Email Marketing
How to Build an Emailing List
A good solid email list can be worth a lot of money to you as an internet marketer. With this in mind it’s obviously in your best interests to get as many people signed up for your list as possible – legally and legitimately.
But people won’t add their names and email addresses to your list unless you have something to offer them in return. This is where free offers, free newsletters and free downloads come into play.
It should be noted however that simply offering something for free won’t persuade everyone to sign up. You need to provide something that has value, and preferably something that they cannot get anywhere else.
Many internet marketers offer a free weekly newsletter to keep in touch with their customers, and send an extra bonus when someone signs up. This is typically a free report or e-book which is targeted specifically at the type of customer the marketer wants to have on their list.
For example, let’s say you have a wide range of e-books to sell on the subject of search engine optimisation. You could offer a free newsletter giving away weekly tips on how to get more traffic to your website and offer a free report in exchange for an email address, revealing the three mistakes almost every website owner makes which cost them mountains of traffic.
Anyone with their own website would no doubt be interested in receiving this free report, as well as the regular weekly tips. If they benefit as a result (remember that your free products should be valuable to the person receiving them) there is every chance they will buy something from you in the future.
The Importance of Email Marketing
Most of the people who visit your site will never buy. In fact, if your website produces a 1% conversion rate your website is considered successful.
In most cases, that means that 99 out of every 100 people who visit your site will leave and never come back… ever.
By offering something of high perceived value absolutely free to your website visitors, in exchange for their name and email address, you can capture a much larger number of people into your online marketing system.
Where a good conversion rate for a site that is selling something is around 1%, a good ‘opt-in rate’ (the number of people who take up your free offer) is around 20%, and can be as high as 50%!
Instead of losing 99 out of 100 people who visit your site, you’re now only losing 50 to 80 people. Or in other words, you’re capturing 20 to 50 people out of every 100 people who visit your site, instead of just one.
Most of the people who visit your site have some interest in what you sell, but for any number of reasons they won’t buy on the spot…
