List-Building – What is it?
Basically list-building is a term used in the internet marketing industry and what it is, is a list of people for whatever reason have joined as your subscriber.
For example All these people are interested in gardening, they came to your website because it is all about gardening and it is a subject they are interested in, you gave them a lot of value by providing information they are interested in or solving problems they have with a particular aspect of gardening or maybe you sell products on there related to gardening which they purchased of you.
For whatever reason they found your website and are interested in it, now in order to build your list, you need to give something away of value to them, so you have decided to do a monthly newsletter on gardening.
In order for them to receive your newsletter they will need to join your email list and they would have to give you their details, which is normally their name and email address, as you are more than likely to send them a digital newsletter. (As especially today people like to receive things straight away and it is cheaper and easier for you to do it this way too).
Somewhere on your website you should have what we call an optin box, this really should be at the top of the right hand margin of your website, tests have proven this to be the best place to put this optin box (which is basically a box with an area for them to put in their name and email address)
In order to get people to fill in that optin box you need to give them something of value, as nobody just wants to give you their details, as people are sceptical of the internet and scared of being scammed, so they first need to be able to trust you and you have to be really giving them something of value for them to want to part with their details.
It is advisable to put something in writing in your optin box to show that their details will not be misused, you could write something like: “We respect your email privacy and we will never share your details with anyone” Once they give you their details, they are then put onto your email list.
All good marketers will have an auto responder, this is software that basically will automatically (after you do some manual work once), send out emails for you, so you do not have to do this manually one by one, as it can send many at one time.
Your auto responder will then send your new subscriber whatever letter you have pre-written into it, really if is a digital product (like the gardening newsletter) you should immediately send this out to your customer and then follow up either with the monthly newsletter or you can do it every two weeks or every couple of days with letters, again always giving them value, for example one day could be a useful gardening tip another a video showing how to do a particular aspect of gardening, another selling a product and basically what you are doing here is building a relationship with your subscriber and remember people don’t buy off you straight away, normally it takes at least 7 attempts before they do, the beauty of having a list is that you can market to them time after time, whereas if you didn’t and they came to your website and did not optin to your list, maybe you would never see them again.
Once you have achieved list-building it’s like having cash on demand. You will find your list is the most important asset of your business, so make sure you treat your subscriber’s right and to always give them lots of value as they can easily unsubscribe if you don’t.
