Building an Email List.
Critical to the success and longevity of an email marketing career is the email list that we have in our possession. Its not only good enough to have a list compiled, but that particular list of customers must also be responsive to your offers. That strategy will come in time and also with practice. Like we have written previously, there are several methods of compiling and creating an email list. We all started somewhere and in many cases none of us had not even one name on our list. But we stayed true to our promise and kept plugging away until we had a satisfactory bank or list of subscribers.
It can be very dis-heartening at times to look at our list and see just a couple of email addresses on the back office of our email autoresponder and more than likely, one of those email addresses on the list is our own. We may have inserted our own email details, just to test the system and see if it’s all working according to the plan of our email campaign. Nothing wrong with that at all, we can always remove it down the line, when we are satisfied everything is OK. It’s nice to read our own email content sometimes, that way we can put ourselves in the shoes of our contacts, so we can experience what it’s like to be on the receiving end of one of our own e-letters or emails.
Starting from Zero
As we begin our journey into the world of email marketing, there are numerous and various methods of collecting and building out a profitable email subscribers list. There are two basic methods that practically all email marketers use and they are the Free option and the Paid option. The free route is sometimes more difficult as we must have some online material like a blog, website, FB or Twitter accounts and so on, so that people have the option of opting in to our contact section and sign-up for further newsletters or information about our product or offer. For instance if we have a Facebook page, it’s always good to complete all the sections like About Us, Contact , Learn More Button and all of those boxes. FB have gone to the trouble of putting all those options on our FB page, so it makes sense to insert all of our details, so that the visitor, if he or she wishes to contact us, they can do so easily, effortlessly and efficiently.
The paid option on the other hand is a pretty seamless exercise in the main. It’s a case of just head on over to any Sole Ad Vendors website and sign-up for a package of subscribers, that are relevant to our niche category. You can refer back here to an earlier post that covers that subject in more detail, for reference. Depending on our budget, it’s just a case of checking to see what the Solo Ad Vendors have to offer and then go ahead and make a purchase. On a note of caution, let’s say that we purchase a Solo Ad deal of 200 visitors, that doesn’t automatically suggest that we have 200 subscribers on our email list. Sadly no…..unfortunately, that rarely happens. We will learn from experience, that getting people to sign up to our offer with their email details, will be very contingent on what we have to offer, how well we describe same in our email and after all of that, then attempt or entice them to opt-in. The opt-in rate will vary always, anywhere over 30-50% is good, anything over that average and you are in bonus territory.
Methods of Generating Free Subscribers
In this paragraph, we will list some methods that are commonly used for generating free traffic or customers for your email list. There are numerous methods for this task, as we have outlined earlier on, but I will go through some of the more popular systems, that most marketers use.
- YouTube
- Article Posts
- Hub Posts
- Free Classified Ads
- Facebook Pages
- & other Social Media Sites.
There are many many more, but for starters, the above methods are a great way to begin our journey in this line of email list building. The beauty of the above list is…..they are all free. Take YouTube for instance, it’s so easy to cut a video on our smartphones nowadays and post it up online. If we are promoting a product, service, online course or whatever, we give a brief account of whatever it is, then towards the end of the video, ask the viewers to click the link in the description underneath, enter their best email address and send. Again, like we described in sending out emails, the content of the video has to be top-class and relevant, so that it will grab the viewers attention, thus getting them to opt-in for our offer. Further on in this website, we will look at other methods of generating free traffic, naturally it requires some hard work and time spent in research, creating the video or content and then advertise our offer online, where it’s available for our audience.
To Conclude and Summarize;
Hard work…I bet you are saying to yourself, after reading all of the above, but look….we can all light the candle and start cursing the dark. I agree, but look at the pay-off. If all of the above steps are followed diligently and you carry through with the promise and commitment that you made to yourself, you will be rewarded financially for life. Also, the job and exercise of building our own online business will bring it’s own satisfaction and contentment in spades. You will be bursting with pride at all of your own hard work and dedication, so much so, you may be tempted to write your own story and create your own online email marketing course. if you have liked what you have read in the above post, please leave a comment below in the comments section and we will respond in due course. All comments are greatly received, or if it’s an inquiry, please ask and we will get back to you as soon as is humanly possible.