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“The Money is in the List” is something that you hear the moment you jump into internet marketing and it follows you whenever and wherever you go.
And the fact that every experienced internet marketer tells you that the money is indeed in the list, goes to establish the fact that your list is your biggest asset and that it is the most important thing in your business.
When I started my business, I never really cared about a list. Traffic generation was simple and Google Adwords and other ads networks were also very cheap. I built a lot of micro niche websites and I was able to generate huge amounts of traffic to these sites. I made and these sites did extremely well. But the biggest mistake that I did was – not build and email list. I never really cared about the “Money is in the list” thing because I was making money and that was all I cared. The next couple of years saw a lot of things change on the internet. The traffic to my sites dropped because they were not optimized and some of them did not even follow the guidelines from Google. Some got penalized and yet others dropped of the rankings. As traffic dropped, the money went down. And finally one day, by the time I could realize what was happening, pretty much all my sites were down.
I am sure you don’t want to be in that situation.
With the changing internet marketing world and the difficulty in generating traffic and visitors to your content and offers, the efforts that you are putting into generating every single visitor is huge. At the same time, the value of every single visitor coming to your website has increased. If you are not able to capture this visitor in the form of an email address, then you are losing a lot of money.
If you haven’t yet started building your list, then start right away. Don’t waste time on planning and designing. Just launch it.
Keep in mind that you will need some good and reliable tools in your list building efforts. I recommend using Aweber for your auto-responder. If you are looking for a self-hosted solution, you can use IMSC rapid mailer and use Amazon SES services to send your email. For building beautiful and high converting optin pages and landing pages, I recommend, Thrive Content Builder and Thrive leads. They are cost-effective and has a lot of features as well.
Now, you have built your list. What next?
Email Marketing Best Practices
Building your list is important. It is equally important to manage it as well. One of the biggest mistakes that most people do is to ignore the list after you have built it.
You don’t want a dead list where your subscribers don’t respond at all. Neither do you want to be building a list where your subscribers are unsubscribing faster than the rate at which they are subscribing.
These 4 email marketing best practices that we are going to discuss today will help you build and manage an email list that is responsive and at the same time profitable.
The Confirmation pages –
I see a lot of people using the default subscription confirmation pages, which we also call the “thank-you” page, for the optin forms. These pages are hosted by the auto-responder services and have nothing but a message to the subscribers to confirm their email. This is sheer waste of a chance to better interact with you new subscribers. Build a custom thank-you page and give it your branding. You might want to personalize it while telling them who you are are. You might want to add a photograph of yours so that they know who you are. I prefer using this same photograph in almost all of my emails.
People digest things better if presented visually. Rather than remembering my name, it will be easier for them to relate to my photograph. And after they have seen it a few times, they will easily remember my name.
The Confirmation email –
Your first interaction with your subscribers is in the form of the confirmation email. And once we most of tend to use the same default email that our autoresponders give us. Isn’t that a waste of the first chance to impress your subscribers and to set the expectations right?
Personalize your confirmation email. Give them a reason to Confirm the subscription. Talking a little bit about yourself will help set the context and your subscribers will be able to relate to you.
Set the expectation in terms of the frequency of the emails and the content that your subscribers can expect.
Tell your subscribers why they should confirm the email and whitelist your domain name. You can do this by telling them what might miss if they don’t do that.
You might want to tell them about the unsubscribe options. Be a little blunt here and tell them that just as they are not interested in reading your emails, you are not interested in keeping somebody who is not interested on your list and that hence they can unsubscribe.
The From email address –
Which of the two email addresses will you trust – info@abc.com or, james@abc.com. I have seen a lot of people also using an email address like noreply@abc.com.
Use an email address that builds trust. If possible avoid using free email providers like gmail.com and yahoo.com. Use your own domain name.
The Welcome email –
As soon as your subscribers confirm their subscription, send them a welcome email.
The Welcome email is the one that sees the most open rates and click through rates, primarily because of the fact that it is this email that delivers the promised freebie to the subscriber.
Write a subject line that entices the subscribers to open the email.
This welcome email is hence your biggest and best option to get your subscribers to click on your most valuable links. Soft sell your best offer in this email without pushing it too hard or, over-promoting it.
Use this email to once again set the expectations on what they will receive as a subscriber on your list.
It is said that the first impression is the best impression. And this is a little different in the case of email marketing. You have one chance to get a subscriber. But you get 3 chances to ensure that they stay with you for long. If you don’t take advantage of these then you have wasted the efforts that you put in to capture your visitor’s email address.
Resources Mentioned in this Episode
Your subscriber list is one of your biggest assets in Internet Marketing. It is hence important that you manage and maintain that well. And in order to do this, you need to ensure that you are using the best tools and software to manage this.
The resources and tools that we mentioned in this episode was primarily pertaining to managing your email marketing lists.
Auto-responder – Aweber, is our recommended auto-responder service and is the most reliable of all the other services that we have used. You can start for FREE today!
Self-hosted Auto-responder – You can use IMSC Rapid Mailer which is a WordPress plugin and run an auto-responder from your WordPress dashboard. You can use Amazon SES for your sending service. This is a cheaper option and if you have a good server on which you are hosting, then this is a good way to start. Click here to get yours!
Optin Page Builder – We use and recommend Thrive Leads to build beautiful and high converting Optin pages. It is simple and easy and you have a lot of templates that you can use to build your optin page and light-box popups. You also get a lot of statistics and analytics which will help you evaluate your best performing forms. Click here to get Thrive Leads.
Landing page builder – Thrive Content Builder is one of the best landing page builder. You can use it build beautiful landing pages and also to better format your blog posts. Read my review here and you can order your copy here.
Thank You for Joining Me!
I would like to thank you all for joining the podcast tonight. If you liked the show and the tips that we discuss here, do share it with your social media circles using one of the social media buttons. Don’t forget to rate us here on itunes, if you liked it. You genuine opinion will help in the ranking of the show.
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