Some of the things that you can implement when using this powerful tool to grow your business are the following:
Personalize your emails
It goes without saying that first impressions matter, and this is triple important for emails. Quick question: What would you do if you subscribed to a company’s email newsletter only to find out that their emails are kind of boring? Simple fonts, no backgrounds, no signatures, and so on.
What will happen is that you will ignore them, and eventually they’ll automatically end up in your spam folder. This is exactly what would happen to your emails if you don’t pay special attention to your email’s presentation.
Of course, you need to be careful and limit personalization to the subject line and the first line of the message, or your email may seem forced or fake. Also, don’t overshoot its design, just use something related to what you do as a business or professional.
Use blogging and Landing pages
Your mailing list will go as far as the means you use to market will take it. This means that you can’t just use a corner of your website to show a sign up form and call it a day. What you really want is to get traffic, and put your mailing list out there.
You can do that by having a blog dedicated to content outside your website, with carefully structured information that can be used to get traffic from wherever you can and then insert a landing page with a call to action to join your mailing list.
Make good use of Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are teasers or incentives that you offer in a call to action to motivate your prospects to join your mailing list. The trick behind a lead magnet is giving away something that can only be obtained by joining your mailing list.
For example, giving away a free eBook, tips, or pieces of content that is not going to be published on the website and is exclusive, can be wonderful lead magnets.
Even if your prospects only sign up for the promise of a one-time free piece of content, they will be on your mailing list. From then on, it’s up to you to keep them engaged.
As useful and as popular as List Building is, there is a chance of having some problems when not used properly.
Incorrectly using it may have consequences that can be dangerous for your business or simply make your customers feel uncomfortable. Here, I show you 10 things you should not do:
Don’t think about list building as a one-act task
List building is an ongoing effort. The process might be getting from A to B, but it hardly ever ends, because your mailing list
needs to keep growing over time. You can’t just create a mailing list with your first contacts and then just set them up for your newsletter.
What you really look for when you build a mailing list is to keep the influx of new subscribers coming, engaging them, and making them bring new people. You have to reinvent what you do with your mailing list from time to time and care for it. After all, this is your business!
Don’t think about your mailing list as a short term recruiting tool
You just can’t set up an offer to give something free for signing up to your mailing list as a method to lure in prospects, because you’ll end up with a mailing list full of people deleting your messages after having got what they wanted from it.
Don’t focus sales on everybody
One of the key words that successful marketers, salesman and saleswoman alike use for closing a deal is the word YOU.
Subscribers already gave exclusivity by granting you access to their inboxes. What they want is for you to talk to THEM individually.
What you have to do is sell in a personal manner, even if you’re forwarding a promotional sales message to your 20,000 subscribers. Don’t just talk about the product and the market. Talk about how YOU can benefit from getting what YOU are being offered.
Don’t focus entirely on marketing somebody else’s product
Let’s face it, if you don’t own a product, you’ll be perceived as less trustworthy, as far as marketing efforts go. If you just focus on selling products and nothing else, especially if those products are from a third party, you’ll be end up being seen as another internet marketing robot.
That’s why you need to offer something that comes from you, something that you worked on that you don’t have to ferociously advertise and maybe even lie about in order to make a quick profit.
