I think, you probably heard the saying, “The Money is in the list”
This saying is most popular in the world of business. And it’s true.
In my opinion, content may be the king but list building is supreme. The fact that “Whole Business Power Lies In The List”
List building is far more important than having a large fan base on Facebook or a lot of traffic on your blog or a lot of followers on Twitter.
Why List Building is important because You Can Reach Your List Subscribers At Any Time You Need.
What most important is that “You have to get them open your email”
We use Email Marketing for collecting email and then optimizing our email for increasing OPEN RATE and Click Through Rate.
In This thread, I am going to share some of the biggest mistakes, people make when building a list and marketing to that list.
So, Let’s Begin
1. Waiting to Build A List
Sometime we think that as our website or blog is getting a handful visitors that we shouldn’t bother trying to build our list. This is a very wrong thinking of our’s.
No matter how much traffic we have, even if it’s one visitor, it’s never too early to start trying to build a list.
It’s because, we never know when that one person who would buy absolutely everything you promote come along, so it’s a good idea to get up squeeze page and a lead magnet and start trying to gather subscribers immediately.
Let’s Try To Understand By An Example
Let’s say you decide to wait until you are getting 1,000 unique visitors per day to start building your list. And let’s say, it takes you a whole year in reaching at this point.
And let’s say you got an average of around 100-200 visitors per day before that. And let’s assume that your squeeze page would have converted 10% of those people to subscribes.
10% of 200 visitors per day (20)*365 days = 7300 subscribers
Always remember, Average subscriber is worth $1 per month. It means you are missing out around $7300.
2. Bad Lead Magnets
In case you are not aware about What Is Lead Magnet then lead magnet is whatever you’re giving away as an incentive to get people to join your list.
It may be a free video or a report or an ebook or a multiday email course.
What Mistake a lot of people are doing here
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that they can throw together a 5-page report that offers very little real value. Yes, it works in short span means you will able to get emails by using this tactics but it’s not going to benefit you for the long term because you will loose their trust.
There is a saying “First Impression Is The Last Impression”
Follow this saying and provide quality content to your subscribers.
Remember, your lead magnet isn’t only to get people to join your list but it’s also a preview of what you know. It’s a preview of valuable things you are going to offer in the future. It helps people in understanding that you’re are expert in your field.
Your lead magnet should actually be of a very high quality that people would be willing to poay for it.
Remember, The higher the quality, the more people will want to buy whatever you offer for sale later, because they will automatically think, “If the freebie is this great, the paid stuff must be freaking incredible!”
3. Bad Squeeze Pages
A bad squeeze page is going to kill your list building efforts faster than anything else.
Always remember that if your squeeze page is poorly constructed, you could be losing out on a very large number of subscribers.
Yes, it’s true, you won’t come up with a perfect squeeze page right off the bat. It may take testing several iterations before you come up with the right version.
For this purpose, you should use A/B testing to determine which version converts best for you. You can also use paid traffic to your squeeze page iterations to test them before you start using them.
I am sorry to say but there’s no one be-all, end-all squeeze page example that is guaranteed to work in any niche. Different markets will respond better to different tactics.
That’s why you should test which style, headline, colors etc. works perfect for you.
- No Autoresponder Sequence
Okay, so let’s say you have built a list of several hundred (or thousand) people. Now what?
If you are not using an autoresponder sequence, you are really missing out a lot of potential from your list.
The reason for this is that you want to keep your list warm until you’re ready to send out your next offer.
What do I mean by Warm?
Well, let’s say you join an email list to get a free report and like it, but you don’t get any emails from that marketers for several weeks. Then suddenly you get an email selling something.
You may have forgotten who this person is. You may not immediately remember that free reports you got, or where it came from. Now suddenly this person seems like a spammer. You hate spam, so you just click the “spam” tag in your email and you don’t get any emails from that person anymore.
Do you want this to happen to you? No? Then keep you list warm by using an autoresponder to send them interesting, valuable emails every few days for a while after they join to keep them warm.
5. Using the Wrong Service
Did you know that the autoresponder service you use can make a huge difference to the success of your email marketing.
Some email services have taken measures to ensure their emails are whitelisted by a lot of the major email providers and ISPs.
What this means is that your emails are a lot less likely to be marked as spam, which means your emails will be seen and read by more people.
The one thing you should not do is to use one of those scripts that run on your own server. Just don’t do it.
You won’t have have the automatic whitelist power that a good email service provider has, and you’ll potentially be the target of spam complaints that could get your hosting account shut down or even get your domain name taken away.
6. Not Tracking Results
This is a mistake even some major marketers make and it’s a big one. If you aren’t tracking your results, you could be missing out big time.
Most email services provide metrics. These metrics are there for a reason. They give you extremely valuable information that can tell you how well you’re doing with your email promotions.
Some of the information you may get from your email provider includes:
- Received Rate - The total number of subscribers who got your email (or at least the total number of messages sent)
- Opens - The total number of people who opened your email
- Read Percentage - The percentage of people who read your message
- Clickthroughs - The number of people who clicked the link in your email.
Metrics such as these will tell you a lot. Your open rate will tell you whether you subject line worked to get people interested.
Your clickthroughs will tell you how well you did writing the email copy.
Don’t ignore these metrics, as they can help you improve your results considerably!
- Over-Hyping the Subject Line
The last thing you want to do is over-hype your subject line, because it will only make people automatically think your message is spam. Or even worse, they won’t believe the hype and they’ll think you’re a liar or a scammer.
Take a look at these subjects line:-
Lose 6 Pounds Overnight? Yes, It’s Possible With NO Dieting!
Brand New Weight Loss Method Shows Promise
The first subject line is probably going to make most people think, “Yeah, right.” There’s no way someone could lose 6 pounds overnight, right? Even if it were possible, the average person would not believe it.
The second subject line is much more believable. It may not be as “exciting”, but it’s much more honest and will probably not upset people the way the first one might.
8. Promotion Only Emails
Every single email you send should offer some sort of value to your subscribers. Even promotional mails should be of value in some way.
You may think, “But the product I’m promoting is incredibly valuable!”
That may be true, but if you are not offering some sort of added value, you may end up upsetting your subscribers.
At the very least, you will eventually end up alienating people, because they will stop opening your messages.
Instead, give your subscribers a lot of value. Send them valuable information for free on a regular basis. Interact with them.
Don’t use noreply@yourdomain.com as your return email address, because you want to respond when a subscriber emails you!
This builds Loyalty.
Whenever you send an email, add value. Here are some ideas:
- Offer a discount or rebate of whatever you’re promoting
- Offer a bonus to anyone who buys through your affiliate link
- Offer a how-to-use-it report to anyone who buys
- Make a video review of the product
Whatever you do, don’t just send a promotion!
9. Not Using Text
There’s a new trend in email marketing these days to use tons of graphics and completely ignore the text side of things. The trouble is, a lot of people can’t stand graphical emails. Sometimes they won’t pay an attention to them if they are all graphics, or they will get confused and not understand where to click to get more information.
This is why you should always include some plain text for those people. At the very least, be sure you have at least one recognizable link for people who look for text to click.
Your call to action should always include text. You might think a huge red flashing animated button that says “Click Here!” would be the option that would be the option that would get most clicks, innocuous text link that gets more results.
Just in case, be sure to include the text link alternative. That way, all your bases are covered, and you’ll find that you’ll get a better CTR because you have both options included.
10. Mailing Too Often or Too Little
Finding the right frequency to email your list can be tricky, but in general you want to email them anywhere from 2-5 times per week. Anything less than that and you risk them forgetting who you are.
Anything more than that and they are likely to unsubscribe because they will think you are spamming them to death.
Every time you send out an email, watch your unsubscribe rate.
If you notice a significant increase in unsubscribes after a particular mailing, you might want to decrease the number of times you email your list. (Unless of course there’s another reason you can pinpoint for the unsubscribes, such as emailing about something controversial.)
If you notice that not many people are clicking your links or opening your emails, it might be because they don’t know who you are. In this case, temporarily increase the number of emails you send each week.
This all goes back to metrics. Pay attention to all of your metrics every time you send out a message. These metrics will let you figure out what you might be doing wrong so you can increase the effectiveness of all of your email marketing campaigns.
Conclusion
Remember, it’s never too late (or too early) to start building an email list. The best time to start, if you haven’t already, is now!
Note - This article is originally written at DigitalWorld.