One of the most important things you should be doing when building an online business is starting an email list. There are many misconceptions about this and hopefully, I will be able to clear some of these up for you guys today. In today’s blog post, I’m going to provide you with the what, why, when, and how to build and grow your list as well as some helpful pointers that will get you started building your list today. Let’s get started shall we?
What’s An Email List Exactly & Why Should You Start Building Yours As Soon As Possible?
This is one of the most popular marketing techniques out there that businesses use to keep in touch with their customers and gain new customers as well. Ever since the inception of the internet back in the early 90’s people have been using email as a gateway for keeping in touch with friends, family, co-workers, and many other people across the globe.
By Starting An Email List, you’ll be able to build a list of subscribers that are really interested in what you have to offer, and want more information on your products and services. If you aren’t building an email list, you’re seriously missing out on a ton of targeted traffic and lots of revenue by not adding this as one of your sources of traffic.
This is something that I should have started myself over a year ago, but for some reason, I kept putting it off. I’m actually regretting that now. I have started writing my first email course over the past couple of days, and I’m really excited to get my campaign up and running.
The Evolution Of Email And How It’s Evolving in 2016
There are many people out there who believe that email marketing is dead and that it’s no longer a reliable source of traffic. According to A 2013 case study, this couldn’t be nothing further from the truth. Within this study, it’s revealed that people are spending up to 50% of their time at work in their email inbox.
Since we are now in the year 2016 these stats have more than likely gone up since then.
Ain’t That Crazy?
Take A Look At The Chart Below To See Which Marketing Platform Is Still King
Here Are A Few Other Things That You May Not Have Known About Email!
- The average person (Male Or Female) receives nearly 12,000 emails a year
- This comes out to over 30 emails daily
- It makes up for 76% of the way people communicate online with this number growing daily.
- It’s used for more than just regular email, this is also used to send pictures, Important documents, and even job applications and car loan applications are sent through email.
- There are nearly 4 billion email accounts opened worldwide. This number is expected to reach nearly 5 billion by next year.
Email marketing doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon and this is still one of the top ways to get targeted traffic to your website.
Here Are A Few Of The Benefits To Having An Email List
When people sign up to your list they are giving you permission to contact them and send them special offers and information on what you’re selling. You have a direct connection with them and people are much more likely to get to know you better and gain your trust faster if they speak directly to you.
You can sell to the same people over and over again once you gain their trust and build a relationship with them. This includes sending them special offers and promotions you have going on throughout the year as well as many other things.
You will get far more engagement on your website from your list then you’ll ever get from people naturally engaging on your site by merely finding you in the search engines. If you aren’t building your list, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity to engage with people who wants to hear what you have to say.
When Should You Start Building Your List?
This is one of the main misconceptions about email marketing in general, which I’m going to go into detail on and tell you guys the perfect time to start building your list. I have reviewed many other Make Money Online Opportunities that focus on only this aspect of marketing alone and tell you to build your list before you have any traffic coming to your website.
Now if you have money to invest in PPC(paid traffic) and you know how to drive traffic to an opt-in form then that’s great. To be honest with you, most people who start out online are very limited on funds and are looking for ways to make money not spend it.
Personally, to me, this is what I call putting the cart before the horse and it just doesn’t make sense for you to do that. Now if you have money to invest in PPC(paid traffic) and you know how to drive traffic to an opt-in form then that’s great. To be honest with you, most people who start out online are very limited on funds and are looking for ways to make money not spend it.
If you are on a limited budget, the best thing I recommend you do is to start out with SEO and wait till you’re getting, at least, a couple hundred visitors per day before you think about building your list. This way you’ll have a decent stream of visitors on your website daily that you could possibly turn into subscribers.
There Are Many Ways To Build A List
There are many ways you could go about this and below I’m going to show you the 3 most popular ways.
- Giving away something of value (Usually an ebook) in exchange for people’s email address
- Having people sign up to receive your latest blog posts delivered straight to their inbox
- Get people to sign up for your weekly newsletter
- If you run a coupon related blog you could deliver coupons and special deals directly to people’s inbox
- Offer a free online course to get subscribers on your list.
How To Get Started Building Your List Today
Now that you have some background information on email and just how powerful of a marketing tool this really is, it’s time you get started creating your first email campaign.
- Sign up for an autoresponder service like Aweber or Mailchimp- If you’re on a budget, Mailchimp provides you with your first 2,000 subscribers for free. In my opinion, they don’t offer nearly as good service as Aweber does. Aweber offers A 30 day Free Trial so you can get familiar with their layout and get more comfortable with how to use their tools and get your first campaign up and running.
- Create A Badass Opt-In Form- This is the key to gaining subscribers and building a kick ass list. Keep things simple with your form and have a catchy phrase above your opt-in form to peak their curiosity and get them to opt-in.
- Choose Your Direction- Like I said above there are many ways you could go about creating your list. You can pick from the list above or think of your own.
- Get To Work Creating Your Incentives- Depending on which direction you chose to go in will determine how long this will take you to achieve Take your time as you’re doing this and remember to provide quality and value. This will be the deciding factor as to someone remaining on your list or hitting the unsubscribe button.
My Closing Thoughts
Email marketing is one of the best ways to engage with your audience and get to know them better. Think about it, an email address is needed for just about anything we do anymore. Whether it’s signing up for a social network or a dating site. You need an email address for everything.
Restaurants and department stores even ask you to sign up for their email club so they can send you coupons, deals and special offers. If you aren’t taking advantage of this powerful marketing tool you really need to get with it and implement this into your daily marketing routine if you want to take your business to the next level and beyond.
If you’re interested in learning more about this powerful marketing technique and how to utilize this to its full potential, I would highly recommend that you check out Wealthy Affiliate. There are live video classes on this as well as many other interactive training modules.
I hope I’ve been able to shed some light on how crucial it is to start building your email list and when you should start doing this. I know some people who have been running an online business for 3 or 4 years now and they still haven’t added this to their website yet.
As you are reading this post, you may be one of those people. If so, I would love to hear why you haven’t added this as a source of traffic. Perhaps you have already tapped into this and are reaping the benefits from it.
Whatever your case may be, I would love to hear about it in the comments below!
Cheers
Your Friend, Scott