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. http://www.howtocorp.com/sales.php?offer=Incise&pid=1
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.
For 24 ways to promote your product try this – I bought it and it transformed my web marketing http://www.howtocorp.com/sales.php?offer=Incise&pid=22
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 .
How to build an optin email subscriber list - To learn more about this author, visit Paul Lock's Website.
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Paul Lock
(Visit Paul's Website)
Brought up in London and been in marketing
since the days of Johnny Rotten - yes,
that long. Corporations may be slow moving
and full of political windbags but
they're a great way to get your training.
After 20 years 'training' I went into
the agency world and set up my own company
three years ago. We help small businesses
make the most of their web marketing
investment, from design and planning to
search engine optimisations and analytics.
If you can't measure it, don't waste
your money - are you a business person or
a gambler? Over the years I've made more
mistakes than you could shake a stick at
and, on the basis that an investment in
knowledge pays the best returns, I offer a
few morsels which might help you make
fewer mistakes than me. I hope my articles
help and feel free to visit my web site.
Best of luck,
Paul
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