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How to build an optin email subscriber list

Written by: Paul Lock

Article Overview: Turn your website into an automatic cash generating machine (and the legal mistake that could cost you a fortune when you retire).

How to build an optin email subscriber list

Ask any successful internet marketer what’s their most valuable asset and they’ll all say the same thing – their opt-in email subscriber list – I guarantee it.

‘Opt-in’ is the opposite of spam.

So how do you build a list of subscribers and get them to buy from you? Here’s a few tips:

1. The reason you need a list is twofold – to capitalise on the investment you’ve made in driving readers to your site and to build trust over time. Every time a visitor leaves your site without buying or leaving their contact details is a potential customer lost.

2. It’s commonly believed that it typically takes 7 contacts with a prospect to get them to trust you and buy. Achieving this on the net is particularly difficult and it’s where email marketing comes into its own.

3. To get people to subscribe to your list you need to give them an incentive. This can vary from a simple newsletter if your market is very niche – the subscribers will have a common interest, hobby or passion and will be keen to sign-up – to an offer or course as a reward for subscribers where their affinity with your offer is weaker.

4. In the ‘old’ days (you’d be amazed how much internet marketing has changed in less than 10 years) website owners had to manage their lists, newsletter distribution, unsubscribers etc manually. It took huge amounts of time and effort and, although it was profitable, it wasn’t much fun.

Now you can automate many of the essential tasks involved in running a subscriber list and focus on delivering great products by using ‘autoresponders’.

An Autoresponder is like a programmed publisher. You feed messages in and decide when they should go out, to whom and in what order. You include links to your sales pages and to your unsubscribe facility.

If you want one, try http://www.aweber.com/?202918.

5. There are two tested ways to communicate by email - a newsletter (ezine) or a mini-course. To work effectively they must be valuable to the readers, but they must also be valuable to you. How?

By having subtle links to your own products and services they encourage readers to find out more about what you offer. So you have to find a way of weaving in references to your products by describing their benefits in a low-key but compelling way.

To find out how to write a profitable newsletter I recommend Michael Green’s ‘How to write a newsletter’ toolkit. Michael’s one of the world’s leading internet marketers. I use many of his products myself and this one’s worth its weight in gold. .

6. There’s no point in signing up subscribers and then forgetting about them. Or sending them a newsletter every two or three months. The opposite is even worse – daily emails full of irrelevant, badly written plugs will overload your unsubscribe service.

There’s no golden rule about frequency – it depends on your market, their needs and what you’re offering. A mini-course should probably go out at least once or twice a week. And an ezine should be monthly at the very least.

If in doubt, why not ask your readers?

7. There are lots of ways to build your list. The techniques you use will depend on your budget and timescales. If you need subscribers quickly, pay-per-click advertising on Google Adwords for example, is a fast way of driving lots of qualified visitors to your site. Just make sure your Landing Page – the one you’re driving them to – is focused on getting them to sign up. Otherwise your ad budget will get wasted.

Other techniques include driving traffic to your site through offline media, contributing to forums, joint ventures with other sites, sending press releases to sites in your sector and all the techniques available to drive traffic to your site.

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8. Avoid this costly mistake and you could retire rich!

Every website should have a privacy policy that readers can check how you intend to use their data. Before you copy a policy from another site – yes, it’s tempting – remember what I said earlier about successful marketers’ most valuable asset – their list!

If you plan to sell your business, it’s vital that its most valuable asset is something you can include in the sale. So having a privacy policy that protects subscribers but allows you to sell their details when you sell the business is critical.

Andrew Woolley is a lawyer specialising in e-business. He can help you avoid this mistake. Contact him at aw@e-lawfirm.co.uk .

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  E Mail Marketing Campaigns
  Tips to Improve Your Online Business List Building Results
  Top 10 Email Marketing Tips to collect Opt-in email list
  8 Ways to Build a Subscriber List
  How To Build a List That Actually Opens Your Emails

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Related Forum Posts
Your 2008 Sales & Marketing Goals? - Hi Everyone, I thought it would be fun to post our individual sales & marketing goals for 2008. This public announcement allows everyone to commit to our goals, and at the end of the year, we'll pick up this thread and report what happened. My goal -- within the year, I would like to build my internet marketing niche subscriber list to over 5000. In internet marketing industry, it's understood that every subscriber is worth $1 a month residually because of the abundance of backend products you can continue to market to the list. Some months, I net more than $1 per subscriber and some months I don't. It's a lot of work to maintain the relationship while looking for more products or information to market. But if I can build my list to over 5000 and can profit from just 1/5 of it every month ($1000), it will be really fun. What is your personal or business goal(s)? Regards, Takuya
Re: Is Bulk Mailing useful for promotion - Generally speaking, NO it's not. Of course, if you are building up your own true opt-in list of subscribers and you use an autoresponder to bulk mail them then it can be very useful. But simply blasting out emails in bulk to people who don't know who you are and haven't specifically given you permission to mail them (by optin in) is not useful at all.
Preparing a list - I'm looking to build a list. Can you point me into some directions of where "without paying for a $100.00+ rebook) where to go to learn how to build a list?
Re: What is Email marketing? - Do a list building activity using opt-in. Or you can buy database of potential customers from mailing list providers and do an email blast. or you can ask them to do an email campaign. But, i would recommend to put an opt-in code and let the people subscribe for it. That is better. What is others' opinion? Thanks Robert
Small Business Advice Seminar? - Small business advice seminar is pretty generic though. Unless the host has pre-existing relationship with the audience, it's kind of hard for the attendees to assess the value of a seminar in such situation. And it's easy for the rest of us to say something you see tested everywhere else so let's get something creative so that Kevin could find something he never would have thought about. Here is my suggestion... Incentive is nice, but it might draw greater number of attendance if a guru speaker can come. Instead of thanking people for attending, it'll make the seminar to look more of a priviledge to attend. Whenever you finish a seminar, the attendees would look back evaluating the ROI for the time that was spent being there. Even though the content wasn't a perfectly delivered one, the greater the influence the host would have with the attendees, the better its after effect would become. So that the bit of celebrity attendance, it would boost the credibility for the next time around. It doesn't have to be a super guru, but just a well known local one once seen on TV news or something. I don't know what your friend's budget is, but if you happen to be promoting something real high end, instead of inviting a guru speaker, you could offer Ipod, too. Now as for the email campaign ... I would pay someone in the local area who has huge database of newsletter subscriber list and approach him with can't lose offer, like paying him upfront and splitting some of the revenue from the backend. Then have him do a few promotions to his list just about the seminar while building anticipation. My friends and I have done similar what we could call "launch" to our lists of people using a few step methods. First mail invited people to click through to our first video -- this showed some "private" behind the scenes type of screen shots of what we wanted to sell with just a small lead capture form below the video to build more list. Second email had another set of short video that showed more content inside, which lasted like 5 minutes so that anyone interested would stop and watch what we had to say. Third one, forth one just kept on building up some anticipation until people said, "Umm.. it's impossible for me to physically attend your seminar (or luncheon) on Monday 12 pm, would you take our cash in advance so that we could buy your recorded DVDs?" Of course, who would refuse that! Well, this time around may not be possible to do anything like that, but as soon as this seminar is over, you might want to video some of the attendees and ask for testimonials. Before the next seminar, have people pre-register for the email list and you can send promotional emails to that list every three to four days, just showing the testimonial videos and results of the attendees. I haven't personally used this method but I know this works the same way as the method I mentioned above. At this time, the audience is thinking "I don't know what you're going to do in your seminar, would it be worth my time to attend or are you going to waste my time?" Most pre-seminar promotions sort of leave it up to the attendees to figure out if it's going to be worth or not. And some hosts mistakingly think if it's free, there is nothing to lose. But they don't realize is it still requires people's opportunity cost to attend a seminar so no matter if it's free or not, it's still costing their valuable time and the only way to really build anticipation is clearly articulating the benefit they'll receive in advance. So if your friends could come up with something super unique to say about the seminar, it could expand it from there. But if their message happens to be still generic, I think it would need the help from a guru speaker.


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