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Email Marketing
The Five Golden Rules of Email Marketing
By Mark Thompson
If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: “The Money Is in the List.” However, that trite, often-repeated phrase doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s just that “The Money is in a Well-Managed, Well-Maintained, and Properly Nurtured Responsive List” doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?
You can have as big a list as you want, but it if’s not responsive, it’s going to waste a lot of your time. I saw an ad yesterday for someone offering to send emails out to a list of 40,000 subscribers. As part of the sales page, he showed the number of emails that were opened for each mailing.
I was surprised that the figure was around 1,500. Also, the ad claimed that the average income from each mailing was $416. I would seriously expect to earn more than that from a small list of 200-300 loyal subscribers if I sent them an offer.
Maintaining a list of responsive subscribers is not about size; it’s all about how it’s used. (Sound familiar?) To that end, here is a list of five “golden rules” that will help you to build, manage, and maintain a responsive list.
Golden Rule #1: Use Double Opt-in and a Reliable Autoresponder
Always use double opt-ins when building your list. A double opt-in ensures that a person on your list has confirmed that they want to be there. I am sure you have subscribed by this method lots of times. You subscribe to a list, and then you receive another email with a link asking you to click it to confirm you want to subscribe.
This may seem annoying at times, but if you are a list owner, it is vital to ensure that you don’t run afoul of CAN-SPAM or other email marketing laws. It’s difficult for a person to accuse you of spamming them when they’ve indicated that they want you to mail them.
It’s often possible to find free tools that do most things that Internet marketers want. Unfortunately, autoresponders are one area in which this isn’t the case. One of the important metrics by which autoresponder companies differentiate themselves is delivery rates. They monitor these rates, and ensure they remain high, by developing long-term relationships with hosting companies and with companies like AOL and Yahoo. If emails are not being delivered, they find out why and rectify the problem.
If your emails aren’t being delivered, you aren’t going to make any money, and if you use a free autoresponder, you will have very low delivery rates. If you also use the autoresponder that comes with your hosting, you stand the risk of having all of your emails, not just those from your mailing list, flagged as spam and blacklisted. If you are serious about email marketing, get a
professional autoresponder.
Golden Rule #2: Be Relevant
A few months ago during a mentoring session, one of the new people who had joined the group asked me if I knew why he
wasn’t getting any sales from a list of 1,500 subscribers he had built up over the past three months. The first clue to the problem came when I asked him where I could sign up to the list, he said, “Oh go to any of my sites and you’ll see the form.” The problem was immediately obvious.
He had sites on baseball, prostate cancer, skin care, classical French cooking, and a dozen other niche sites. He was sending all the subscribers the same emails. To top it off, he was then trying to sell them high-ticket Internet marketing products. Your lists must be sent relevant information. If you have a list of subscribers who signed up for your weight loss
tips, then ensure you send them emails that relate to weight loss. Sending to a list anything other than what those subscribers
expect to receive will just lead to your losing subscribers.
Golden Rule #3: Nurture Your List
Once you build your list, you need to look after it and get the list members to relate to you. The big mistake most marketers make is that they immediately start sending out offers and trying to sell things. It has been estimated that it takes about 10 emails before the recipient trusts and relates to you.
Start off by sending out relevant tips and advice. For instance, it can often help to point them to free resources. Try to avoid
blatantly selling in any of your early emails; instead, focus on letting them get to know you. Share anecdotes and information
about your life and build empathy. Obviously, if you have a list of vegetarians, don’t talk about the BBQ and juicy steak you had last weekend!
Once you have built up a rapport with your list subscribers, then you can begin sending them offers and deals. However, don’t
send offers with every email; continue to give value to the list members. If you find you have a lot of people unsubscribing after
you send an email, you need to send more quality emails and start to build trust again.
Golden Rule #4: Have a Plan before You Start
I am sure that most people have fallen into the trap of thinking that they need to build a list and start building with no thought about how they are going to monetize it. List building and maintenance is timeconsuming, so you need to be sure you have a monetization plan from the start.
Have a look around and see if you can find several products that you could happily recommend to a list before you start building it. If the niche is so small that you are going to struggle to find products to promote or people to join your list, move on to something else.
Try to be unique; don’t promote the same products that everyone else is promoting. If you feel you have to promote a popular product that is being promoted by several marketers, get in there first. Send out prelaunch emails and presell the product. Offer bonuses if you need to. Just try to avoid emailing after everyone else.
Golden Rule #5: Manage Your List
So now you have a profitable list, you’ve built a rapport with your subscribers, and every offer you send out makes you money. Well done, but don’t rest on your laurels. You now have an opportunity to turn your responsive list into a hyper-responsive one by managing your list.
A quality autoresponder company will give you lots of stats about each email you send out. You can use this information to split your list into subgroups — those people who you know are buyers, those who have clicked the links but didn’t buy, those who just read your email, and those who didn’t even open your email.
The ones who don’t open the email could have just missed it, or perhaps they didn’t like the title, so you can try a different title and email them again a few days later. The buyers on your list are like gold dust; you now know what products they like, and that they aren’t afraid to buy a product online.
By managing your list, you can build several sublists and target them with the type of emails to which they respond. This is where the real money is.
By developing your mailing list and not just building it, you can ensure that you have a valuable resource that can earn you several thousand dollars a month. If you take only one thing away from this article, it should be that it’s not just good enough to build a big list; you need to build a responsive list.
About the Author
Mark Thompson spent many years working in an IT consultancy in London. Following a re-evaluation of his goals and lifestyle in 2004, he sold everything he couldn’t fit into the family car and moved to rural Spain, where he now pursues a variety of online ventures. Visit his website http://www.income-academy.com to learn more about the benefits of his low-cost online business coaching.
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