Grow Email List and YouTube TOGETHER

Looking to grow your email list with YouTube? As a small business owner, you probably already know that YouTube isn’t just about growing your audience, right?

(Like you’re not trying to be famous… You’re building your community so you can build your business.)

Discover five easy strategies to build your audience while boosting your email list without breaking YouTube’s rules. In this video, I explain how you can leverage YouTube’s algorithm to build your list naturally.

Plus, learn how to create a funnel that works without needing ads or social media! Whether you’re a content creator or a small business owner, this is a game-changer for growing your email list and business.

VIDEO: Grow Email List and YouTube TOGETHER

Some product links in this post are affiliate links, and I will be compensated when you purchase by clicking our links. Read my disclosure policy here.

Grow Your Email List and YouTube Together: 5 Key Strategies for Success

YouTube is more than just a platform for creating viral videos. It’s a powerful tool to build your community and grow your business. One of the most important steps in expanding your business online is building your email list. This is often described as the “invisible glue” that bridges your YouTube audience to paying clients. However, growing your email list via YouTube can be tricky. due to the platform’s algorithm, which prioritizes keeping viewers on YouTube.

Almost a year ago, I was at an event called BBD Live out in California. I had the opportunity to present a small segment on my “set it and forget it” YouTube funnel concept. A lot of people liked the concept and came up to me afterward.

Typically, with a sales funnel, you bring in traffic at the top and gain customers at the bottom. But I kept getting the question, ‘Where does the traffic come from?’. While it’s obvious to me that the traffic comes from YouTube, it’s not as clear to everyone else.

I’m not running ads to grow my list, which is a common way to drive traffic to a funnel. I’m also not creating reels or TikToks to build my list. The nature of YouTube—and the specific strategies I use and teach—naturally build my list.

If you’re using YouTube as a marketing platform, you’re growing your audience, expanding your list, and building your business. There’s a natural, symbiotic relationship among these elements. Allowing each to support the other: your list grows naturally, and your business grows steadily and consistently.

Why Growing Your Email List with YouTube is Tricky

YouTube is the most powerful way to build your list. But to make YouTube work for you, you have to build your audience and get the algorithm. To build your audience for you, you have to think in terms of how can your content help YouTube win—not just how to grow your list and your business with YouTube.

Otherwise, you risk spending tons of time and energy on videos that actually hurt your audience growth and ultimately don’t contribute to building your list or generating any revenue.

YouTube’s algorithm is designed to keep viewers on the platform for as long as possible. Therefore, when videos constantly direct users away from YouTube—such as asking them to sign up for an email list—YouTube is less likely to promote these videos. If your primary goal is to direct viewers off the platform, the algorithm might see this as a “red flag” and stop pushing your content to more users. This makes it crucial to strike a balance between promoting your business and maintaining positive signals for YouTube’s algorithm.

The good news is, it’s entirely possible to grow both your email list and YouTube channel together without hurting your channel’s visibility. The key is to approach YouTube growth in a way that aligns with its algorithm while subtly driving viewers toward your email list. Here are five easy ways to do just that:

1. Focus on Positive YouTube Algorithm Signals

One of the best ways to grow your channel is to encourage “session starts” on YouTube. This happens when someone starts their YouTube session by clicking on one of your videos, either through a YouTube search or from an external source like an email link. When this happens, YouTube views it as a positive signal because you’re bringing users to the platform. This helps boost the visibility of your videos.

People don’t read emails just for fun, right? I don’t. So those who open them want to hear from you, and those who click through whatever you tell them or direct them to click in emails are doing so because they are interested in what you have to share.

To capitalize on this, whenever you release a new video, let your email list know about it—but not right away. It’s beneficial to wait 24 hours or more before sending that email. When you publish a new video, let some of your most engaged people know there is one. This gives YouTube’s algorithm time to analyze and promote your video to new viewers first. After this period, share your video with your email list and boost your views from your most engaged audience.

2. Use Evergreen Content to Maximize Engagement

Evergreen content—videos that remain relevant over time—are a fantastic way to maintain steady growth on YouTube. By creating how-to guides, tutorials, or educational content, you can continually attract new viewers long after the video has been posted.

One smart tactic is to build an email sequence around your existing video library. This means setting up automated emails that periodically send your subscribers valuable older content from your channel. This keeps your audience engaged with your videos while gradually introducing them to more of your work. Tools like ConvertKit (now branded as Kit) make it easy to automate this process by creating email sequences. You can even organize your content by themes or seasons, ensuring that you’re sending the right videos at the right time.

With ConvertKit, you can send a regular broadcast email to your list. But you can also create an automated sequence—a series of emails that go out in a specific order you set, such as daily, weekly on Thursdays at 7 a.m., or any schedule you choose.

If you create how-to videos or tutorials that show how to achieve specific results, there’s a good chance this will work well. Subscribers will appreciate that you’re selecting the best content from your library—the material you believe will be most helpful for new subscribers—saving them from having to search through your channel or go down a rabbit hole. I teach more about email marketing (ConvertKit) inside Video Brand Academy.

3. Create Lead Magnets that Complement Your Videos

YouTube doesn’t want to send people off the platform, right? They’re not interested in having you say, ‘Go join my Facebook group’—that’s generally discouraged. It’s not ideal to create videos solely focused on directing viewers away from YouTube. However, to get people onto your list, you do need to send them off the platform. This usually means including a link in the description to a page where they can enter their email address to join your list. And most of the time, the reason someone wants to give you their email address is that you’re offering something valuable in return!

If you’re new to email marketing, what I’m referring to is a lead magnet, which could be as simple as a cheat sheet, a checklist, or a guide.

A lead magnet is a free piece of valuable content—such as a cheat sheet, checklist, or guide—that you offer in exchange for a viewer’s email address. This is a proven method to grow your email list, and it works particularly well on YouTube when you tie it directly to your video content.

If you have a series of videos on a particular topic, create one lead magnet that complements all the videos in that series. Mention the lead magnet in multiple videos and provide a link in the description. This way, you don’t have to create a new lead magnet for every video, but you’re still giving your viewers a compelling reason to join your list.

A key point here is not to overwhelm your audience by promoting a lead magnet in every video. Instead, be strategic and only promote your lead magnet when it adds real value to the viewer’s experience. This approach keeps both YouTube and your viewers happy.

4. Structure Your Email Around Your Videos

There are only five elements to an effective email where the call to action is to get somebody to go watch your video.

If you dread writing emails, here’s a simple strategy: Let your videos do the heavy lifting for you. When you create a YouTube video, you already develop key components like a title, description, and opening hook. You can reuse these elements in your emails.

Here’s how to structure a simple email to promote your YouTube videos:

Opening Hook: Use the same opening line as your video to generate curiosity. The first couple of sentences should generate a little bit of intrigue, some interest, some curiosity at the top of your email, and then all you have to do is link to your video.
Video Link: Paste the video link, ensuring it’s clickable with a strong call-to-action like “Watch Now.” When you paste a YouTube link in the email composition area, it automatically pulls the thumbnail, puts a little play button, and makes it clickable – so that’s incredibly easy.
Description: Include a brief description (usually your video description) to give readers more context. It’s a little bit more descriptive of what is happening in the video without giving away everything that’s happening in the video.
Sign Off: Keep it short and personal.
P.S. Section: Add a one-line teaser as a postscript (P.S.), enticing people to watch the video. This could be a condensed version of your video title or a quick benefit of watching the video.

This process ensures your emails are quick and easy to write, while still driving traffic to your video.

5. Strategically Plan Your Video Content to Fit Your Lead Magnet

If you have a lead magnet that converts well, a highly effective tactic is to create content specifically designed to promote that lead magnet. Think about the questions or problems your audience is searching for and create videos that naturally lead them to your offer.

If you have a series of videos like I have a Descript series, basically I have a collection of videos on how to use Descript, so I have a Descript cheat sheet – it’s one cheat sheet.

When you have an established lead magnet that converts—in other words, you know that when people go to the link to download your free offer, they actually enter their email and complete the download, and you’re confident that it’s something your audience finds valuable—then you’re on the right track. If you also know that the leads you gain from this lead magnet ultimately convert into sales for your offer, whether it’s a course, program, digital product, or service, then a smart way to use YouTube to drive more people to that lead magnet is to ask yourself: What topics are people searching for on YouTube that your lead magnet directly addresses, or where it’s the obvious next step to the topic of your video?

You can be very strategic about the content you create by building a series, using the spiderweb strategy, and applying growth strategies from Video Brand Academy to ensure that your content covers topics people are searching for. This approach creates a substantial collection of videos on your channel, giving viewers more content to binge.

By being strategic in this way, you’re providing valuable content that helps your viewers while gently encouraging them to join your email list.

Simplest Way to Generate Consistent Sales

The “set it and forget it” YouTube funnel is the simplest way to generate consistent sales of your offer, right? Some viewers will go from your YouTube channel—specifically, from one of the videos they’re watching—to your landing page, where they enter their email. They may not return right away, but hopefully, they will engage with the next phase of your funnel.

In my case, I have a video I refer to as a ‘secret video.’ It’s not hosted on my YouTube channel; instead, it’s on a landing page, so viewers are still engaging with my content, just not on YouTube. After watching my video, they leave the platform and may not return, which raises a red flag for the algorithm. However, the trade-off is worth it because, first of all, it’s a small percentage of my viewers. I’m not so talented that every single person who watches one of my YouTube videos clicks through to download my cheat sheet—it just doesn’t work that way. So, only a small percentage of people watch a video and then leave to join my “set it and forget it”.

And two, one of the main concepts of the YouTube funnel is you have what I call a lead-getter video pinned at the top of your channel, so I’m not relying on YouTube to promote that video in the algorithm. So if the algorithm is somehow offended that I’m sending people away from the platform – like, ‘I’m not going to promote this video for her, she’s sending people away from the platform’ – that’s fine. I don’t need that. It’s pinned at the top of my channel. It’s a call to action on a whole bunch of my videos.

A Win-Win for YouTube, Your List, and Your Business

The small percentage of people who watch the lead getter and do leave the platform, there’s a segment of those people who become a paying client or customer because I’ve made a sale, like either my “30 Days to a Thriving YouTube Channel” course or my “YouTube Funnel Clinic” course, or maybe eventually, you know, when the doors are open to Video Brand Academy, they join at that point and they become a paying client or customer. So creating a ton of value for the YouTube platform, bringing viewers in, and keeping viewers on the platform is a win for YouTube.

Building a “set it and forget it” YouTube funnel is one of the simplest ways to generate consistent sales of your products or courses by leveraging weekly, short-form video content. The key to this system is consistent video creation—uploading 5- to 15-minute videos that add value and engage your target audience. YouTube rewards this consistency by increasing your videos’ reach, attracting new viewers who discover your lead magnets and ultimately, your offers.

In Episode 1 of this podcast, I broke down the essentials of creating a YouTube funnel that works on autopilot, covering everything from how the system functions to what a personalized setup might look like. The goal is to have a funnel where your course, program, or product practically sells itself, with YouTube driving all the traffic. This method lets you “set it and forget it” allowing the platform to continue working for you.

Conclusion:

The real magic happens when you create a symbiotic relationship between your YouTube content and your email list. By aligning your video strategies with YouTube’s algorithm and strategically promoting your email list, you can grow both at the same time. Remember, it’s about providing value to your audience on YouTube first, then offering an irresistible incentive for them to join your email list. This not only boosts your YouTube growth but also leads to more business revenue.

The best part? Once you’ve set up a system that works for you—whether it’s evergreen content, strategic email sequences, or a lead magnet-driven content plan—your email list and YouTube channel will grow consistently without you having to put in double the work.

If you have an online business with a course, program, or any other kind of offer, and you’re not currently generating consistent sales on autopilot, I’d like to introduce you to the hands off youtube funnel that has made me over $20k on a $147 course! That way, you too can make consistent sales of your offer, with the beauty and simplicity of organic, evergreen traffic from YouTube! Start here with my free “AIT Method” training.