subject: Best Practices For Email Marketing: Building Targeted Lists [print this page] One of, if not THE most important asset to your online business is your mailing list. Without it you have no way to keep in touch with your website visitors and customers over and over again. Without that ability you will never be able to build the relationship with them necessary to succeed in business in this new "social media age." Building a list is actually the easy part. Getting your list to respond to you and generate income for you is where your focus should be.
The very first step in getting more response from your opt-in list is paying attention to WHO you are attracting to that list in the first place.
Why You Need To Build Highly-Targeted Lists
Got a BIG advertising budget? Can you spend $100 or $1000 per solo ad to build your subscriber list? In reality, none of that matters. You can use every list building service, solo ad network or reciprocal mailing system out there. In the end, the size of your list matters little if it contains un-targeted individuals, or uninterested readers. With an un-targeted list (say a list made up of general opportunity seekers) you will make some money, but it will never be substantial, nor will it be residual. Without a list of targeted and focused subscribers you will never be able to pinpoint what they really want, thus you will never have a way to provide real value which is what makes up a truly sustainable and successful business model.
In the information age you have to compete for your subscribers attention. As our technology grows and frees up more of our time, we seem to have less of it. Your subscribers have hundreds of places to go for general information and unless you stand out, by providing them with a much more targeted and niche set of information, catered directly to them, you will not be able to build a solid and trusting relationship with your readers resulting in more sales and customer loyalty.
3 Solid Ways To Build Targeted Lists (And One Secret Weapon)
1) Opt-in Forms
There is no doubt that content is KING online. If you produce good content it will get passed around and it will bring you targeted traffic. Make sure that you include an opt-in form on EVERY piece of content you produce. If your content gets passed around you want to increase the chances that this free word-of-mouth traffic results in new subscribers.
If you add a post to your blog make sure you include within the content an opt-in form. If your readers love your content they are going to want more of it. By providing an opt-in form within your blog post they will be able to seamlessly join your list when they are ready for more. You cannot get more targeted than this! If you cannot include an opt-in form directly within your content, make sure that you have a link to your opt-in form and that it is very clear where your readers can go to get more information.
2) Always Promote Your List
Do not go directly for the sale with any of your advertising. ALWAYS use your advertising campaigns to promote more of your free information. If you write an article make sure your author BIO points to your opt-in list, where your readers can get more of your content for free. The same goes for your YouTube videos, paid advertising or anything else you do online.
Without a doubt, conversions to your list will be much higher than conversions to a product sale right off the bat. Once you have people on your opt-in list you can work them into a sale by providing excellent content that they need and will use. You will earn more money this way and build a much larger list and following. The larger following you build the more apt they will be to follow through on #3 for you. (Tell-A-Friend.)
3) Tell-A-Friend
Get your subscribers to tell their friends about you. This is quite easy to accomplish if you provide killer content and use that content to build your opt-in list. If you take care of your subscribers they will naturally tell their friends. You won't even have to ask them. As time goes on you can even look into providing an incentive program to your subscribers where you reward them for telling their friends, re-tweeting your content or "linking" it on Facebook. The possibilities are truly endless here.
=> SECRET WEAPON
I did promise to tell you my secret weapon for building highly targeted opt-in lists so here it is. My secret weapon is a website called Omgili.com. Omgili.com is a different kind of search engine. It is a search engine that lets you find communities, message boards, and discussion threads about any topic. You type in your topic keyword and it brings up real-time conversations going on all over the Internet about your searched for topic.
Do I need to tell you how invaluable this is? Lets say for instance I type in "how to build targeted email lists" into the Omgili search engine. What comes up are all of the places where this subject is being talked about now, in real-time! A lot of the people talking about this stuff are trying to sell products or services that discuss this topic. If I come into this conversation on either Twitter, or in a forum where it is going on and offer up a link to my article (even this article itself) who do you think is going to get the subscriber?
I am offering up some free information that will help answer the questions people have on this subject instead of trying to sell something right off the bat. Using this strategy of finding conversations going on dealing with content I just wrote, I have generated tons of leadsall in real-time. And that is one incredible secret weapon. While everyone else is trying to get ranked in Google for their keywords, I just go right to where the people already are and give them what they want. Try it. It really works!
Highly targeted subscribers generally means highly motivated subscribers. If you do not focus on getting highly targeted subscribers first, nothing else you do with your email marketing after that will matter much. Get this down and the rest will be easy.
