If you have an online business, you need a mailing list. It is your hotline to your hot prospects and you have to organize it well to get the most out of your list building.
Here are a few things to bear in mind when building your list.
Make your Mailing List Easy to Join…
People don’t want to spend their precious time on working out things that are complex and time-consuming; they’ll go to another website if you make enrolling tough on them. Give a clear sign up box for your mailing list and also make it obvious that you will operating a double opt in mailing list. That means when they give you their details your auto responder will be set to send out an email link which they must click on to confirm that they want to join your mailing list.
That way, people won’t feel trapped into your list building. You won’t lose many people by them not clicking on the link in the email and it will be worth it for the security you offer the people that do agree to join your mailing list.
And to Leave…
In the same way, make it easy to opt out of the mailing list in the future. People’s priorities and needs change and they may not always want to be on your mailing list. Don’t be scared by allowing them to leave. Telling people up front that they can leave your mailing list easily any time they want to just makes them more likely to join it in the first place.
Keep in Touch with the People on your List on a Regular Basis
Sending out a weekly newsletter is best. And, that brings up an important sub-point: send out newsletters often; at the very least, once a month. These newsletters fulfill all sorts of purposes. To name but a few:
- They remind people who you are
- They allow your to show off your knowledge
- You can promote your products and services
Make sure that you provide the people on your mailing list with helpful and useful information. If all you send them are ads for your website, you are not going to maintain a good mailing list; spam is a real turn off for subscribers.
Actively Seek out Subscribers to your Mailing List
It is not enough to set up a website and expect people to join your list. There are literally thousands of websites similar to yours; you must do something to generate interest and show what makes your mailing list better and more valuable to join than anyone else’s.
So, visit forums, chat groups, blog sites etc. and post articles, essays etc. to generate interest in your list building. Make sure these are relevant to the business of your mailing list and you will be reaching potential customers who are already warmed up and wanting to hear about what your business has to offer them.
Never underestimate the value of networking for list building. If you can find other firms/websites that will let you post a link to your site, you have the potential to build up your mailing list even more.
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Quality not Quantity Matters in List Building
When it comes to getting leads for your list building and effectively keeping people joined up to your list, quality, not quantity is what counts. This matters in terms of the people on your mailing list, and also in the communication you send out to keep them there.
Quality Leads
It matters less about how many people are on your mailing list than whether the names on your mailing list are likely to buy things from you. If they aren’t, what is the point in them being on your mailing list?
For that reason, your list building attempts should focus on long tail keyword phrases rather than general keywords. This will enable you to get targeted prospects that are looking for what you are selling. That means you are more likely to get a sale because you are giving them what they want.
Keeping your Subscribers
List building is not the be all and end all of making a success of your online business. It is just a means to an end. The end is to keep a ‘captive audience’ of subscribers who are interested in what your business does so that you can drip feed information to them over time and encourage them to buy from you. This is the way to build up the trust of your potential customers in you. Until they trust you, they won’t give you their hard-earned money.
The key to creating an effective opt-in list is to provide your subscribers with quality information that will really help them. One of the best ways to do this is to provide them with a weekly, biweekly, or monthly e-zine. An e-zine is a newsletter or publication that is sent to subscribers who have chosen to receive your publication. You will learn more about this later in this book.
In order to build a database of potential customers and start collecting e-mail addresses, you'll first need to set up a mailing list. This mailing list must enable your visitors to submit their information and subscribe them to your list.
Freebies?
There are many free list building services that will enable you to set up a mailing list. However, they are not recommended. They will not allow you to personalize your messages with your subscribers' names and they require your visitor to reply to a confirmation message. That is where this book will help you!
There are many powerful ways to build your subscriber base. However, for this book, we will only focus on the "best" methods of list building.
Customers’ Needs
The best marketing always focuses on the needs of a business’ potential customers.
- What do they need from you?
- Why do they need your products or services?
- What is going to induce them buy to buy from you?
In list building, don’t be trapped into merely marketing what your business does when you should be identifying the needs of your customers and working towards fulfilling these needs.
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List Building Made Easy
People often think that you only build a list by getting people to visit your website and sign up. That is why they don’t bother, because they see that as being a lot of hard work. However, the longer you go without a decent mailing list, the more your business will suffer. Let us show you some easy ways to get started on your perfect mailing list without very much work at all!
Subscription Boxes
The first thing you should accomplish is to put an opt-in box to sign up to your mailing list on each of your website pages. This is very important for your list building. People way come to your website from lots of different pages, not just the home page. They may never even go to your home page, so ensure that your mailing list sign up box is visible on every page of your website.
The best people to have on your mailing list are targeted prospects who are already interested in your company. If they have visited your website, you’re already halfway toward making them loyal customers.
Having a mailing list allows you to offer information regularly to these people, showing them what your company does, so they increase their confidence in you. Then you can start to offer them products and services and be more certain that they will be more likely to buy from you. It’s like having a semi-captive audience from which to build your products!
So how do you get these sign-ups to your mailing list?
Speculate to Accumulate
If you have some money to spend and you want to invest it in your business, one way to get started on building your perfect mailing list is to simply purchase subscribers. You accomplish this through the placement of an ad.
Warning!
The perfect mailing list isn’t a list of random people who may or may not be interested in your business. You should try to find hot prospects who are interested in what you do and more likely to buy from you.
Get specific
So, you search for a website or newsletter that specializes in your area of interest. After all, if you’re a writer of TV and/or movie scripts, you don’t want to place an ad in a newsletter with information about breastfeeding! When people see your ad, they can just click on a box to be added to your mailing list. It’s a very effective method for quickly growing a list.
The next tip is to buy a list of people who’ve expressed interest in what you do. The way this works is this: there are companies that compile lists of people, and what subjects they have said they want more information on. So, maybe some people have said they love science fiction, and would love to read books by new authors. If you own a publishing company, and most of your sales are via your website and Amazon.com (and other such sites), it could be very helpful to you to have a list of people interested in your subject matter. You buy a list from a company, and then send emails to those people. Be aware though that any mailing list you buy may not be specifically tailored to your requirements.
Partner up
The third step in building your perfect mailing list the easy way is to join forces with like-minded companies, and split the cost of buying subscriber lists or other marketing and list building activities. This allows you to build your list, yet not bear all the expense.
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Create a Win-Win Situation to Improve Your List Building
For list building to be a win-win situation for you and your subscribers, and therefore have the best chance of making money from it, you should ensure you send your mailing list only useful information which is relevant to them. It’s like with those life Cover Plans for 50s, when you’re in your 20s and 30s – don’t you just hate getting those! Don’t commit such a faux pas with your own list building.
If you get your list building right and know who your subscribers are, you can use the mailing list to really boost your online marketing efforts. You can use it to warm up potential clients or pre-sell goods and services. If you’re not using your list building like this, your business marketing is not as successful as it could be. It’s as simple as that.
Offering free gifts is a great way to pre-sell and is a great inducement to get people to sign up to your mailing list. Let’s now turn our attention to choosing and creating the right free offer to achieve your business aims.
Freebies Build Trust
People love to get something for nothing. If they can get a useful free gift and all they have to do for that is to leave their email address with you, then they will be happy to do it.
The simple offer of a free newsletter from your website is very effective at building trust and building your mailing list. It will set you up as an expert, capable of passing on useful information. But, be sure to fill it with information that your subscribers will actually be interested in. also, a little humor always helps.
Quality Control
Your list building depends upon providing quality information to the people on your mailing list. If you have a website that is just chock full of good quality information that is useful to people, it will bring in more visitors and many of them will sign up for your mailing list.
A good way of proving your expertise at something is to write about it. Write articles, a book, an e-book etc. and give them away for free. Any type of publication that can get your material out in front of the public can be very effective. And don’t let the idea of a book overwhelm you. You can simply take articles, short stories, essays etc. that you’ve already done and “stitch” them together.
You’ll be surprised at how all these steps can work together to add prospects to your mailing list.
Here are the most effective ways to get mailing list subscribers using free offers:
- Offer a free subscription in relevant newsgroups
- Offer a free subscription in related email discussion lists
- Offer a free subscription in relevant emails
- Offer a free subscription in classified ads
- Offer a free subscription in relevant forums
- Offer a free subscription in your email signature
- Issue press releases to publicize your free newsletter
- Offer a free subscription on ALL the pages of your website
- Rent relevant opt-in e-mail lists to offer your free subscription
- Offer a free subscription to members of relevant online clubs and organizations
- Exchange sponsorships with other related, but not competitive newsletters
- Offer “gift subscriptions” in your newsletters whereby someone can go to a webpage and give a subscription to a friend.
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List Building with a Free E-book
Creating a free e-book full of relevant content and containing your website link by which they can directly join your mailing list is a great way to aid your list building. To allow this link building to become viral, allow people to distribute the e-book free of charge.
To fully realize the list building potential of this opportunity, create a "Free Gift" page in your e-book and put your mailing list opt-in box on this page. Use an incentive such as an exclusive free e-book which will only go to them as your free gift for new subscribers. In building your mailing list, you have to speculate to accumulate!
Creating and maintaining an up-to-date opt-in mailing list is absolutely essential. You should promote your mailing list in all the relevant places that you can.
More subscribers = more sales
Your e-book will potentially to be viewed by millions of Internet users. Make the most of this highly effective way of increasing sales.
Getting your E-book Written
The most important thing is to make a good e-book that the user will want to get for free. Don’t worry if you don’t consider yourself much of a writer. You can outsource it to writers who then give you copyright to the book in exchange for a fee more reasonable than you might expect.
After you get your e-book ready, ensure that you add your opt-in page or autoresponder URL to every page of the e-book, to help the user to sign up for your mailing list immediately, or you will lose them once that urgency is gone.
You can make an e-book that is just a few pages long or a long one that runs to a hundred pages or so; there’s no standard length. People like to receive free e-books, especially if they are interested in the information it contains.
E-books are cheap for you to give away because you don’t have to maintain a physical inventory. You can send them to your users through your autoresponder, so delivery is quick. You don’t incur shipping charges, and you can give away as many copies as you wish.
E-books can be given away for free as an incentive to sign up with you. Your mailing list subscribers can also give it away for free. However, the excitement soon fades over an e-book.
The trick is to keep writing new e-books all the time to keep your audience eager. You aim here is to increase your list size with more subscribers. By increasing the number of links pointing to your own website, you can also rank higher with the search engines.
Ways in Which You Can Use E-books to Build Your Mailing List
There are several ways that you can use your e-book to build your mailing list, such as:
· Offer the complete e-book in return for referral email ids or testimonials, which you can use.
· Writing your own e-book makes you look like an expert in your field, and builds your credibility.
· You can post your e-book on various free websites, which will ensure an increase in the number of downloads.
· You might offer just the first two chapters of the e-book, giving the visitor the choice to buy the full e-book.
· Your e-book can help to build your mailing list if you make it a limited offer. Informing your visitor this e-book will only be available for free download for the next 24 hours creates a sense of urgency and encourages them to take advantage of the offer right away by signing up for your mailing list.
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Ad Swaps for List Building
Ad swaps are free, making them a great for list building. They work by you finding people who publish similar e-zines to you, and asking if you can post an ad in theirs in exchange for putting an ad for their e-zine in yours.
Ideally, you will do this ad swapping with a few e-zines, and that should bring you a lot more subscribers. Once you find that a decent number of people have signed up from this traded link and you start to see the number of subscribers fall, you can assume you have exhausted that market and move on to some different e-zine lists with which to trade ads.
E-zines have greater usefulness than this for list building. People rarely sign up with you having only seen your link first. They need to learn to trust you first. They need to know that you know what you’re talking about… that you’re an expert. A well written, informative e-zine, which you will promise to deliver by autoresponder every week or every month can help to reassure them of these things, so you will get more links. They are great publicity tools.
Choosing Your Ad Swap Partners
You should choose a relevant business for your ad swap partner. They should not compete with you, but be in a business that complements yours. That way, you will get a target audience, who are warmed up, ready to buy from you. It is cheap, too, and as well as increasing your list building, you may make a good number of direct sales as a result of this ad swapping.
Most e-zines are archived online. That means that the life of your ad lives on into the future, without you having to spend anything at all!
You should also try to have some input into the placement of your ad within the e-zine. Choose as many related e-zines as you can, because the more you get your ad out there, the more people who will see the link from which to join your mailing list.
Ad swapping in this way also allows you to ride on the back of the trust that your ad swap partner has built up with his or her subscribers. By virtue of the fact that this internet marketer has allowed you to place an ad on an e-zine that they trust, they will feel that they can trust you too.
Now, you should have a mailing list, so you better use it! It’s a lot easier to keep selling to people who already know you, than continuing to find new customers. You need to make the most of the captive audience who are already interested in your business and what you have to offer. That is the real beauty of having a mailing list.
Trust is vital in business. Trust isn’t given to you overnight. It has to be built up over time, as you build a relationship with people, to entice them to sign up for your mailing list and to stay on it. Your mailing list and the communications you send out through it will help you to build up relationships with your potential clients.
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Building your Mailing List through Relationship Marketing
To make the most of the opportunities afforded to you by your list building, you need to master the art of relationship management. This is the way to keep clients coming back to you, spending their money on your business, and this securing the future of your business. Your mailing list is the key to relationship building with your potential clients, which is why you should be doing it consistently.
The first step in relationship building is to be able to identify:
- Prospects
- Customers
- Loyal customers
- Former customers
- Lost leads.
Obviously, loyal customers are the ones that spend the most money. So, how do you start communicating with your mailing list to turn them into loyal customers?
Relationship Building through E-zines
People signed up for your e-zine because you promised to regularly send them quality information that is relevant to their needs. Make sure you do this and keep doing it, so they want to stay part of your mailing list. Make your e-zine informative, and don’ use it for the hard sell approach. That way, you will look like an expert in your field: someone they want to consult with. Include your subscribers and make them feel appreciated.
Here are some ways to do that:
· Post questions for your e-zine subscribers to answer from a choice of 3 answers, which they can do by clicking a link.
· Encourage feedback from your subscribers; you can provide a link where they can post their feedback and other remarks. Make sure you acknowledge these and perhaps offer a small giveaway to people whose feedback is included as a tip in your next e-zine.
· Invite questions and suggestions from your readers. Ensure that you reply to these in subsequent issues.
The point of e-zines is to foster the belief that you are an expert and can be trusted.
The two main ways you will use the mailing list you have built is for regularly sending out e-zines and emails. That means that it is really important to get these right, or you will have wasted all that effort that went into building your mailing list. That is why you have to make sure your emails send out a powerful message.
So, on to your Message…
Real people will be receiving your emails. Humans. They will only be interested in one thing in reading your email: what’s in it for me? You need to make this clear very quickly in your email or you will lose your audience. So, concentrate on how your product or service can:
- Improve their business
- Make them money
- Look better
- Deal with a problem they have, etc.
It is often said that there is no ‘I’ in ‘sales’. This means that you need to focus on what your product or service will do for your potential clients. Never use ‘I’ in your emails, always ‘you’.
The tone of your emails is vital in building up a relationship with potential clients. In terms of sales, the most effective tone is friendly but business-like. Try not to sound too formal, though, as this will make people feel distanced from you and then they will lose the loyalty they feel to you which would have encouraged them to buy from you.
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How to do List Building through Social Bookmarking Sites
The main social bookmarking websites are:
- Digg.com
- Twitter.com
- Delicious
- Addthis.com
To make the most of social bookmarking websites for your list building, there are a few techniques you should follow:
- Type the post in English. The website vistors will come from all over the world, but the majority will be able to read English – more than if you used another language, anyway.
- Use attractive anchor text, to entice people to click on your website link.
- Upload videos to Twitter and YouTube, to showcase your company.
- Put bookmark icons in highly visible places on your website.
- MySpace and Facebook can also be used to increase traffic to your website.
Forums and Message Boards
These are the most interactive of all websites. They get a lot of traffic and potentially that means a lot of people will see the link from which to join your mailing list. You just need to include the relevant link in your signature which you add to each of your posts.
Here you can give your opinions, answer questions or post your own questions, or respond to what has been written. The things to remember when using forums and message boards in order to further your list building are:
- Be professional
- Show you are knowledgeable
- Stay on topic
- Don’t push your products and services; leave that to your website
- Make sure you use your signature every post and have your link in it
This is the way to use forums and discussion groups for list building without being accused of spamming. You should use them as opportunities to become known as an expert within your field. That way, people’s faith in you will grow and they will be more inclined to bring their business to you.
Sign up for several relevant forums and you will soon be well known; make sure you are well known for all the right reasons. On most of these online forums you will also be able to upload your profile. That is often visible to the public, so make sure it contains relevant keywords and gives a reasonable idea of what your business does and even what your business ethos is.
If your post is informative, people who read it will almost always click on your link to visit your website. If they like what they see there, and you have a link to sign up for your mailing list on every page, like was suggested earlier, they will more often than not join your mailing list. So, relax, and keep the hard sell off the forum. You don’t need to do it there and if you do, you will more than likely put people off.
When you join these forums, take some time to browse and find out where you can make your most useful contributions. A good tip if you have the necessary knowledge is to answer any questions which have not yet been responded to. Make sure you sound professional and like you know what you are talking about, in every contribution you make. Don’t just say ‘click here to find the answer in my e-book’. That really won’t work and will just make it seem like you are taking liberties with your membership to the forum. That will cause offence and could even get you banned and blacklisted, which would be a disaster for your business promotion.
It is also important to make your forum contributions regular. That is all part of relationship building and allowing people’s trust in you to grow. In time, people will visit your website through your link. They will also recommend you to other people.
Of course, you can always start your own threads in the forums. Good threads to start are those which directly relate to what appear to be the current problems. Always make sure what you write is meaningful. People aren’t stupid. If they can see you’re not interested in helping but only want to do your list building, they will avoid clicking on your link.
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List Building with Competitions
Most of us will have entered a competition at some time. Isn’t it exciting when you win? Everyone enjoys that feeling. That’s why it’s a good idea to run a competition on your website and opt-in pages. They just need to give you their name and email address in exchange for an entry into the competition. That is a really effective way to build your mailing list.
Your autoresponder will send them an email confirming their entry. Prizes could be some useful tips, free report etc.
There are several different types of competitions that you could run in order to boost your list building:
Essay Competition
Give your readers a subject (or topic area) and word limit and let them know that you will choose the best essays for publication in your e-zine. That also ensures that they will sign up for your mailing list because they will definitely want to see their essay for themselves.
In order to get it into the e-zine in time and to create a sense of urgency, set a deadline by which the essays must be submitted. You should also issue some guidance as to what is acceptable content for the essays. Clearly stipulate whether, once submitted, or once published in your e-zine, the essays become your property. Think carefully about this, because if the writer retains copyright and they publish it elsewhere, what will that do to your search engine rankings and your credibility? However, publishing the content written by your subscribers is a great way to building up a good relationship with your mailing list.
Photo Competitions
Similar to essay competitions, you could run photo competitions linked to the theme of your website. They would work in the same way as described above. You can publicize these competitions more widely, this potentially getting more people to see your link, by advertising in competition directories. There are several of these online and they are easy to find through the search engines.
Remembering that your aim here is to get contacts’ email addresses to add to your mailing list, a much simpler competition that you could run is to have a draw of people’s email addresses, for which they win a prize if you are selected. Like with all these competitions, a good prize is some kind of information product (e-book, report or autoresponder course) which shows them dome more about your business and how it can meet their needs, so they are encouraged to buy from you. You can have these draws fortnightly or monthly – whatever suits you.
Instead of information products, if you have a membership website that people must pay to sign up for, offer a free premium access to your membership area.
Make sure you mention the value of the prize (i.e. the price for which you would usually sell it). That will help to generate interest in your competition as people know that they will be getting a worthwhile prize if they win.
To attract attention, your competition needs a catchy title, and then you should be able to get a lot of names for your mailing list as people will be eager to enter and win the valuable prize.
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Pop-Ups to Aid your List Building
Pop-ups are a very effective way of getting sign-ups for your mailing list if they are used correctly. We all probably know what pop-up are - those little windows that pop up and open when a visitor clicks a link. Some of the most effective pop-ups appear when a visitor attempts to leave your website.
These pop-ups can be very annoying, or they can be viewed as a great opportunity to get hold of some valuable information. The trick is for you to make your pop-ups seem like they are in the latter category. You should present joining your mailing list as an opportunity not to be missed at any cost.
To make the pop-ups effective for your list building, you should ensure that your pop-up message sounds like they will be missing out on a valuable opportunity – perhaps for ever. That is the way to boost your list building through pop-ups as people will feel compelled to click on them and once they have clicked on them, they are more likely to feel that they may as well leave their details – and then you have them on your mailing list.
Warning!
However, there is a problem with traditional pop-ups because many people these days have pop-up blockers on their PCs. These are free and easily installed, so you have to make a little effort if you want to get around pop-up blockers, but it’s worth it for the boost to your list building.
You can use DHTML pop-ups which cannot be blocked.
Adding Pop-Ups To Your Website
You can easily download free software from the internet which will allow you to create DHTML pop-ups. You can do this yourself without the need for professional help so you don’t need to worry about that.
Save your energy for getting your pop-up message just right. What you say in the pop-up is the most important thing. You need to convince visitors to leave their contact information, so how do you do this?
· Offer something like a free e-book or report in exchange for their email addresses.
· Ensure that your pop-up title includes a powerful keyword linked to your niche. That will also help to boost your search engine rankings.
· Make your pop-up ad catchy.
· Make your headline attractive. Your visitors won’t hang around if you don’t grab their attention right away. Make them excited in a few seconds so that they want to sign up to your mailing list. You can even get software to help you with making these attractive headlines.
· Use few graphics or none at all. Your pop-up needs to load quickly or people won’t bother sticking around. A simple, stylish design is best.
· Make sure that your pop-up windows have a close option. There’s no point in forcing your visitors to sign up to your mailing list just so your pop-up will go away! People who really didn’t want to sign up with you aren’t going to buy from you. All this will do will give you a bad reputation.
If you use these techniques, your pop-ups should be catchy and compelling and that should ensure that they help your list building efforts.
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