Growing an email list for your online business is one of the most efficient ways of connecting with your site’s visitors and building trust.
Over the course of three articles, I’ll provide you with insights into how you build a list and then turn your emails into conversions.
I want to kick things off by discussing the importance of your email list.
I’m a fan of Derek Halpern of Social Triggers, and one thing he always stresses is that “your email list should be your main priority.”
While other marketing mediums are of course important, your email list will provide valuable and immediate insights into what engages your users, what sort of products you can market to them and will ultimately help your business to grow faster.
Neil Patel discovered when optimizing his email list for Quicksprout that his email users accounted for 41% of his overall blog comments and were 3.9 times more likely to share his content on social media than users from other channels.
So, with those stats in mind let’s get started and take a look at how you can start setting up a system and method for building up your email list. What’s great about the following email marketing tips is that you can begin implementing them right away and once set up correctly you can have the whole process run on automatic.
This first article will focus on the following two learning objectives
• The Snyper Method for Email Marketing
• Where to Find Good Email Data
The Sniper Method for Email Marketing
The Sniper method is an email marketing strategy whereby you literally pick off subscribers from a large list of email users.
It involves sending large numbers of emails through a VPS (virtual private server). Out of the large list you will then separate the users that have opened your email in the initial blast.
The openers will then form the foundation of your highly targeted list. You will then send autoresponder emails through your VPS to a landing page with an opt in form.
The opt ins will then go into a second email system and they will be the gold that makes up your highly targeted email list.
Where to Find Good Email Data to Market To
Your email marketing strategy will only work if you have good data. Period. So if you want to get good at building your email list you need to make sure that your email subscriber lists are good quality.
Be very wary of purchasing email data or random strangers that you come across on LinkedIn or that appear on Skype promising you millions of rows of “fresh” email data.
The reality is that many data and list providers sell the same lists over and over again, and that many lists in circulation are well beyond their sell by date (that is, they are so old and have been emailed so many times that they are now inactive).
Below are a few tips for trying to source out good email data:
• Always find full contact email data – Never work with lists that have only email addresses. It’s good to get as much info about the contacts on the lists as possible for personalisation and also for targeting by geo or region. To add to this, try to find lists that contain a good mix of ISPs (this will help your sending reputation).
• Use a Trusted List Broker – This is much harder than it sounds, as there are many list brokers making repeat sales on the same lists. Generally speaking a list will be more expensive the closer it is to the opt in date of the subscribers on the list. Any older than a few weeks and the list will be dirt cheap, and probably close to being inactive. Therefore try and catch that list somewhere in the middle of this process. For emailing it doesn’t have to be immediately after the opt in, but it has to be before the list becomes useless. Always use a broker that comes well recommended.
• Work With an Online Publisher – Again it sounds easy, but finding a publisher that you can trust and that knows what they are talking about is most of the battle. That said, a good publisher will have your interests in mind and will be looking for repeat custom – so if you make money they make money. Talk with many publishers and work with ones that provide you with plenty of info about their lists sources, such as exactly what the subscribers have opted in for and examples of landing pages that the leads have been generated from. That way you can understand better if the products you offer are relevant for the source of the data and how best to market them if they are.
• Subscribe to a Data Feed – There are email marketing companies that source out data from around the web and can provide you with a regular feed of data direct by API to your email server. These are hard to come by and again you need to get to know them, but a good data feed provider will clean your list, remove potential spam trap emails and keep your marketing ticking over with a regular supply of fresh data. What’s great about a data feed on API is that it can allow you to run your entire campaign on automatic.
With good sources of email data at the ready and using the Sniper email marketing method you will quickly be able to build up a list of highly targeted users who make repeat visits to your site over and over.
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Related posts:
- Email Marketing PART THREE: Converting and Measuring Progress - September 22, 2017
- Email Marketing PART TWO: Setting Up a Bulk Server and Choosing Email Type - September 15, 2017
- Email Marketing PART ONE: Building Your Email List and Maximizing Impact - September 8, 2017
