If you’re building a network marketing business and you’re generating leads without building your own email list, you may be throwing away one of the most valuable assets you could be creating.
I learned this pretty early in my online career.
When I first started marketing online in 2002, people weren’t talking nearly as much about building an email list as they do today. Social media didn’t exist. There was no Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram.
Email was where people hung out.
At first, I was using bulk email to generate leads. I would purchase large lists of email addresses and send promotional emails to them.
Something interesting started happening.
I realized that if I went back to some of those same people a week, two weeks, or even a month later, I could get an entirely new surge of responses.
Maybe they weren’t interested the first time.
Maybe the timing wasn’t right.
Maybe they simply needed to see the message again.
That realization eventually changed the way I built my business.
Instead of thinking about a lead as someone I had one chance to convert, I started thinking about how valuable it would be to have the ability to communicate with that person over and over again.
Within a couple of years, I purchased my own third-party autoresponder and started sending all of my traffic to my own capture page first.
That decision turned out to be insanely profitable over the years.
And more than 20 years later, I still believe building your own email list is one of the smartest things you can do if you’re serious about building a network marketing business.
How Do You Actually Build an Email List for Network Marketing?
Let’s start with the basic question.
If a network marketer came to me today and said:
“Nate, how do I build an email list?”
I would tell them they need three basic things.
First, you need a capture page.
This is simply a page where you give someone a reason to enter their name and email address.
Second, you need what we call a third-party autoresponder.
This is the software that collects and hosts your leads as they fill out the form on your capture page. It also allows you to send emails to your subscribers and create automated follow-up sequences.
Third, you connect the form on your capture page to your autoresponder.
Now you’re up and running.
And don’t worry—this isn’t as complicated as it sounds.
As long as you’re using a platform that simplifies the process and provides the training and support you need, this is something almost anyone can learn to set up.
I’m legally blind, and I figured this stuff out more than 20 years ago when the technology was considerably less user-friendly than it is today.
Today we have simple funnel builders, autoresponder platforms, step-by-step training, and even artificial intelligence that can walk you through technical problems and help you write your emails.
The biggest hurdle for most people isn’t whether they can do it.
It’s sitting down, learning how to do it, and getting it done.
Your Capture Page Should Be Simple
I prefer capture pages that are short and to the point.
Tell the visitor what they’re going to get by entering their information, give them a reason to want it, and let them opt in.
That’s about it.
I don’t want someone sitting there reading a book before they even enter their email address. The more unnecessary information you put in front of someone, the more opportunities you give them to talk themselves out of taking the next step.
Years ago, you could get away with a capture page that basically said:
Enter your information to learn about this incredible business opportunity.
I don’t think that’s nearly as effective today.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of opportunities competing for people’s attention. If someone is already involved in network marketing, they’re probably seeing new opportunities constantly.
So instead of immediately pitching another opportunity, I prefer to offer something useful.
It could be a free guide.
A training.
A video.
A checklist.
Something that helps your ideal prospect solve a problem they already want to solve.
If you’re trying to recruit network marketers, for example, teach them something that helps them become better network marketers.
Help them learn how to generate leads.
Help them understand follow-up.
Help them recruit without bothering their friends and family.
Help them solve the problems that brought them to you in the first place.
As you become a person who helps them get what they want, they begin to see you as someone worth listening to.
And that relationship can eventually lead to sales and enrollments without you having to shove your network marketing opportunity in their face the first time they meet you.
Why I Never Sent My Leads Directly to My Company
From around 2004 through 2015, I built one particular network marketing company.
That company actually had one of the best marketing and follow-up systems on the Internet at the time.
But I had one rule:
I never sent a lead directly to the company marketing system.
No exceptions.
Every lead went through my capture page first.
My process was essentially a double opt-in strategy.
Someone would first enter their information on my capture page and become a subscriber to my autoresponder.
Then they would see a short personal welcome video from me.
The video was less than three minutes long. I introduced myself, briefly told my story, talked about being legally blind and how I got started in network marketing, and then explained the next step.
On the following page, they could enter their information again to pre-enroll and test-drive the company’s marketing system.
Some people thought I was crazy.
Why make someone opt in twice?
Why put an additional step between the lead and the company presentation?
Why not just send the lead directly to the company’s system?
Because now I had the lead too.
And my conversion rate was dramatically higher than what I saw from people who weren’t doing this.
They were relying primarily on generic company follow-up.
My prospects were also hearing from me.
They saw my face.
They heard my voice.
They knew a little about my story.
They received my personal emails over time.
That started building the know, like, and trust factor before they ever spoke with me.
Your Company’s Email List Is Not Your Email List
There’s another reason I think network marketers should build their own email lists that I learned the hard way.
The company I just described was one I had built from 2004 until 2015.
Then one morning in 2015, I woke up and the company was gone.
The FTC had raided it and shut it down.
My income from that company disappeared essentially overnight.
Now imagine if I had spent more than a decade sending every lead I generated directly into that company’s marketing system.
What would I have owned when the company disappeared?
Very little.
Fortunately, that wasn’t what I had done.
I had spent all those years building my own email list first.
That’s one of the questions I would ask anyone who tells me:
“I don’t need an email list. My company already follows up with my leads.”
What happens if your company disappears?
It doesn’t necessarily have to be shut down by a government agency. Companies go out of business. Compensation plans change. Management changes. Products change. You may eventually decide that the company simply isn’t right for you anymore.
If all your prospects exist inside someone else’s marketing system, you’ve spent years building an asset you don’t control.
That’s a mistake I never wanted to make.
My Email List Helped Me Recruit More Than 400 People in Six Months
The power of building your own email list really became obvious to me around 2010 and 2011.
My first network marketing sponsor eventually launched his own company, and I became one of the first distributors to join.
By this point, I had been building my email list for approximately six or seven years.
I didn’t have to start from zero.
I sent some emails to the list I had already built.
In the first month alone, I personally enrolled more than 100 people.
Within approximately six months, I had personally enrolled well over 400 people and became the number-one recruiter in the entire company.
There is absolutely no way I could have accomplished that as quickly without my email list.
Think about the alternative.
Imagine trying to personally call hundreds or thousands of people.
Imagine trying to have individual Messenger conversations with all of them.
It would be exhausting.
With email, I could sit down for 15 or 20 minutes, write one message, press a button, and communicate with thousands of people at once.
The people who were interested could click the link, get the information, and make their own decision.
That brings me to one of the benefits of email marketing that I don’t think gets talked about enough.
An Email List Doesn’t Just Give You Money Leverage—It Gives You Time Leverage
One of my favorite examples happened in 2010.
A small affiliate program launched that I thought was pretty good. It paid a nice commission, the price point was low enough to make it an easy purchase, and for whatever reason, the offer converted extraordinarily well.
I want to emphasize that because I don’t want to pretend the results were entirely because I was some email-marketing genius.
This particular offer was a needle in a haystack. Offers that converted like this did not come along very often.
But I had something extremely valuable when it did come along:
an email list I had spent approximately six years building.
One morning, I sat at my computer for maybe 15 minutes and wrote an email promoting it.
Then I pressed send.
It was a beautiful sunny day, so I went outside and enjoyed my day.
When I came back inside later that evening, I had experienced my first $1,000 day online.
About 15 minutes of actual work.
But the real work hadn’t happened that morning.
The real work had been happening for the previous six years while I was building the list and the relationships with the people on it.
And it didn’t end with that $1,000 day.
I probably sent another 15 to 20 emails that month promoting the same offer and ended up making well over $20,000 that month.
Again, the offer itself deserves a lot of credit.
But without the list, I couldn’t have put that offer in front of thousands of people who already knew me in a matter of minutes.
That’s leverage.
The Relationship With Your Email List Matters
I’m an okay email writer.
I’m certainly not the greatest copywriter in the world. Not even close.
But I’ve had people buy things from me because they had been hearing from me for years.
When I launched that company in 2011, I recognized many of the names joining.
Some had been on my email list for a long time.
Some had been involved in previous companies with me.
They trusted my recommendation.
That’s something that’s difficult to measure with an open rate or click-through rate.
You’re building a relationship.
That’s also why I think you can damage an email list by constantly jumping from opportunity to opportunity.
I’ve fallen into that trap myself.
When my health problems became more severe and my lead flow had come to a screeching halt, I went through a period where I was looking for the next opportunity that might get my existing list responding again.
Looking back, I think that can hurt trust.
I’ve watched another very good marketer I have known for years do something similar. For a long time, he promoted essentially one thing.
Over the last several years, it seems like he’s promoting something different every 60 or 90 days.
I’ve personally lost some faith in his recommendations.
If this month’s opportunity is the greatest thing since sliced bread and next month you’re telling me something completely different is the greatest thing since sliced bread, eventually I’m going to stop believing you.
That doesn’t mean you can only promote one product.
Complementary products and services can make perfect sense.
But your recommendations should mean something.
One Subscriber Bought Almost Two Years Later
Here’s another reason I don’t think you should give up on leads too quickly.
I’ve tracked my subscriber statistics pretty closely over the years.
Recently, someone purchased a product I was promoting whose name I didn’t recognize.
So I looked him up.
He had joined my email list almost two years earlier.
As far as I could tell, he had never purchased anything else from me during that time.
Then almost two years later, the timing was apparently right.
He bought.
Had I sent him directly to a sales page two years earlier and never captured his email address, that opportunity would probably have disappeared forever.
That’s the fundamental difference between traffic and building an asset.
A visitor comes and goes.
A subscriber gives you the opportunity to continue the conversation.
My Email List Kept Producing Income When My Health Prevented Me From Working
This is probably the most personally important reason I’m grateful I built my list.
Around 2010 and 2011, the lead source I had relied on heavily began drying up.
Around the same time, I started experiencing some strange health problems.
I moved into blogging as another lead-generation strategy, but I never got anywhere near the lead flow I had previously generated.
By around 2013 or 2014, my health had declined enough that even blogging became difficult.
There were periods over the following four to six years when I generated almost no new leads.
I’m talking about going months at times without generating a single new lead.
But I still had my email list.
And during those years, I continued making sales and getting signups in my business.
I could send an email once, twice, or three times a week with very little physical effort and still generate some income.
I hadn’t known when I started building my list that health problems would eventually limit my ability to work.
Looking back, building that email list was literally life-changing.
It kept an income-producing asset in my hands during a period when I wasn’t capable of building a new lead-generation strategy.
But an Email List Doesn’t Stay Valuable Forever Without Fresh Leads
There’s an important other side to this story.
My email list eventually started getting stale.
People unsubscribed.
Open rates declined.
Clicks declined.
Some people probably stopped using the email address they had originally subscribed with.
Sales gradually declined.
And because I wasn’t replacing those people with enough new prospects, the list became less productive.
That’s why I say your email list may be one of your biggest business assets, but the ability to consistently generate targeted leads is even more important.
The list is the asset you’re building.
Lead generation is what continually replenishes it.
Today, I would much rather have 1,000 highly targeted subscribers than 10,000 poorly targeted or completely untargeted subscribers.
Fifteen or twenty years ago, I probably would have answered that differently. Email was such a dominant communication channel that sheer quantity could produce incredible results.
Today, quality matters much more.
Don’t Wait Until You Have a “Big List” to Start Emailing
People sometimes think:
“I’ve only got 50 or 100 subscribers. What’s the point of emailing them?”
No, 50 subscribers probably aren’t going to set the world on fire.
But you need to develop the habit.
And you don’t know who’s sitting inside those 50 or 100 subscribers.
One of them could eventually become a customer or distributor.
If they don’t hear from you for six months while you wait for your list to become “big enough,” they’ll probably forget who you are.
There’s also a little strategy I’ve used that makes writing emails to a small list considerably more valuable.
Write your broadcast email.
Send it to your current subscribers.
Then look at the email and ask:
Can I make this evergreen?
Maybe you remove references to today’s date or something that happened specifically this week.
Then add the evergreen version to your automated follow-up sequence.
Now the email you spent time writing today isn’t just being sent once.
Every new subscriber who joins your list in the future can receive it automatically.
Do that repeatedly and something interesting happens.
Your autoresponder campaign starts building itself.
Boom.
You’re welcome.
How Many Emails Should You Put in Your Autoresponder?
I’ve seen successful marketers approach this completely differently.
Personally, I like long automated follow-up sequences.
I’ve built campaigns that follow new subscribers for 30, 60, or even 90 days.
Why?
It frees up my time.
If I don’t send a broadcast for a week because I’m busy or dealing with health issues, my newest subscribers aren’t sitting there hearing nothing from me.
The autoresponder continues communicating with them.
But I also know highly successful marketers who have only three automated emails and send broadcasts after that.
I know someone who has been extremely successful with my primary affiliate program who consistently sends only about one email per week.
So I don’t believe there’s one magic number.
Consistency matters more.
For someone brand new who doesn’t want to get overwhelmed, I would make it incredibly simple.
Start with three to five automated emails.
Your first email delivers whatever the person requested when they opted in.
If you promised a free guide, give them another link to the free guide.
Your second email tells your story.
Who are you?
Why are you doing this?
How can you help them?
Let them know there’s a real person behind the emails and that they’re welcome to reach out if they have questions.
Then write a few emails that follow up on the original offer or teach pieces of what the free guide or training covers.
That’s enough to get started.
You can build the longer sequence over time.
What Should You Email Your Network Marketing Leads?
When I first started, you could get away with sending straight promotional emails constantly.
Join this.
Buy this.
Look at this opportunity.
And they worked.
Today, I think you need a better mixture.
I’ll still send completely promotional emails when there’s a reason.
If there’s an important webinar coming up, I might send two, three, or even four emails leading up to it.
On the day of an important webinar, I may send several reminders.
But that’s not what I want every email to look like.
I’ll send personal stories.
I’ll tell subscribers what’s happening in my life.
Sometimes the entire email is essentially a story, with a little P.S. at the bottom mentioning something I’m promoting.
I’ll send educational emails.
I’ll share something I’ve learned about lead generation.
I’ll share results from something I’ve tested.
My TikTok experiment is a perfect example. I created more than 300 videos, generated 535 leads, watched the engagement from those leads, and learned something from the experience.
That’s useful information I can share.
One concept I’ve learned over the years is called:
Learn. Do. Teach.
Learn something.
Go do it.
Then teach your subscribers what you learned.
You don’t need 20 years of experience to do that.
You could watch a 10-minute training video, apply what you learned, and then write an email telling your subscribers what happened.
Now you’re providing value while you’re learning.
How Often Should You Email Your List?
As a general rule, I think you should communicate with your email list at least once a week.
Personally, I often like one to three emails per week.
There are exceptions.
If I’m launching something new or promoting a time-sensitive event, I may temporarily email more frequently.
I don’t normally want to email multiple times every day.
But I’m also not terrified of unsubscribes.
If somebody unsubscribes, they’re telling me they don’t want to hear from me.
That’s okay.
The solution isn’t to become so afraid of unsubscribes that you stop communicating.
The solution is consistent lead generation.
When new targeted prospects are joining your list every day, you don’t become emotionally attached to every subscriber.
People leave.
New people arrive.
The asset continues growing.
When Should You Remove Inactive Subscribers?
This is something I’ve struggled with a little myself, particularly during periods when my lead flow was low.
When you aren’t generating many new leads, it’s easy to become attached to every email address you’ve got.
Some marketers remove subscribers who haven’t opened an email in 90 days.
I’m not that aggressive.
I’ve gone as far as approximately a year.
If someone hasn’t opened anything from me in 12 months, I’ll consider removing them.
Keeping a more engaged list can also help email deliverability because engagement is one of the signals email providers can use when deciding where messages belong.
As a general rule, I like seeing open rates above 10%, and I’d much rather see them above 20%.
But I don’t remove somebody simply because they haven’t purchased.
If they’re still opening and clicking, they’re engaged.
Why remove them?
It costs me virtually no additional time to send an email to 5,001 people instead of 5,000.
And as the subscriber who bought from me after almost two years demonstrates, you never know when someone’s circumstances or interests will change.
Don’t Build Your Entire Audience on Someone Else’s Platform
There’s nothing wrong with building an audience on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, or any other platform.
I’m actually working on building more evergreen traffic myself through blogging and YouTube.
But I want those platforms feeding something I control.
Algorithms change.
Your Facebook posts may once have reached a large percentage of your followers and now reach a fraction of them.
A social platform can change how content is distributed.
Accounts can be suspended.
Channels can disappear.
Rules change.
If you have 10,000 YouTube subscribers, those people are still ultimately YouTube users.
If you have 10,000 Facebook followers, they’re still on Facebook’s platform.
I don’t want my entire business sitting in the hands of an algorithm that can change overnight.
With an email list, I can export and back up my subscribers.
Even in the rare event that an autoresponder company terminates an account, there are numerous other email service providers. Assuming you’ve maintained proper backups and comply with the provider’s rules, your database isn’t inherently tied to one piece of software.
That’s why I think of an email list as a genuine business asset.
You’re not just collecting email addresses.
You’re building direct access to an audience that has specifically asked to hear from you.
Why Email Follow-Up May Be Even More Important Today
People sometimes say email marketing is old-fashioned.
I actually think email follow-up may be more important today than it was 15 or 20 years ago.
Not because getting attention in an inbox is easier.
It’s probably harder.
But your prospects are being exposed to more marketing messages and more opportunities than ever.
If they aren’t hearing from you, they’re hearing from somebody else.
And eventually they forget about you.
That’s why I wouldn’t choose between building a social audience and building an email list.
Build the audience wherever your ideal prospects are.
Then give them a reason to join your email list.
My Simple Email-List Strategy for a New Network Marketer
If you’re brand new, don’t turn this into another technical project that takes six months before you actually generate a lead.
Keep it simple.
Get a funnel builder and an autoresponder.
Create a simple capture page offering something useful to your ideal prospect.
Connect the capture page to your autoresponder.
Write three to five basic follow-up emails.
Then start generating targeted leads.
If your company has a weekly webinar, you’ve already got an easy reason to communicate with your subscribers.
Send an email once a week.
Tell them something useful or briefly share what’s happening with you, and invite interested people to the upcoming webinar.
That’s something almost anyone can maintain.
Then, as you gain experience, expand your automated campaign.
Turn good broadcasts into evergreen follow-up emails.
Tell more stories.
Teach what you’re learning.
Share your results.
Build relationships.
And spend the majority of your business-building time doing the thing that keeps the entire system alive:
generating fresh, targeted leads.
If I were starting from scratch, that’s where I’d put roughly 80% of my effort.
An Email List Is an Asset—But Lead Flow Is the Engine
After more than 20 years of doing this, I still use essentially the same fundamental strategy I discovered in the early years.
Generate a lead.
Capture the lead onto my own email list.
Build a relationship.
Follow up.
Provide value.
Make offers when they’re appropriate.
And continue generating new leads.
The technology has changed.
The traffic sources have changed.
The way people consume information has changed.
But that fundamental process hasn’t changed very much at all.
I’ve had a subscriber buy almost two years after joining my list.
I’ve recruited more than 400 people into a company in roughly six months largely because I already had an audience to communicate with.
I’ve experienced a $1,000 day after spending roughly 15 minutes writing an email.
I’ve had a month where one offer generated more than $20,000 after years of building the audience that made those results possible.
And most importantly to me, my email list continued producing income during years when health problems made it extremely difficult for me to work.
That’s why I don’t view building an email list as some optional marketing trick.
It’s an asset.
But generating leads is only one part of building a business online.
You also need somewhere to send those leads, a way to capture and follow up with them, the right tools to create your marketing, and a system you can actually learn how to use.
And that’s where a lot of people get overwhelmed.
They end up piecing together different tools, trying to figure everything out on their own, or jumping from one marketing strategy to another without ever building a complete system around their business.
After more than 20 years of marketing online, I’ve become a big believer in simplifying as much of this as possible.
If you’re already building a network marketing, affiliate marketing, or other online business and want a simpler way to get the tools, training and support you need to market it, click below and take a look at what I’m using.
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