cousin and, like, that random friend from high school that we wish did not follow us.

[laughs] So you're not alone.

And if you feel like, "Okay, where do I begin?" the good news is, like, you do already have people who follow you on your social media, but how do you make sure that they're warm enough to get on a waitlist? And how do you make sure that they're warm enough and interested in your offer? This is actually where a waitlist comes in super handy because [laughs] as soon as you start your waitlist, you're going to see, okay, are people actually joining this waitlist? Are people actually interested in my offer? What questions are people having as they're joining? And that's just going to give you so much juicy information on how to move forward with your messaging, with your launch, like what things to double down on because you're not starting completely from scratch because you actually have followers, you have audience members.

I know you've recently had a baby as well, so potentially you haven't been as on as you normally would be, so you're kind of maybe restarting after a bit of a pause.

The first thing I would do is just give yourself permission not to be everywhere.

You don't need to be on all the platforms.

You don't need to have all of the lead magnets figured out.

You don't need to be posting every single day.

Get really real with your capacity and then look at the data that you have so far as far as where your clients are coming from, who's actually been converting into your offer historically, and double down in those places with the limited capacity that you have.

I know you're in a season where you don't have the space and the time that you maybe once had, obviously as a mom, as a new mom.

So we really want to be real with what our capacity is and therefore what we can actually get done in that capacity.

So I would definitely look at that.

Okay, I have two hours to work every day during my child's nap and after he goes to bed at night, so what are those things, those real n- needle-moving things that I can do during that time? The next thing I'd do is really set a goal for yourself.

So, like, what are the goals that you have for your offer that you're selling and you're launching? And therefore, what are the waitlist goals that you have? Offers typically convert between 7 and 15%.

That's like the benchmark.

So if you wanna sell, say, five spots to your offer, how much do you need to grow your waitlist? Like, how many people do you actually need on your waitlist to convert at that level? That just becomes a numbers game basically.

So instead of being like, "Oh, I need all of these people on my waitlist," maybe you just need like 50 people on your waitlist, and that becomes the entire goal for your warm-up period.