5 Tips on How to Create an Email List the Smart Way
Summary
Get up-to-speed quickly on how to build a responsive email list from the start. Keep reading to find out what successful email marketers do to create a responsive email list...and what they avoid doing.
Best Practices For Building A Responsive Email Marketing List
Did you know that there is a smart way to build your email marketing list so that it provides good value to your subscribers, makes your subscribers responsive to your messaging, and can help you make a decent income? Keep reading to discover:
Email List Building
There is an expression in the Internet marketing world that states, "The money is in the list". The follow-on idea is that the bigger the list, the more money you make. I agree with the former and tend to disagree some with the latter. More on that in a moment.
Just keep in mind that all email lists are not equal. If you take the time to build a targeted email list as described below, then you'll typically have much more success with it than an email subscriber list that is only loosely targeted. Keep reading to find out why...
A Starting Point...
A baseline of sorts in the email marketing arena is that the average subscriber on your list is worth about $1 per month. So, a list of 1,000 average email subscribers could - on average - be worth $1,000 per month. A list of 10,000 subscribers could be worth $10,000 per month. And, so on.
In reality, some email subscribers don't buy or don't buy very often. But, some do. And, when you work out the math (i.e., how much money you make in a given month from your list divided by the number of subscribers you have), the industry average is reported to be $1 per subscriber per month. Naturally, your mileage may vary...
Of course, you have to be mailing to them some number of times each month, and what you mail to them has to resonate with them in order to get some number of them to actually open your emails and buy your offers & recommended affiliate commission products.
But, there's more to it than that. To have a responsive, growing list, you need to be attracting subscribers who are closely-aligned with your niche and your ongoing email content.
Is A Bigger List Better?
Having a huge email subscriber list is a great thing - as long as it is made up of subscribers who are closely-aligned with your niche. But, if it's made up of a significant number of subscribers who are only loosely-aligned or loosely interested with your niche & ongoing content, then all you will likely have is a big list of largely unresponsive subscribers. With this poorly-built type of list, you'll likely suffer from:
Then, you'll also likely conclude that email marketing just doesn't work.
What Happened?
It's possible because of the way you may have gone about building your list, you could have ended up with a significant percentage of subscribers who really only wanted the freebie you initially offered to them as your lead magnet (or ethical bribe) to get them to hand-over their email address in the first place. Then, they simply tuned you out. Oops...
At the time, you might have been excited to see your fledgling list actually growing. You might even have been excited to contact your autoresponder company to upgrade to the next higher subscriber tier because, after all, your list was growing.
But, now you notice that you have a lot of subscribers who seem never to buy anything. In fact, many never appear to even open your emails. And, you're pretty sure that you're not getting anywhere close to $1 per subscriber per month.
It turns out that you can actually have a smaller list of subscribers and make more money than with a larger list made up of loosely-targeted subscribers. But, that requires a more targeted list of subscribers that you initially focused on, continually appeal to, and continue to attract.
How Can Things Go Wrong? Here's An Example...
In the attempt to acquire email subscribers, perhaps you chose to pay for a "solo ad". For those that are unaware, a solo ad is typically one in which your message & call-to-action is sent within an email that someone else broadcasts-out to their email following.
While some solo ad email lists are certainly worthwhile in using, depending on how targeted the list of subscribers is on the sender's list, you may only get a lot of new subscribers who just wanted your freebie offer. They were willing to provide their email address (or a throw-away email address) to get your download. But, that's it. From that point on, they may never open one of your emails again. Naturally, that's obviously a waste...
The Unintentional Mismatch
An example of this might be that your niche is, say, email marketing training. But, because of how you went about building your list, you've ended up getting people on it that are really more interested in getting their affiliate marketing website to show up in the search results. Or, maybe they were really more interested in designing & providing WordPress websites.
Digging A Little Deeper
Being newer to email marketing, maybe you weren't really sure what to offer people as a lead-magnet to get them to opt-in to your list. So, maybe you ended up choosing to offer an SEO cheat-sheet because a lot of marketers always seem to be continually talking about SEO. So, you chose to go with that, and some of the people decided to opt-in to get that cheat-sheet to see the cool SEO tricks that you promised them.
For those from the group of people who are interested in their affiliate marketing websites, they got your cheat-sheet - and that's about all they were interested in because they haven't really taken the big plunge into SEO yet. The group of WordPress website designers may have opted-in for the cheat-sheet because they realize that they need to get something happening with somehow incorporating SEO into their website offerings in order to be competitive with other website design companies who are touting the SEO-friendliness of their WordPress website offerings.
But, for practical purposes, neither group seems to be super-interested in SEO right now. And, even though you email out helpful tips, useful resources, and great product recommendations to your list about email marketing, your list is just not all that responsive.
That's because you haven't targeted the subscribers that well.
Frequency Of Communication
As a side note, another way to have an unresponsive list is if you slack off on communicating regularly with your subscribers. If you let weeks, months, or years go by without sending out emails to them, many subscribers will forget all about you - then think you're spamming them when you email them 6 months later pitching some product recommendation. You should be reaching out to your list at least weekly to keep your brand in their mind-share. Some email marketers swear by mailing their lists daily.
How To Do It Right
OK, by now, you begin to understand that you need to do a good job in initially building your list and continue to do a good job as you grow it.
Quick Tip: Perform Email House Keeping
Why have subscribers on your list who do not appear to be interested in being on your list? I recommend that you clean your list from time to time so that you can prune-out the non-responsive subscribers. If you do this:
The better autoresponder services allow you to identify subscribers who don't appear to be opening your emails and certainly haven't clicked a link in an email in a long time. Before simply deleting non-responsive subscribers, considering sending just them a special email asking if it's over. Maybe "life" got in the way for them, but they really want to stay on your list and may actually start interacting with your emails. If they respond to you, keep them on your list. They may turn out to be a great customer who's just been dormant. For the rest, simply delete them from your email list of subscribers.
NOTE - The "open rate" percentage can be misleading. You could actually have more people opening your emails than gets reported. The way that the autoresponder company knows an email has been opened is that a pixel gets reported back to them. But, if your email account defaults to not loading images when you open an email, the pixel never gets triggered. So, even though the email got opened & read, to the email autoresponder company, it appears to have never been opened.
Some email marketers ask their new email subscribers on their welcome email to "white-list" the email address and to have your email account automatically load all images. In reality, some people will do this. Others are agreeable, but forget to follow-through. Some just don't want to be bothered.
Congruence is Your Friend
The savvy email marketers know to keep their message closely-aligned with their niche. They know that they need to be congruent. So, how do they do it?
Congruent Lead-Magnets
If your website is about cooking - and you want to build an email list, don't offer a special report about clutch repair tips. Of course, I'm exaggerating my example. But, by now, you understand that you can unintentionally get off-track with your subscribers from the get-go with a misaligned lead-magnet offer, Then, continue to stay misaligned.
So, what to do? Here's a couple examples:
If your website is about SEO training and you want to grow a targeted list, consider offering a cheat-sheet on...wait for it...SEO Tips to get people to opt-in. Then, write helpful, non-spammy articles about SEO on your website and send the article link to your list with a summary each time you publish a new article. Also, point out helpful free resources online about SEO. Throw in some affiliate SEO product recommendations from time to time.
Just don't default to pitching products in every email like so many of the uninspired email marketers of today do. People get tired of it and will unsubscribe. Your list will be unresponsive. Provide value, and tell them about great SEO products that will be helpful to them - and that you will get a commission from if they buy through your link.
Quick Tip: Consider Sharing Your Lead Magnet Virally
Imagine if you could get people to share your website with their friends. Then, people visiting your site from these mini-recommendations could end up doing the same thing with their friends. And, so on. You've started something viral. And, it doesn't involve coming up with cat videos, people crashing into something, or other nonsense. It's your brand being shared virally.
It called micro-influencer marketing, and it could help your list grow faster because you have a small army of people recommending your site to their friends.
Naturally, you'd need to offer a pretty decent lead-magnet (perceived as being valuable enough to get people to share your site with their friends). But, you could find yourself in a situation where your list is growing rapidly.
You might decide to keep track of the sharing yourself with a system you come up with to manage it. But, it can be done. And, your email subscriber list can begin to grow nicely from there.
Another option is to go with a dedicated system that takes care of keeping track of everything for you, including delivering the lead-magnet for you. One such referral marketing solution is called PerkZilla by Simon Hodgkinson & Jeremy Gislason.
How Do I Come Up With A Lead-magnet?
You're not alone if you're interested in getting an email list going, but simply have no clue where you'd start regarding the lead-magnet part. Thankfully, you have options.
Create it yourself
One option is for you to actually create the content yourself. But, I already know what you may be thinking. "What would I say?" Fear not because you've got options here, too.
First, take stock in yourself. You're likely good at what you do - or good at your hobby. Think for a bit, and write some notes about something helpful. For now, don't worry about the order of things that you write. Just get the ideas on paper (or screen). You can rearrange things later.
I recommend writing something short - so that people will actually be willing to read it. Also, make it one of your best pieces of advice. The idea here is that you want your email subscriber prospects thinking, "Wow...this download is really helpful. Imagine the cool info I'd get it if I bought his/her paid product." Getting the idea now?
Alternatively, you might choose to offer a congruent software download to get people to opt-in. More on that in a moment...
Content Length
If your lead-magnet special report or cheat-sheet is only a page or two, people will be actually be willing to take the time to read it. If you feel that you really need to write ten or twenty pages to make yourself clear, you may well be crystal clear in what you say. But, most people simply won't take the time to read it. Just either pare it down - or just summarize your great points.
You can create your lead-magnet in Word, Pages, or in a Google Doc. Then, turn it into a PDF. Why? With all of the malware and hacker issues these days, some people will simply not trust a Word doc to open it or to click a link that goes to something they don't recognize. Plus, PDFs are easily viewable on just about any device.
Takeaway - Make it bite size and a no-brainer to download & view.
Content Quality
If the content of your download hasn't got enough oomph to it & is therefore not all that appealing, people will either not be interested in opting-in to get it - or they will be underwhelmed with it when they read it. Either way, you lose.
Instead, you can write something short that gives them one to three of your very best tips - in the case of our example - on SEO.
I recommend that you create a nice, branded cover for your report or cheat-sheet, and be sure to add some styling to the body of it, too. Word, Pages, and Google Docs offer templates for that. Your reports & cheat-sheets will have a much higher perceived value, and they will help you to look more professional - which can help to establish you as an authority on your niche.
The better user-generated reports & cheat-sheets have the "Apple treatment" to them. To those unaware, unboxing any Apple product is a visually great experience. You can do the same for your text downloads by creating them with Paul Clifford's Designrr product.
Buy Your Lead-Magnet
Another alternative is to buy congruent lead-magnets that have been professionally prepared - and are ready to connect to your email opt-in form. Going this route costs you a few bucks, but it keeps you from having to rack your brain trying to figure out what to say - or taking time you don't have to research a topic to write about - or both.
Takeaway - Paid lead-magnets generally look good, have helpful content, and are ready to go right now.
Keep in mind that a paid lead-magnet could be a text type of download. It could be a video training. It could even be software.
If you choose to offer a software-style of download to entice people to opt-in to your list, just make sure it is congruent to your niche. In the running example, you'd choose an SEO-related software tool, like a tool to help identify promising keywords to use.
If you're not a software developer, you might choose to buy readily available software for this purpose from a Private Label Rights (PLR) website. Or, perhaps you bought a helpful SEO software tool (that's licensed to give away) as part of an upsell or One-Time-Offer (OTO) when buying a product made available through a JVZoo or WarriorPlus product launch offer. Perhaps, you yourself have created some software of your own to share. It could even be a limited version of a paid tool you sell.
Wrapping It Up...
Having an unresponsive email list is a waste of time, effort, and money. But, simply taking time to initially dial-in your focus will help you grow a responsive email list that provides value to your subscribers, and it can make you a decent living.
Do These 5 Things...
PS. Keeping true to the 5 tips for smart email list building will serve you well.
PSS. There are other good email list building training resources available. ListLaunch Pro offers a free training event on how to build a large email list with strategy, software, and platform created by a top Internet earner. Check-out List Launch Pro here
PSSS. Another good training is the eMarketers Club that teaches proven email marketing strategies for marketers & entrepreneurs. Click here to get free Silver Pass access to eMarketers Club
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About
Don Roberts
Don Roberts is a certified Email Marketing Specialist (EPC Institute). He is also a certified Sales Partner (Sales Partners Worldwide), as well as a certified Local Marketing Consultant (Marketing Mastery Association) and a certified Professional Internet Marketer (SEO in Practice). Additionally, Don is a skilled multi-channel marketing specialist in the fields of Facebook marketing, chatbot marketing, video marketing, and affiliate marketing.
