Building a mailing list can be one of the most effective ways to increase your turnover and profits as a business owner.
That’s because each email on that list represents a potential customer to whom you can market and sell.
Depending on the value of your product, a well maintained mailing list can represent a lot of money.
The only issue?
Building your list in the first place can take a lot of time, effort, and financial investment.
In other words, you need a big list to make a lot of money, but you also need a lot of money to build a big list!
Or at least this is what was once thought.
Today, it is possible to build a massive email list without spending a penny.
Not only that, but you can do so without investing hundreds of hours into the project.
After all… time is money!
You may already know from your own experience, marketers use incentives to encourage people to sign up to their mailing list.
Often these incentives will be things like free eBooks, e-mail courses or”reports”.
Incentives work well but they are not always the best strategy.
For instance, if you’re giving away a free eBook, you may devalue other information products you intend to sell later.
Worse, you might get people signing up because they want a freebie.
They may not have any intention of ever engaging with you or your business again.
Of course the other slight problem with an eBook is you have to actually write it yourself or pay someone else to do so.
So what incentive could you offer instead?
One option that works very well is to make membership of the e-mail itself the incentive.
In other words, you “sell” the value of your e-mails so strongly that people will want to sign up just to receive them.
This way, your subscribers will actively looking out for your messages.
If they are waiting for your emails they are more likely to want to open them.
One great method for doing this is to describe your mailing list as a newsletter rather than just e-mails.
As an alternative, you could create a short e-course in a topic of interest.
You then you teach that course within a series of email messages.
Your subscribers will learn by reading through the messages.
Take this idea one step further, and you can used the short e-course as a prelude to a much longer and more detailed education product.
Within each lesson in the e-course you mention the upcoming product.
Include statements like “and I go into much more detail in my forthcoming…….
That way you can get your audience to sign up to get more information when the new product is available.
This works extremely well because you now have a list of people who actually want you to send them marketing material!
That’s what we call a jackpot!
Now you need ways to keep your subscribers engaged, with their eyes on their inbox.
Give away some free gifts and run competitions.
You can even survey your subscribers.
Make sure you find a way to store and use all that valuable survey data!
