9 Reasons Why Education Consultants Should Have An Email List

Growing an email list is a huge reason for my success in selling my digital teacher PD and in growing my education consulting business. Currently my email list has 17,142 secondary math teachers that I email with helpful tips and resources every single week. The number of opportunities that have come as a result of growing an email list for my consulting business is immeasurable and I encourage every education consultant to do the same. Stop waiting. Start today. While many education consultants seek to gain the attention of administrators to hire us for consulting services, I have personally found it challenging to nail cold marketing directly to administrators. Instead, I have found much more success growing an email list of ideal teachers. While I do want administrators to hire me to work with their math departments to increase engagement of 6-12th grade students who struggle with math, I have found much more success growing an email list of teachers. Here are 9 reasons why education consultants should grow an email list - of administrators or teachers. 

9 Reasons Why Education Consultants Should Have An Email List 

1. Direct Communication Channel: An email list allows you to communicate directly with your audience without relying on social media algorithms or third-party platforms that may limit your reach. 
2. Establishes Expertise: Regular emails with valuable insights, resources, and strategies help position you as a trusted expert in your niche, which can lead to more consulting opportunities.
3. Builds Relationships: Email helps you nurture a deeper connection with your audience. Personalized messages and regular contact make people feel more connected to you and your brand, often more connected than social media.
4. Drives Traffic: Sending emails with links to blog posts, videos, or free resources drives targeted traffic to your website, helping with lead generation and increasing visibility.
5. Low-Cost Marketing: Email marketing is cost-effective compared to paid ads or traditional marketing, and you can reach thousands of people with a single send.
6. Ownership of Your Audience: Social media platforms and their rules can change, but your email list is something you own and control. You won’t lose your audience if a platform shuts down or changes its policies.
7. Easy Feedback Loop: Email gives you the opportunity to gather feedback, conduct surveys, or test new ideas with your audience before investing heavily, helping you improve your offerings based on what they want and need.
8. Nurtures Leads into Clients: Regular email communication keeps potential clients engaged and informed about your services, gradually building trust and positioning you as the go-to consultant when they're ready to hire.
9. Promotes Your Products: With an engaged list, you can introduce and sell your digital PD programs, books, workshops, or services directly to your audience, often with higher conversion rates.

How do you build an email list as an Education Consultant?

Step 1: Create a lead magnet

A lead magnet is something you provide to your ideal client for free in exchange for their email. Since I target 6-12th grade math teachers with students who struggle with math, one of my successful lead magnets is my “10 Math Intervention Strategies.” In it I offer 10 easy to implement strategies to help students who have been historically unsuccessful in mathematics. I created a professional looking PDF using Canva that is available to download for free in exchange for a teachers email address.

Step 2: Create an opt in page

I highly recommend using Kajabi as your all in one platform. I use Kajabi to host all of my landing pages, capture my email opt ins, and as my email service provider (where I schedule and send all my emails each week). Once you get set in  Kajabi, you’ll create a landing page. This page will tell people who land on it all about your lead magnet. You should include:

• An image of your lead magnet PDF
• Target audience identification (ex: 6-12th grade math teachers, MTSS Coordinators, 4th grade teachers)
• Audience pain points (ex: tired of talking to yourself all period, overwhelmed by classroom management, etc)
• Outcomes of your lead magnet (ex: gain tools to increase engagement of students who struggle, etc)
• A place/form for visitors to enter their first name and email

On the backend within your system you will send an email automatically that contains the lead magnet when someone gives you their email/fills out the form on your opt in page.

Step 3: Share your lead magnet everywhere

If you’re not ready for facebook ads, that’s okay! You can also join Facebook groups where your idea customer is - for example I help 6-12th grade math teachers increase engagement of students who struggle so I’m in a lot of middle school and high school math teacher groups to share my lead magnet when appropriate. You cannot create a post just to share your lead magnet, but if someone asks a question in the group and your lead magnet would help answer their question, you can usually drop the link in the comments and encourage the poster to download your lead magnet. You can also post about your lead magnet on social media and DM people the link who are interested in learning more. I also like to create blog posts that promote my lead magnet and link to my opt in page directly in the blog post to drive more traffic.

Step 4: Email your list every week

Once you begin collecting emails, you need to provide consistent value to your list every week if possible so that you can reap the benefits I described earlier in this blog post. Share tips, blog posts, resources, case studies, recommendations, as well as sales and promotional emails. Like I said in step 2, I highly recommend using Kajabi as your all in one platform. I use Kajabi as my email service provider to schedule and send all my emails each week. This Kajabi link is my affiliate link and it would mean so much to me if you would give Kajabi a try with a free trial using my link. This entire website that you’re on right now, was built on Kajabi!

If you want to see an example of a lead magnet, be sure to check out my lead magnet, “10 Strategies for Starting & Scaling Your Digital PD Business” by visiting the opt in page here.