Why you need an email list, and tips on building one. This post is by David Smith of Conversion Optimization company Invesp.
You’ve a great product which you want to sell online. So you created a stylish website with some great content, you’ve written a great sales letter covering all the reasons why one should buy the product , But still you are not getting sales? Why, because you don’t have traffic. Your target audience doesn’t know about you. And to get traffic you have to buy it through PPC campaigns or by investing in SEO activities.
In early business stages, you may have to rely completely on search engines and PPC campaigns for traffic. But, if you want to be successful in long term you must have direct access to your customer base. And, there comes the importance of list building. It doesn’t matter what products/service you have to offer building your own list of potential customers and their contact details should be your top most priority from start. Below are the few benefits of having your own list.
You don’t have to solely depend on search engines and PPC campaigns for traffic. You will be having your own customer database that you can use anytime.
Having your own list gives you a great opportunity to communicate directly with your target audience.
Developing relationships with the list members (potential customers) and building credibility amongst them will be easier.
By using proper communication skills and sharing great offers and content, you can get them to visit your site again and again.
Your list subscribers will prefer to buy from you because of the already developed relationships and credibility you’ve established amongst them.
Now, as you know the importance of a list, following are the few tips for list building –
Start As early as Possible – Start building your list from the first day of your online venture. Time and again we see marketers who wait for their traffic to reach to a certain level before focusing on list building which is a wrong approach.
Use Email Service Providers – Avoid hosting your email subscriber list on free software with plans of moving to professional email providers once it grew to a specific number. One can easily lose more than 50% of his subscribers during the transition from one platform to another because most of the ESP’s (Email Service Provider) like Aweber will require your subscribers to opt back in. So, don’t be foolish to go with free software for saving some dollars.
Offer Free Bonuses– Your readers won’t subscribe to your blog of their own. You need to give them a reason to join your mailing list. The easiest and most effective way to get people to join your list is by offering them something for free (e-book, tools, business reports etc).
Use Multiple Ways to encourage Sign-ups – Don’t rely completely on your sign up box to get the new subscribers. Use multiple approaches to capture leads like using WordPress plugins to email to first time commentators, putting links to sign up pages on your social media profiles like Facebook and Twitter.
Always remember that Money is in the list. The more you will delay working on it, higher will be your loses.
David Smith works for Conversion Optimization Company Invesp and enjoys writing on SEO, landing pages, conversion rate optimization and affiliate marketing.
