Top List Building Tips

Top List Building Tips : So the first thing they tell you when you go in search of a few extra dollars online, is you must “learn how to promote other people’s offers as an affiliate.”  That is, learn how to drive traffic to a website.

Some of the people who click end up buying… and you get paid.

Next, they tell you to start building a list.  A list of email addresses which you can email at any time, and produce ‘income-on-demand.’

What usually happens though for most, is somewhere between the 0 – 3,000 email subscriber count, email marketing can be very ‘hit and miss.’

Some days you’ll get the odd sale.  But then you can go for weeks… with nothing. Nada. Zilch!

None of this is bad advice – in fact it’s exactly what we teach but there is more to it and we want to share with you our top list building tips to help you because we’ve been in that same place. Thankfully we didn’t give up.  now we have a list of tens of thousands but the truth of the matter is that most of those 1m subscribers are unengaged or completely unresponsive.  This is natural for all lists.  As the list ages, people lose interest, change email addresses, etc… so responsiveness goes down.

These days when we email our main list we don’t expect miracle open rates and nor should you.  That being said, these top list building tips should help you get the best from your list building

At a recent mastermind a delegate asked our mentor Matt Lloyd “I’ve got this list of 3,000 email addresses, but I don’t have any sales. What am I doing wrong?” Here’s what he said:-

1. It’s not just the size of the list.  It’s the relationship you have with the list, which really pays you.

Most Online Marketers think that just by merely building a list is going to get them paid, but building a list is the first step—it’s not what really pays you.

In fact, I know people who have a list of 10,000 leads but they still can’t make a dollar online, or still aren’t getting regular commissions.

The size of a list is a factor, but the relationship is what’s infinitely more important.

The relationship is incredibly important if you ever want to sell something to somebody. Then once you build a rapport with your prospect, the next step is to get those people to respond.

You do that through telling stories. Through entertaining.  Through being interesting.  Through having personality in your copy.  By being likeable etc.  Read ‘Influence’ by Robert Cialdini to get good at this.

2. Market to the right people.

This might sound obvious, but the 3,000 people you reached might be the wrong 3,000 people. This is actually pretty common among Online Marketers…

If you’re promoting some product or solution and that’s what you advertise, then you’re landing page should match.

A lot of people advertise many different products online, but then they send these prospects all the to same exact landing page—instead of having separate landing pages for each product advertised.

Yes, it helps you build a big list, but many people are getting on your list through this lead capture page thinking it’s about something completely different.

If the product you’re offering on the landing page is totally unrelated to the ad they clicked, that means you’re not being congruent. And it will be a very hard sale to make.

For instance if you get on our list, and you’re expecting daily videos about marketing, how would you feel if we sent you an email about better gardening? Would you buy our videos about marketing?

Absolutely not, because what we offered, what we presented on their entry point into our sales funnel was completely different to what we’re actually offering. Now, that’s an exaggerated example, chances are you’re not doing it to that degree, but that could be one of the reasons.

2. Frequency of your messages.

Another reason why you might not yet be making money from this list, is that you’re NOT contacting them frequently enough.

You should be reaching out to your list, in our personal view, almost daily.

Some people might think that’s too much.

But your average prospect spends less than 5 seconds a day thinking about you or your business, so it’s not too much at all.

If receiving your content / stories / offers daily is too much for a prospect, they probably are not the right prospect for you anyway.

3. Consistency is key.

Here’s another big tip. Consistency is just as important as frequency.

How often do you email them? Is it every day, or two days, or three day?

How often are you staying in front of your prospect? This is what consistency is all about.

For example, if you email them every day for a week, and then they don’t hear from you for a month, guess what? That list is pretty much dying out. That’s not going to last for that long, and we see this happen all the time.

For us, having a structure really helps.  Without a routine it would be easy to put off emailing and as we said, emailing your list is the one thing you need to prioritize over everything else in this business.

Whilst we outsource some of the tasks in our business emailing is not one of them.  It’s the most important of them!

4. Don’t be forgotten (especially in the first few weeks).

Many new online marketers get all excited about building their brand new list. But when they start emailing their new contacts, and they don’t notice immediate results, they put everything on hold.

They don’t email their list for a few weeks… or in some cases, longer.

Then, six months later, they come back to it and they start sending emails again, but now they’re not getting any response. They are not getting any opens, they’re not getting any clicks, and they wonder why…

It’s because these people signed up to be on your list. They were interested in what you had to offer, so they gave you their email address. But they also have incredibly short-term memories.

New leads have very short-term memories…

If someone subscribes to your list and they get a few emails from you, and then you don’t email them for a week, they’ve probably already forgotten you.

That’s why it’s your job to provide them with interesting content they will enjoy reading, and then, of course, you need to offer them products they will actually want to buy.

They will forget your name pretty quickly, so you should always be conscious of this, and keep in touch with them from the beginning.

5. Get “Paranoid” about the constant threat of the declining value of your list.

Here’s a big tip learned from Dan Kennedy…

It’s important you keep a healthy degree of paranoia about your list, because your list is a very unique asset.

Your list is not like gold, it’s not like real estate, or any other tangible asset which has a fairly stable value over time.

Your list is an organic asset—that means it is perishable.

It is either improving in value or it is decaying. So if you are not actively steps and actions to improve the responsiveness of your list and improve that relationship with your list, it is dying out.

And if it’s neglected enough, it will die out completely and you will have this big list that produces no money. So, that’s also very important.

6. Survey your list (ie. ask them what they want from you!)

Now, you might then ask, “Well, how do I know what they want?” And the answer is very simple—YOU SHOULD ASK THEM.

The best thing you can do is to do a quick survey.

You can go to a site like SurveyMonkey.com, and there are lots of other sites like this that allow you to conduct surveys. These sites allow you to do a free survey where you can ask them a bunch of questions. You send your new survey out to your list, and ask them what kind of training or value they want.

Usually only a very small percentage will answer your survey, but those are usually going to be your most responsive people, and they will tell you what they want. You might even just ask them, “Look, what are you interested in learning about? Traffic generation, improving conversions, video marketing?” Things like that, and find out what they actually want.

Let me give you expert advice here… Do the survey. Okay?

Do the survey first of all, and see what they actually want to learn. Learn what they actually want to buy. And why they felt compelled to give you their email address.

You’ll quickly discover why they originally joined your list, and then you can branch out with more questions about that topic to see what they actually want to learn.

7. Make offers to your list (this is the whole point in having a list!)

You’re Here To Run A Profitable Business, And You Must Never Be Afraid To Make Offers And Ask For The Sale!

Be relentless in promoting offers.

You should promote an offer in just about every single email you do. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re just saying “buy this, buy this, buy this,” – because if you’re too salesy in your approach to every email and you never give anything in return, you’ll burn out your list quickly.

You still want to be interesting, you still want to be engaging, you still want to educate them, but you have to be making an offer in just about every single email. You will notice in my marketing I’m always making an offer.  Sometimes it’s a very obvious offer, and sometimes it’s very subtle (eg. a soft call-to-action in the PS).

For example in our emails we might be telling stories, sharing information, giving some training but there will always be a banner ad at the bottom of the email for one of our products.

So even though that’s a very subtle offer, we’re always putting some kind of offer in front of our market, our list. So you want to make sure that you are doing that.

8. Copywriting skills:  never stop improving them.

You should really work at improving your copy writing skills—it’s a very important skill to master.

It’s the ultimate leverage point.

The ability to put words on a page and influence the masses to do what you want, is one of the most powerful and profitable skills you can posses.

Some people pick it up really quickly.  Others can take years to get good at it.  But it’s something worth studying and practicing.

When you are writing an email, make sure to encourage responsiveness. Send them an occasional email where you say, “If you want to know more, get back to me/us.”

Ask them actually reply to the email or contact you on Facebook. That way, you are actually responding to them after they raised their hand and submitted their email to you.

It might sound surprising, but responding and following up with prospects is VERY RARE in this Industry.

The moment that you respond to them, you suddenly become a real person in their eyes. No longer are you just an anonymous guru in their inbox with another 20 emails coming their way.

When you respond to their questions, they see that you’re actually a real person and they feel some little connection with you. They become more responsive as leads and as buyers. So keep on doing that as well.

9. Make offers through different marketing channels (that you introduce through your emails)

Again, your success in marketing is all about making offers…

Use different channels to mix things up.  Sometimes you might do a webinar, which you invite them to from your emails.  You then teach them something on a webinar, and make an offer at the end.

If you’ve never done a webinar before that probably sounds hard.  But it’s actually very simple.  There are many platforms for webinars from free to paid and practice will make perfect!

Another channel:  Bring them to a Facebook group you have, engage them there, and make an offer. Private message the ones who are interested. We have a private  mastermind group on Facebook for our audience where we add value but also opportunities to buy from us.  It’s a balance as you don’t want it to be a pitch fest but just a link in your email to join your group is all that’s needed

You should develop several main marketing channels over time, and again just be relentless in marketing and following up.

It’s what separates the people in this game who can extra $2 of value out of every $1 click they buy, from the majority who can’t even get $0.20 out of the same traffic.

It’s all about persistence in the follow up.

You always have to be putting an offer in front of your audience, or some piece of content so that you’re relevant, you’re in their life, and when they’re ready to buy, you’re right there in front of them.

That’s important. Because many times they’re not ready to buy on the spot, but when they are ready, you want to be there.

So there you go—we hope these 9-marketing tips help you get better connect to your email list.

If you have list of 3,000 email addresses, but you don’t have any sales, now you should be able to pinpoint an area you need to work on, and you can start converting leads into customers.

By the way, if you like this kind of practical training, we’ve got a lot more.

Top List Building Tips Resources

Autoresponders : Aweber or GetResponse

Lead Page Creators : Lead Pages or ClickFunnels

Surveys : Survey Monkey

Webinars : GoToWebinar  Demio

Thanks for reading and hope this article – Top Tips for List Building will help you in your online business

 

 

 

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