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Best Money-Making Secrets Email List Strategies For Increased Sales Online
E-mail marketing is hands down the most powerful and effective form of online marketing. Nothing comes close. Seriously. Even search marketing with all its hype and tried-and-proven success can’t even hold the candle to just how effective list marketing can be. It’s easy to see why, survey after survey, marketing firms keep putting e-mail marketing at or near the top of their advertising preferences. Here are the reasons why.
Through e-mail marketing, you can get in front of the eyeballs of your audience members anytime anywhere. That’s right. You can be at a beach in the Bahamas somewhere writing an e-mail update. Plug that in to your e-mail service provider and your audience, regardless of where they may be in the world and regardless of what they’re doing, are sure to get your e-mail. After all, most people check their e-mail inboxes. Isn’t that awesome?
This enables you to sell more products. Since you have a de facto relationship with people who voluntarily got on your mailing list, you are able to keep the conversation going. You don’t get just one bite at the apple in trying to get list members to buy. Every time you send an update, you get a chance to convert some of your audience members into buyers.
Through e-mail, you also get to keep in touch with the needs of your audience. It’s like you’re plugged in to what they need, what they’re looking for and the problems that they face. After all, that’s the reason why they joined your mailing list in the first place. They’re looking for solutions and answers that your list can provide.
This enables you to keep a steady flow of traffic to your blog or online store. Now, this traffic may not convert right there and then but the fact that it is constant enables you to get many bites at the apple. You don’t just get a one-shot chance at converting online traffic. That traffic can come back again and again with each and every update that you spend.
If you’ve heard great things about social media, you might want to think again. Social medial marketing faces many challenges because of the evolving algorithms of platforms like Facebook. As the years go by, Facebook is sending less and less organic traffic. Even if you have a big Facebook fan page with a gigantic following, you’d be lucky for your page posts to reach a tiny fraction of your following. It’s getting worse and worse with each passing year.
With e-mail marketing, you have a higher chance of reaching your complete mailing list instead of being at the mercy of these changing social media platform algorithms. It really all boils down to how well you write your headlines and how targeted your list recruitment is. If you did your homework and you played your cards right, you stand to reach a much larger percentage of your list audience. This is not the case with the typical Facebook fan page.
Finally, with your own e-mail list, you stay in control of your access to your audience. You can even download your list members’ e-mail addresses as you move from one e-mail service provider to the next. This list is your asset. It’s not going away anytime soon.
Given all these amazing reasons, it’s no wonder lots of old-school online marketers say “The money is in the list.”
But wait… If you have just jumped in with both feet into e-mail marketing, I’ve got some bad news for you. You’re probably going to fail. There, I said it. You can fail by:
- Putting up a list but it doesn’t attract many members.
- Attracting enough people to your list but most don’t open your e-mails.
- Building a huge list of people with many opening your e-mails – but most don’t buy anything.
The sad reality is that the vast majority of people who try their hand at e-mail marketing have very little to show for it. They spend money every single month on their e-mail service provider only to come up empty handed.
Failure in e-marketing comes in many different forms because people try many different things. Marketers also have many different circumstances and priorities. However, they all lead to the same place: very low to no income!
If you want to get into e-mail marketing and enjoy the amazing income it can produce for you, you are reading the best book to get your started. Seriously. No other book comes close because almost all other books out there try to pump you up about e-mail marketing. They get you all hyped up but they leave you high and dry. How come? They do not step you through a systematic and methodical way of doing modern e-mail marketing.
Let me tell you the old tricks no longer work. Get rid of them. Don’t get excited by them. Otherwise, you are just setting yourself up for failure. Unfortunately, almost all the other e-mail list marketing books out there keep rehashing the same stuff.
In this guide, you are going to get just what you need to succeed in the highly competitive yet also highly lucrative world of e-mail marketing. Put simply, I will step you through the process of putting up a modern e-mail list – one that is engineered to succeed from the ground up. I have trimmed all the fat off. There is no fluff. Instead, you’re going to get clear, easy-to-understand concepts that you need to wrap your mind around for you to be successful.
Identifying the Target Audience for Your Marketing Campaign
If you have a fuzzy idea of who your target audience is, you are going to fail with e-mail marketing. You really are. You might as well give up now if you are chasing after some sort of vaguely defined market.
Audience identification is crucial for niche list marketing. You cannot just target everybody. You have to drill down to a specific population of people who are trying to solve a fairly narrow set of problems. This is how you define their needs. By directly addressing the needs of these individuals, conducting enough consumer research and speaking their language, you would be able to convert a high percentage of them from website visitors to list members to product buyers.
It is crucial that you go from raw traffic to dollars in your bank account. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time. All the traffic in the world is not going to add one red cent to your bank account unless you target a specific niche market and give its audience the solutions that they are looking for.
Finding the Right Audience
So, how do you know which audience you should target? There are many different audiences out there. All of them cluster around a specific range of needs or problems. Well, it all boils down to commercial value of those needs. There are many problems out there that people are not going to pay top
dollar to solve. Sure, people are looking for the right DVD set of headphones but there is a limit to people’s budgets. Different problems have different priorities.
You need to find a niche that has enough commercial value. One way to estimate this is to use Google AdWords Keyword Planner and do cost-per-click research on keywords related to your niche. If you notice that advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money per click on those keywords, then you’re in a good spot. Chances are there is enough commercial demand for that niche. People are willing to pay a significant amount of money to solve problems related to your niche.
It’s also important to make sure that you are targeting a niche that is big enough. Sure, there are lots of advertisers willing to pay a tremendous amount of money for “structured settlement” keyword traffic. We’re talking about more than $20 per click. The problem is the volume of searches for that niche is actually quite low.
Make sure the niche you are targeting has enough demand as indicated by Google Keyword Planner. This tool not only tells you how much advertisers are willing to pay per click but it will also give you an estimate of the volume of searches for keywords related to that niche. You’re looking for a nice combination of decent commercial value with decent traffic volume.
Finally, you should also pay attention to competition levels. If you pick a niche that is extremely competitive with gigantic brands monopolizing pretty much all the search volume for keywords related to that niche, you probably are going to have a tough time making inroads. You should look for a niche that is somewhat competitive but no so competitive that there’s absolutely no space for newcomers.
How do you do competitive research? Very simple. Just get all the Google Keyword Planner tool keywords for the niches you are interested in. Plug them one by one into Google’s search box and you will see the number of pages competing for those keywords. This should give you a clear enough idea of how competitive certain niches are. At the end of this process, you should have a short list of niches that have decent commercial appeal and enough search volume every single month.
Consider these three factors:
1) Find Your Customers Online
I’ve got some great news for you. Regardless of the niche that you selected, chances are very high your customers are already online. You just need to find them. This doesn’t mean that there is a dedicated website that caters specifically to your niche audience. Instead, your niche audience members may simply be asking questions related to your niche. Maybe they’re sharing infographics or photos and videos related to your niche.
Whatever the case may be they’re already online exchanging content. Your job is to find all these areas online and listen to them. That’s the main key you need to do for consumer intelligence.
Pay attention to the words that they’re using. Pay attention to the solutions that they’re already talking about. Understand the shortcomings of the solutions people are already aware of.
If you spend enough time on these online platforms like forums, message boards, Facebook groups, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Reddit, subreddits and Quora or other question-and-answer platforms, you should have a clear understanding of who your audience members are and their expectations.
You should also have a fairly clear idea of who your competitors are. I’ve got some bad news for you. Regardless of your niche, you probably already have competitors. This is not depressing news. Instead, you could use this to your advantage. Find the competitors competing for your target audience. Create a long list of them. Look for both direct and indirect competitors.
2) Reverse Engineer Your Competitors
Once you have a clear idea of who your competitors are, reverse engineer what they’re doing. How do they speak to the needs of the people you’re trying to reach? What do their websites look like? What kind of social media accounts do they have? What kind of content do they use for marketing purposes? How are their pages designed? You have to keep these and other related questions in mind as you research one competitor after another.
After you’ve spent some time asking these questions and processing your competitors in a systematic and methodical way, you should have a clear idea of what your niche “industry standard” is. You would quickly find out that your niche competitors tend to look alike.
They tend to address the same problems. They tend to have the same solutions. Their social media accounts tend to look similar to each other.
Be mindful of this. Look at these similarities and understand that this is the “industry standard” in your niche. Whatever website or social media account or mailing list you come up with must fit the industry standard.
Please understand that when you figure out the industry standard in your niche, it just gives you a place to start. You shouldn’t start and end there. If anything, it just gives you a head start instead of fumbling around to come up with the right squeeze page or mailing list marketing materials for your niche. It gives you a place to start.
3) What “Industry Standard” Item Should You Look For
Pay attention to your competitor’s squeeze page layout. This is the signup page your competitors use to get their target audience members to sign up for their mailing list. Pay attention to how they lay out these pages.
What kind of pictures do they use? What kind of text do they present? How did they format their text? Do they tell stories? Do they show videos?
Next, pay attention to their sales funnel layout. Your competitors have a standard way of getting people to sign up to their mailing list and also selling those list members to a wide range of products and services. Be aware of how they do this. How do they step prospects through the sales process?
Understand that their ultimate goal is to get list members to buy something. Try to figure out how their sales funnel is laid out and how it seeks to convert list members. Pay attention to the kind of freebies or incentives your competitors give out to get people to sign up to their mailing list.
Do they use cheat sheets or short reports? Do they give away full books? Do they attract list members by offering a special video? Do they promise some sort of insider information that people have to sign up for to access?
Be aware of the specific “industry standard” digital incentive your competitors give out. You’re going to have to offer the same. You can tweak this later on, but you need to start out with this type of incentive.
Subsequently, pay attention to the updates that they send. Do they talk about news and events? Do they seek to teach e-mail recipients a wide range of solutions?
Finally, pay attention to the stuff that they are promoting in their e-mails. You can bet that your competitors are sending out e-mails intended to make them money. If you click on the right link, it would lead you to a product they hope you would buy. The same goes with services.
Pay attention to these. Identify the most common products that they push with their updates. Again, this forms the “industry standard” in your niche. Look for the industry standard because this is where you will start. It doesn’t mean you have to start and end your e-mail list marketing activities with the industry standard. Instead, it just gives you a tremendous head start because you’re not fumbling around coming up with your own squeeze page and mailing list strategy which might fail.
Instead, by going with the tried and proven industry standard, you can improve on mailing list practices that already exist. You just need to perfect whatever it is your competitors are already doing.
Choosing the Perfect Email-Marketing Platform
This step is crucial. In fact, it’s so important that it only comes second in importance to Step #1. You have to have the right technology workhorse to ensure your mailing list business is a success. You have to understand that you cannot do e-mail marketing manually. It’s physically impossible. Even if you have a list of only 500 people, sending e-mail updates to those people one by one is going to drive you nuts.
You have to sign up to the right e-mail marketing platform that would automate all mail delivery. You might think that this is a pretty simple process. It isn’t. It’s very hard to manually keep tract of people signing up and unsubscribing to your list. You may be able to get away with it if you only have a handful of members, but once your mailing list starts to grow, it can easily get out of hand.
Pay attention to key common features of e-mail marketing platforms:
Automated Autoresponder Sequence
Regardless of the platform you go with, they must have a way of enabling you to schedule e-mails to send to each and every one of your list members on a scheduled basis.
For example, if somebody joined your list on Monday, they get the e-mail update for Day 1. On Tuesday, they get the e-mail update for Day 2. When another person signs up for your mailing list on Friday, they get Day 1’s update and so on and so forth.
In other words, your mailing list platform must be automated and powerful enough to market to all your list members on an individually scheduled basis. This is crucial if you want to use your autoresponder e-mail sequence to turn your list members into buyers.
Powerful Universal Update Features
Sometimes, you need to send an update to all your mailing list. For example, if you’re holding a sale or you have some important news to share, you need to be able to reach everybody at one time. Your mailing list platform must be able to deliver your e-mail to its recipients. Otherwise, it’s failed at its job.
Unfortunately, not all e-mail marketing platforms do a good job in delivering your e-mail.
Four powerful players stand out: AWeber, GetResponse, MailChimp and Constant Contact stand out amongst the rest. These services have a solid-gold reputation for getting past spam filters. They are so trusted by mail services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail that their e-mails usually get through.
Deliverability is crucial. Regardless of whether you are sending autoresponder text or you’re sending a late-breaking update.
Insist on E-Mail Templates
Sometimes you just don’t have the time to compose e-mails. To make things easier on yourself, you probably would want to use a template. This is an e-mail that’s been formatted a certain way.
There are e-mail systems that are purely template driven like AWeber. Others expect you to come up with your own e-mail design each and every time. Others tend to push you to using text-only e-mails.
Pay Attention to Squeeze Page or E-Mail Signup Page Builders
Let’s face it. Most list marketers are not very good at web design and coding pages. Unfortunately, if you want to come up with an online form, you have to know some basic web design and coding. Thankfully, some platforms have ready-made e-mail list signup templates. You can just make certain changes to graphics, color and font as well as the text of these pages.
GetResponse is far and away the best choice for ready-made e-mail signup forms or squeeze pages. It really all depends on your needs. If you are looking for something that looks very professional and is easy to use, GetResponse is probably a good choice. If you know your way around HTML, you probably would be better off with AWeber or MailChimp.
Consider Alternatives to E-Mail List Recruitment Page Designs
One alternative you can try for building your own squeeze pages is a service called LeadPages. This online service enables you to use a two-step process to get people to sign up to your mailing list. This is a very powerful alternative to how e-mail lists are normally presented on a page.
Usually, people load a page, and they would see the e-mail form where they can enter their e-mail address and their name. They would then click a submit button, and they would get their freebie.
The problem with this one-step layout is that it doesn’t really qualify people based on how eager they are for whatever it is you are offering to give your page visitors in exchange for the e-mail address. Maybe they’re just curiosity seekers. Perhaps they just want the freebie. Most likely, they didn’t read the e-mail form correctly.
Whatever the case may be they enter their e-mail address, and you end up with a list squatter. This is a person who just stays on your list without reading your e-mails or, worse yet, buying anything.
LeadPages solves this problem by enabling you to use a two-step opt-in system. People have to click an ad link to end up at a page where they can actually enter their e-mail address.
By using this two-step process, only truly motivated or genuinely interested list members are attracted by your offer. Sure, this may result in a lower subscription, but you have more peace of mind as to the quality of list members you will attract.
Decide on your list incentive
Let’s get one thing straight. People are not going to sign up to your mailing list just because. It is not like they don’t have anything else better to do. You have to give them a compelling reason to sign up for your mailing list. There has to be something in it for them.
This is where incentives come in. You’re going to give away something for free, which adds value to your potential list members’ lives. They would look at these incentives as “ethical bribes”. You’re bribing them to join your mailing list. It’s not enough to promise that you’re going to give them great information regarding the niche they are interested in. Anybody can make that claim. To create the perception of value in the minds of your potential list members, you have to step up and give them a very powerful incentive.
Now the question becomes: what kind of incentive should you offer? The bad news is that it depends. I wish I could tell you that there is some sort of one-size-fits-all or universal answer to this question. There isn’t. The winning incentive varies from niche to niche. It also varies based on the sources of traffic that you have.
Accordingly, you have to play it by ear. Ideally, you should offer the 10 common types of incentives that I’m going to lay out below. You should offer them in sequence. Once you’ve gone through all 10, look through your conversion records and pick the incentives that got the most signups. That’s the best way to know.
Anybody could tell you that you should give away booklets or simply update people, but that’s assuming too much. People who are interested in your niche might prefer something else. The best way to find the right incentive is to simply go through all 10 common incentives and pick the best performing type. Once you found the highest converting type, then you can optimize as to which specific giveaway of that type works the best.
I hope we’re clear here. You have to go through this list. There are 10 common types of incentives you can offer. Here they are.
Topic-based email series
This incentive spoon-feeds list members answers to the common problems they may have. The value add is the content they receive in their emails. People who sign up for this type of mailing list incentive expect that you would be sending them pre-programmed emails that would step them through common problems associated with the niche they’re interested in. You would start at the beginning, then teach them a few things. After which, you then send another email which teaches the recipient another set of solutions, so on and so forth.
This incentive gives you a tremendous opportunity to build expertise. You’re not laying out all your expertise at once. Instead, you are sharing to the recipient certain solutions, which gives them enough time to implement until the next set of solutions come.
Cheat sheet
A cheat sheet is just one simple document. It may be a one-page item or it can run several pages. Whatever form it takes, it is topic-based. A cheat sheet just focuses on one specific topic and breaks it down. Cheat sheets are very popular because they tend to highlight easy-to-know or easy-to-overlook information.
People are constantly looking for “stripped down” info. They don’t have time. They just want to scan something that would give them the right answers as quickly as possible.
They are also looking for something that spells out the answer in the simplest terms. It’s easy to see the value of cheat sheets. It’s no surprise that this form of mailing list incentive is quite popular.
Template giveaway
Templates are very popular because people do not want to screw around with solving problems from scratch. They’d rather work with an existing template that they can just plug in specific information into. Of course, template giveaways don’t work across the board. While you can probably get a lot of subscribers for resume templates, you probably won’t get as many takers if the template addresses something that is so specific or so abstract that it is not really all that relevant. Templates can work, but it all depends on your mailing list’s niche.
Complete starter kit
You can compile all the solutions to a specific problem and give people access via an email link. Typically, this would involve people signing up to your squeeze page and being redirected to an online resource or PDF file that compiles all the content the reader needs to solve a problem.
This content can take many different forms. It can be a series of videos, audio files or links to PDF’s or even other websites. The big value-add here is the fact that you are compiling all these answers and putting them in one place. It solves the problem the user has in a very comprehensive way.
Step-by-step plan
Oftentimes, when people are faced with a problem they simply do not know where to start. Even if they have a fairly general idea of the solution, they don’t have a plan to attack the problem in a comprehensive and clear way. A step-by-step plan enables you to guide the reader to solve the problem effectively.
Case Studies
Everybody likes a good story. If anything, most people would like to see stories involving changes to other people’s lives before and after something happened. These personal stories draw people in. They are able to connect on a person-to-person basis.
You can use these case studies to not only to build up your mailing list but also to upsell whatever service or product your company is promoting. You can even upsell members who sign up to your mailing list for case studies to other mailing lists. The possibilities are endless. Case studies work in most niches but this is not a slam dunk across the board. Keep that in mind.
Latest and Greatest News
This is my personal favorite. You have to understand that when you’re giving away some sort of “bribe” for somebody to join your mailing list, you run the risk of attracting people who only sign up for the bribe. It doesn’t matter whether you’re giving out software, cheat sheets, booklets, books, templates, or whatnot. There’s a chance that your mailing list might be filled with list squatters. This is the kind of risk you run.
On the other hand, if you promote the updates that people would get by signing up to your list, there’s a strong chance that the people ending up on your list would actually read your emails. They will not be list squatters who ignore the updates that you send. As you probably already know, you will only make money off your mailing list when people actually bother to open and read them.
Showcase the latest and greatest news in your niche. Make the value of this information clear to potential list members. Unfortunately, this is not a strong value proposition for all niches. If you run a news website for a very specific niche, a newsletter would be a great way to build up your mailing list.
On the other hand, if you are in a niche where developments tend to come very slowly or people have a fixed idea as to what their problems are and these don’t seem to change, you might not get many takers for your newsletter. Offering the latest and greatest news works best for niches that have constant developments... (Learn More)
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