List Building 101

Building an email list can be the difference between making just enough to get by on and earning 6 to 7 figures a year!  

It’s critical not only for making the first product sale, or reminding people about your services, but most importantly for the on going marketing. This is how you can sell to your customer after the first sale and is an area that many marketers completely overlook.

Your email list can make all the difference to your business success. 

First of all, the average customer will only buy from you after you make contact with them 5-7 times. Very rarely will somebody buy on the first “touch.”

If you don’t get their contact information the first time they visit, you’ve almost certainly lost them forever. However, if you get their email address you can continue marketing to them, and you can very often turn a prospect into a customer. 

But that’s not even the most important part of a list. 

Very often you will do nothing more than break even on the front end. The KEY is having a powerful follow up campaign that makes up for it. This could be either in the form of up-sells or cross-sells, regularly scheduled newsletters, and could be your own product or even someone else’s.

Segmenting Your List

I would strongly recommend you segment your list - the first with those who haven’t bought from you and the second with those who have. This helps you make offers specifically for them. When done right, your profits could increase as people purchase from the follow up, or recurring, emails. 

Building Your List

Aim for quality over quantity. In other words, don’t just go for a list of 1000s of people. Aresponsive list is the most important factor. 

Wouldn’t you rather have a list of 200 hungry prospects than 30,000 unresponsive prospects? I thought so. Getting targeted prospects to your list is key to your success. 

So how do you achieve that? First you have to know who your prospect is. This will determine who you go after. 

Make sure you know the age, gender, where they live, average income, interests, etc. If you don’t know exactly who your prospects are, you won’t be able to craft your sales letter and emails exactly to their needs.

I would strongly recommend you have an email opt-in form on every page of your site. Especially on your homepage.  In both ecommerce and service based businesses, the best way to collect an email address is to offer something of value in return.  Whether it be a discount for your product or a free download or discovery call. 

How do you increase the percentage of signups for your newsletter?

You need to give them a compelling reason to join. Consider testing an opt-in page. This will weed out the “tire kickers” from the serious prospects. 

Some profitable marketers have two or three opt-ins that people need to join, before they even let those prospective people see the sales sequence. This is to ensure that they have the email address of every single hot prospect, whereas just putting it in the sales segment might let a few slip through the cracks.

Remember, yourmain goal is to get your visitor on your email list not to make the sale the first time they visit. Again, this is because it takes most people at least 5-7 contacts before they will buy.

Therefore I would recommend testing having an opt in page versus a regular sales letter to see which converts the most visitors into subscribers. 

How do you test this?

One option is to watch analytics closely, a second is to split test this in Adwords. Once you’ve come up with a winner, then focus on getting the better performing one ranked with SEO. 

Hopefully this has enlightened you on how you can make money with list building and why list building can be important for your brand.