List Building – Top 10 Tips for building your List
There are certain elements that you must get right in order to build a list. Your aim should be to build a list of double opt in e mail subscribers that are responsive to your product or affiliate offers. I personally subscribe to many marketers lists to monitor what they are saying and how they are connecting with their own lists. By far the most successful list owners are the ones that build a relationship with their list first rather trying to sell to them. How do you achieve this? Here are my to ten tips.
1) GIVE MORE SELL LESS - what does this mean? Whenever you generate a new subscriber the first thing you need to do is provide FREEuseful and relevant content about the niche that you are promoting. This may be a free report, a video or an e mail course. Do not hit them over the head with a sales pitch on your first contact with them this will only result in them unsubscribing from your list.
2) Stay on topic- say you are in the dog training niche, keep all your correspondence with your list about dog training don’t jump from topic to topic. Its no good sending someone information no matter how good it is about weight loss if they signed up for dog training information.
3) Mix up your series of messages to your list with a ratio of approximately 3 -1 i.e. send two pieces of free relevant information and then a message that may contain affiliate or product links.
4) Respect your list - remember these are real people you are dealing with. I see so many e mails coming through that basically try to tell me I am stupid for not jumping on their current offer. Now I am not stupid and I am sure you are not so always treat people like you would like to be treated yourself. Sounds like common sense but I see so many marketers doing this and it really annoys me.
5) Get your subject line right – this is crucial. Nowadays we are all busy people and our e mail in boxes get flooded with junk e mails. think about how you choose which e mails you open. The first thing you see when an e mail comes through is who is the email from and the subject line. Never use the words like free, dollars get rich or any other kind of hyped up promotional phrases. Most spam filters will delete your e mails when you use certain words in your subject line. Your first hurdle is to get them to actually open your message and actually read it.
6) Proof read everything- I don’t know about you but I see so many e mails that come through that look like they have either been written by someone whose first language is not English or by a young child. ALWAYS spell check your messages and proof read everything at least twice to make sure it reads well. There is no excuse for spelling errors when we all have spell checkers available. If you are not that confident in writing articles etc. get a family member or a friend to double check everything for you before you send it out. Once you hit that send button its too late!!
7) Stick to plain text messages- There are lots of e mail systems that you can use to send out your messages which use fancy HTML templates with graphics in. Steer clear of using these as lots of peoples e mail systems just will not accept these types of messages or they will be slow to open. Plain text is always best.
Get your subscribers to White List your e mail address -if you are using a sign up form then always use the double opt in procedure. This means that when they subscribe they will get a message form your Autoresponder system that basically tells them that they must confirm their e mail address to get their free product, service etc. On the confirmation page that you set up in your Autoresponder system include details on how they can white list your address depending on which e mail provider they uses such as AOL, Hotmail, Googlemail etc. This ensures that they will then actually get your message and not be caught in their Spam filters.
9) Always include an unsubscribe address - To comply with Spam rules you should always include an unsubscribe address at the bottom of the e mail. Some people try to hide by putting lots of empty lines at the bottom of the e mail and then on the very last line is the unsubscribe address – why do they do this? Basically they are scared that they will send out their message and the subscriber will unsubscribe. This to me is weak marketing. If your messages are a load of crap then people will unsubscribe but if you are providing quality information you should not be worried about this. It happens, people unsubscribe all the time its normal.
10) Test, Test, Test -Always test every element of your list building, from the initial entry point be it from your blog or a squeeze page to your subject lines and e mail body content. Beware only change one thing at a time and re test so you know exactly what worked and what didn’t. If you change a whole bunch of things at the same time how are you going to know what changes made the improvement.
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