The backbone of every online business. The golden key to build a strong, growing and successful business fast! What is it? The answer is simple: A Mailing List.
What is a Mailing List?
A mailing list is literally a list of names and emails of potential customers. You can choose to send emails to your email list whenever you want, as often as you want. You can even automate mailings with simple software that can send follow up emails.
Why build a Mailing List:
The main benefits from having a mailing list are as follows:
- You can contact leads on your list again and again. Therefore, you can send multiple offers.
- It substantially increases sales from return customers. Without a mailing list, a customer could be gone forever with no way of contacting them. However, a list enables you to provide even more excellent service to the customer and in return gain more sales.
- Most importantly, you can develop a relationship with your mailing list. This is key as it is much easier to sell something to a person who already knows who you are!
Therefore, a mailing list can connect you to countless web visitors, build a relationship with them, provide great value, and sell your product/service to a huge database multiple times. Its power is astronomical!
How to build a Mailing List:
Now after hearing about the wealth of power a mailing list has to building an online business, you must be desperate to learn how to unleash the power of the Mailing List on your business. Here is a simple step by step process to creating that strong list:
- Set up a web page form that asks for names and email addresses. This is called a squeeze page. Sign up to autoresponder service, or use a mailing list manager provided by your web host. ‘GetResponse‘ is an example of a great autoresponder service. Don’t distract them by having too much content on the same page. Most effective pages have one headline, a brief summary of what the list is about, and a capture form. Videos briefly explaining the list are very popular as video formats tend to yield far greater results. At this point there is no attempt to sell anything.
- Offer something of value for free if they sign up. These give visitors a reason to give you their email. Remember who your target demographic is. Make it relevant! What are their fears, wants and desires? A free piece of content could be a free report or free software or an eBook etc. But most importantly it must be of great value and quality!
- Give them a reason to subscribe to the mailing for the long term. This could be newsletters, daily updates, daily special deals, new content etc. A daily or weekly stream of valuable quality
- Create two versions of the squeeze page and use software to alternate between which version is shown. This allows you to experiment and see which version has the greatest response so you can use that as your main squeeze page. In-fact, you can constantly try to beat your best squeeze page to create better and better squeeze pages.
- Provide a link to the free offer in their ‘Thank You’,
- Begin sending the daily/weekly content that was promised in the squeeze page.
- Eventually, you will have built a strong enough relationship with your mailing list through your emails to begin promoting a product/service. Your revenue stream.
Conclusion to Building a Mailing List:
There you have it! It’s not so hard isn’t it? That mailing list will very quickly become the life blood of your business and will yield substantial and noticeable results as long as you provide great quality valuable content. Remember, the size of the list is nowhere near as important as the responsiveness of the list.
Furthermore, a strong relationship with the mailing list where you are over-providing is absolutely key. You don’t truly own the Email list if you don’t have a strong relationship with them. They are your community, keep them close.
For more information on boosting traffic and marketing your content check out the “Traffic Creation” section of our blogs to learn more.
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