The Holy Grail of Internet Marketing!
E-mail List building. It is a real asset to your business. Possibly the only tangible asset to an full on-line business anyway. If you think about it the bigger your e-mail list gets, the more sales you make right? I mean, common sense here – law of averages you have to make more sales, right?
No, not at all. In my experience I have had personal friends who have, through great networking skills, acquired partners an amounted a list of over 300,000 subscribers. Through a mailing campaign of several e-mails it resulted in less than 5 transactions – that is horrible conversion.
Lesson Learned?
Relationship is the key, not the size. It’s better to have a small list that know and understand you and is responsive, as I know from having a list of under 200 people and it resulted in millions of dollars in property sales – without ever leaving my office.
Size Doesn’t Matter
You can rent e-mail lists and you will find it to be very hard to get them to convert. (Convert=take action). So what then is the secret. It is called: Relationship Building. It’s part of the give awesome content and value to all your potential customers. Like what you’re reading now. It’s short, simple and to the point. Lessons that would cost you a lot of time and money, but you can learn the easy way – for free from me.
3 Tragic List Building Failures:
1) You don’t have a e-mail capture form on your site – anywhere.
This is horrendous and you need to instigate this now. CAPTURE E-MAILS!
2) No Ethical Reward.
What awesome content are you going to give people for giving you their treasured e-mail? Take 10 minutes and put a PDF Report together. Use an audio or webinar you may have recorded or have access to. Or even just writing 3 e-mails giving people the answer to their problems in the market you operate in…It’s always better if you can combine the offers together! Heck you don’t even need you own content, just always cite the content at the bottom of your report.
3) E-mail form below the fold.
Great! You have an e-mail form, well done. But it’s located below the fold (basically when you land on a site and you must scroll the page to see it). Big no-no. Just like advertising, things that aren’t obvious will be missed.
Your ingenious mind will be able to flip the opposite on the above and now use those tools to create cool ways to capture peoples e-mails. Of course list building in itself is a strategy and requires a bit of time and understanding but the first thing to do, is sign up to a trusted e-mail provider. Then put some thought into helping people with your cool content.
I highly recommend Aweber E-mail Marketing – $1 Trial for 30 Days.