Email marketing is a great way to keep current customers informed on what’s new as well as a great way to build sales from prospects.
But first of all, you have to have a list of people to send your emails to. But how do you go about that? It’s one thing finding the addresses of physical homes, but finding personal emails is a different game entirely. You could buy a list from another company, or rent one out for a price. But this can be expensive and there is a huge flaw in that you have no idea how many of the prospects will be interested, and your emails may go straight into their junk mail.
The only real way to go about starting off an email marketing campaign is to compile your own list. Here are some tips on building an email list for your online business:
Home Page Sign-up – have an area on the home page of your website dedicated solely to enticing people to sign up for something. Having a regular newsletter to send is always a good idea, but you can also ask people to sign up for information on new products, promotions or special offers. Whatever it is, it needs to be of value to your customers, not just to you.
Ask to Add – when you attend networking events, meetings or trade shows, wherever you are likely to meet potential new customers or are gathering business cards, ask those you meet if you can add them to your mailing list, to send them a newsletter or special offers.
Association Lists – if you are a member of any trade or community organizations, ask if you can have access to their membership list. Many offer membership lists to members for free; some are available for a fee.
Sign-up after the Sale – if you have an ecommerce site, add a check-off box that encourages customers to sign up for your newsletter or special offers as part of the online checkout process. If you take telephone orders, provide guidelines for employees to solicit email subscriptions after the sale.
Reciprocal plugs – find other newsletters that you think your customers would enjoy and ask if they’ll promote your newsletter if you do the same for them.
Buy a List – there are quite a few online resources that offer lists for sale sorted by postal code, demographics, income, lifestyle interests, buying behaviour, etc. You can purchase a really targeted list based on your products or services and use it to test a variety of promotions or special offers.
Does it Work?
Like all things in internet marketing, it depends how well you do it. Email marketing is such a great technique because you end up with a list full of hot prospects. These are people who have shown an interest in your niche area, and they are therefore much more likely to pay for something.
But here’s the most important factor: they will only pay for something if the free report or information that they signed up for was really of a high quality. If it wasn’t then you can hardly expect them to pay for more of the same. With email marketing you need to start them off with something really great, and then offer them even more for a price.
Building an email list that will help you drive traffic and sales is an integral part of a well-rounded online marketing program, one of the many helpful tools you’ll find in Pathways. Check it out!
This is a guest post written by Dave Crew, if you would like to be considered for a guest post contact me.
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Hey Dave great post mate.
It is so nice to see someone putting a slightly different spin on all the usual list building stuff. A few more ideas for the notebook 🙂
Cheers
Clive 🙂
Well hello Dave and John, when it comes to creating a solution to give away do not under value what you use naturally in your business.
What may seem like a simplistic process to you could be of massive value to someone else, as you say consider the value this adds to your prospects lives rather than how it helps you.
Hello Dave, how are you doing? I hope you are fine.
Email list building is a vital part of building an online business yet many marketers don’t do it.
Building a list of subscribers who trust you and you can promote to time and time again is a real asset to a marketer.
A squeeze page offering a free report or newsletter in exchange for the subscribers email is a common way to build a list which can really make you some ongoing profits down the line. After you collect the subscribers email you should follow your subscribers with valuable email content, and not just hard sell affiliate promotions to them.
I agree on the quality of the report should be high quality, the quality of the information must be 110% valuable, so that the subscriber see you as the expert and continues reading your emails.
As for the squeeze page:
-keep the squeeze page simple
-include a graphical image of your report,
-use a strong headline, to your capture visitors eyes
-use bullets in your copy, drive targeted traffic to the page,
-include a link to your squeeze page on your blog (for more traffic)
-include many content/value emails (where you don’t promote affiliate links)
-don’t over complicate things.
Matt Morgan
Hi Dave,
Thanks for a great read! I think it’s a fantastic idea to ask to add people to your list when you meet them in networking events. When you’ve met them in person, chances are you have managed to build some form of rapport with them – and building trust face-to-face can be much easier than behind a laptop screen!
But whichever way you do it, it’s important that you always come across as someone who is trustworthy and worth listening to.
Thanks for sharing!
Laura
Hi everyone,
nice tips Dave, but I’ve got a question what do you do if your list is not responsive?
How do you ask them to respond to your offer after a bit of time and you see that the prospects on the list are not opening your e-mials or they don’t click the links?
But thanks for sharing and see you on top.
Erwin
Hi John…
Just wanted to chime in and say that I’m happy to see someone writing about *other* avenues of building a list, apart from the classical web form.
I’d like to add to the above (web form) though, that a very effective way to build a list online is to offer the potential prospects (instead of the classical free report) a small piece of software that would help them do whatever the niche’s focus might be.
For example, for the weight loss a good sw could be a BMI calculator, for the forex market, a nice one could be an app to show the trading sessions start/end hours/times, etc…
Cheers,
Steve ✉ Master eMailSmith ✉ Lorenzo
Chief Editor # eMail Tips Daily Newsletter
Hi John and Dave,
You’ve got some great ideas here that I haven’t thought of before. I’m not really doing a newsletter right now, but it’s something I plan to do in the very near future and I will keep these ideas in mind. Thanks for sharing!