Secrets of Email List Building - Part 1
One of the most critical and profitable elements of online marketing is building a responsive email list. At the same time just how to effectively do this can be a challenge to many internet marketers. This doesn’t have to be rocket science and the rewards will show up in your bottom line. So take these guidelines seriously.
1. Always provide an incentive of high perceived value for signing up to your list. Just don’t say ‘free’ but give the value of the gift you are offering in exchange for a subscriber’s email address.
2. Use a ‘double optin’ approach in getting emails, but just be sure that you have the prospects permission. Pre-filling check boxes where the prospect is not fully aware of what they are signing up for can only backfire in terms of SPAM complaints. In other words your best prospects are those who raise their hands and say, ‘yes I want to be on your list’.
3. You should attempt to obtain as much demographics about your prospect as possible, but keep in mind that the more information you ask for the more likely the prospect will not sign up. In other words, you are likely to get more subscribers if you simply ask for an email address than if you asked for a first name, last name, email address, date of birth, favorite color, marital status, etc. The more complete your data is the more you can target your list but the less email you will collect. You must therefore strike a balance here.
4. You should provide a clear privacy policy and ‘terms of use’ for the information that you are collecting to establish your credibility with the prospect.
5. Think of any list that you are building as a leaking tank. You must continually replenish the numbers of subscribers and maintain a subscription rate that exceeds your attrition rate.
6. About the fastest way to build an email list is to buy the list from a reputable lead company. There are many companies that sell leads but you’ll have to be very cautious here. Of course you should never buy harvested email addresses that usually come in the millions on CDs for $19.95. If the lead company cannot provide the IP addresses this is a good sign that your leads are of low quality and of questionable origins. Having the IP addresses will provide a safer haven from SPAM complaints. The ideal is to generate your own leads but many marketers have used this method to build very responsive lists.
7. Use Co-Registration companies. Co-Registration companies can target your opt-in advertisement to customers after they have signed up for a similar product. For example, if you run a garden related newsletter, your newsletter subscription box would be presented as an additional resource on the ‘thank you’ page of the subscription form for another garden-related product. This is often seen when you make a purchase or signup for a product or service and you are presented with other products that you may choose in addition-an up-sell. The cost per lead varies from a fraction of a cent to many dollars depending on your market. You can find co-registration companies by doing a search engine query for “co-registration”.
8. Use a rented list to mail to and include your opt-in information or your website where an incentive is offered for signing up to your list. The difference with a rental list and a purchased list is that the names do not ‘belong’ to you so you cannot just add them to your list. They still must opt-in, which you can encourage them to do with an appropriate ‘reward.’
9. Place a sign-up form on every page of your website. The more ubiquitous your sign-up forms are the greater the probability that you will get subscribers. This may be in the form of a popup box or in the website itself.
10. Exchange real estate on your ‘thank you’ page for your subscription form with other list builders in a complimentary field. For example, if you are running an Ezine on gardening then you may place a short text ad for an Ezine on lawn care in exchange for the lawn care Ezine owner placing an ad for your newsletter on his/her ‘thank you’ page. This is a simple joint venture proposal that works to the benefit of both Ezine owners.
In part 2 I’ll provide another twelve tips on really ramping up your list building efforts.
Filed under: Marketing Tips
I see the importance of building a list and communicating with that list. However, here, reading your blog, I see no such list-building effort.
I am working on this same dilemma with my own blog. I think I’ll put up a “request to be informed when I make a post”. I realize there are lots of RSS-readers out there and such, but y’know there’s just an AWFUL lot of people out there who don’t want to load one more client on their machine, and don’t start off their world at some web-portal which will suck all of their favorite RSS feeds in.
Thoughts? I have to write it myself, it appears — I’ve tried getting someone from rent-a-coder to do it. After spending hours writing up the specs so that no one could screw it up, I can’t get someone to get the job done for a reasonable rate. I don’t want to pay someone $300 for what I can do with a few more hours work. But, I guess I’m one of the lucky ones out there who actually CAN program my own stuff, if I have to.
Or perhaps I’m my own worst enemy in an e-myth sort of way, doing the work I SHOULD be handing off to others. It’s just so difficult to completely let go, realizing that the questions being asked of me by an “expert” programmer are such questions that nearly any junior programmer should have the answer figured out themselves.
Oops! That bites. But you are perfectly correct. My blog is still in the building
process and that’s one of the items on the list! I have to integrate a signup
box on the blog itself. I too don’t want to depend on RSS feeds as handy
as they are, most people are still not comfortable with them.
I think that I’ll get this done today … thanks for the headsup