Before you can proceed building your mailing list and launching the corresponding email marketing campaign in order to get subscribers, you must first establish the system that will carry out these processes. Your mailing list and your email marketing campaign will only be strong and bankable if you take some time to sow its seeds properly. 

This may demand a certain amount of investment on your part, but it is something that you must choose to take.  Such investments will rebound to your benefit anyway and you will be able to recoup them from the profits you are able to derive as a result of an excellently established mailing list. We break down this process in 5 steps.

Step One. Choosing An Excellent Autoresponder Service
You may already know how important an excellent autoresponder service will be for your email marketing campaign.  You simply cannot build a mailing list without taking advantage of an autoresponder service and you cannot build a responsive mailing list without a great autoresponder service.  Some autoresponders are simply better than others and you should consider in choosing the best autoresponder service for your online business’ needs, allow me to reiterate the prominence of the Aweber service.  It is simply one of the best, if not the best, autoresponder service on the market today as it boasts all the amazing features expected from an autoresponder service, as well as some other features exclusive to its powerful engine.

Nonetheless, if you wish to try other options, here’s a key factor to consider:

The autoresponder service must be offered by a credible company.  This is because the service will constantly run for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, nonstop. Hence, you cannot afford any interruption in its operation.  A credible company providing such a service will give you all the technical support you’ll need to ensure that everything runs smoothly.

Price, though an important consideration, should be secondary to the quality of the autoresponder system you will be taking advantage of.  Remember, subscription to an autoresponder service is an important investment.  It is something you cannot do without.  You cannot compromise your choice of a great autoresponder service simply because you can save more with something that offers inferior value. Indeed, choosing the right, if not the best, autoresponder service is the first step in building a profitable mailing list. You have to make sure that you’ll be off to a rousing start!

Step Two. Integrating The Autoresponder Service Into Your Website
Integrating the autoresponder service which you have chosen and subscribed to is easy.  All you have to do is make a separate page where you can invite your visitors to join your mailing list.  It doesn’t even have to be a separate page – it could be included on your main page in a strategic position that won’t be missed by your visitors’ eyes.

This is crucial.  Subscribers are potential customers after all.  You want to capture them so that you’re able to offer them your products or services eventually.  The more subscribers you manage to capture, the more exposure your products or services will get… this is the basic rule.  But a mailing list offers more.  With a follow-up system, you’ll be able to convince your subscribers to purchase what you have to offer, through techniques which are more personalized and more specialized in nature.

So, since inviting people to subscribe to your mailing list is comparable to inviting visitors to buy your products or services, persuasion is important for success with this particular aspect. Whether you choose a separate page or a strategic location on an existing web page, you will have to exert some effort to convince your visitor to sign up to your mailing list.  Now, persuasion is an art form.  You just can’t tell them to sign up without specifying the reasons why they should.  And you cannot specify some reasons why they should sign up if you’re not able to give them such reasons in the first place.

You can’t introduce your capture page like this: “Hey!  Sign up now!  Join the other members of my mailing list!”  That’s pretty much pointless.  You might just end up turning them away instead of convincing them to join. You must offer them something encouraging, if not inspiring, so that they’ll decide to provide their contact details and subscribe to your mailing list. 

So the page or the area where you introduce your mailing list should be able to emphasize on the benefits that your visitors will receive once they subscribe to your mailing list.  You have to remember this. Instead of telling them something like “hey!  Join my mailing list, please,” you can present your lead capture box with an enumeration of what they stand to gain once they subscribe. This would be a great approach to win their confidence in sharing with you what is relatively an intimate detail.  Their email address is sensitive information after all, and by giving it to you, they’ll be reposing upon you their trust.

Step Three. Preparing Your Autoresponder System
An autoresponder system will allow you to prepare your messages beforehand and set the delivery date for them.  This is a very convenient feature.  You won’t have to keep logging in to your autoresponder account just to type in your messages and have them sent right there and then.  You can automate the process by preparing everything beforehand. There are basically two stages to this particular step.  First is the preparation of the messages you want to send out.  And second is the interval in between the deliveries of your messages.

The point of an email marketing campaign is to generate some sales for your website.  And you can only generate sales if you make some offers.  With email marketing, you can make such offers through the emails you send to the members of your mailing list. But do not send them some mini-sales pages; that is, do not make obvious sales pitches.  They’ll just feel betrayed as they have joined your mailing list because of the value you have promised.

So, if you can’t offer your products or services directly, how can you convert your subscribers into paying customers? Well, a mailing list is also called a follow-up system for a reason.  It will allow you to follow up with your subscribers, hence the aforementioned name. By following up on them, you can actually warm them up for a future sale.  How do you exactly warm them up? You have to devise your email messages wisely.  They should contain something of value, like the freebies, bonuses, information, news, contests, etc.  This should be your primary concern when preparing your email messages.

The rule to remember is this: always offer your subscribers something worth their time, first and foremost.  A direct sales pitch will just discourage them from reading your complete message.  It’s like someone knocking on their door just to sell a variety of commodities.  They gave you their email address and this means that they trusted you enough with a piece of their privacy.  You have to show them that you respect this privacy so they won’t feel deceived.  It’s part of warming them up.

Now, what should be the schedule of your message deliveries?  Well, upon a visitor’s subscription, you should send your first email within 3 to 5 days afterwards.  Subsequent correspondences should also have the same interval between them.

1. Subscription
2. Within 3 to 5 days afterwards – send your first email offering a freebie or some important news
3. Within 1 to 2 days – send an email asking them if they received the freebies, and if everything is ok
4. Within 3 to 5 days – send your second email offering another freebie or another important tidbit
5. Within 1 to 2 days – send another email asking them if everything is in order regarding the freebies you have sent
6. Within 3 to 5 days – offer your first product
7. Repeat the process

Step Four. Avoiding The Spam Filters
Most email servers employ spam filters to comply with the Anti-Spam Law.  Spam filters segregate emails which are believed to be unsolicited and they are placed in a separate folder. This poses quite a problem for the Internet marketer. For starters, Spam filters do not possess any sentience.  They are just programs meant to robotically determine certain emails that are possibly spam.  They do this by pinpointing certain words, or certain email servers, that contain potential spam triggers.  As such, even the emails that the recipients have assented to are sometimes placed in a different folder.

When this happens, the Internet marketer’s emails won’t appear in the recipient’s inbox; hence, there is that chance that they won’t get read at all. Worse, the recipient himself may forget that he has signed up to your mailing list and he might file a spam complaint.  A spam complaint will have your mail server banned from the recipient mailing network.  Imagine if the spam complainant is using Yahoo’s, MSN’s, or Google’s mailing network.  Such would mean that your messages won’t be received by other recipients whose email addresses end with yahoo.com, msn.com, hotmail.com, and gmail.com.  This would instantly destroy your email marketing campaign.

Indeed, the danger of being considered as spam by those nasty filters is one of the worst enemies that any Internet marketer has to encounter. Hence, there is a need to try our very best to avoid these spam filters. And how are you supposed to do that?  Here are some helpful and essential tips to ensure that your emails will be received and read.

• Avoid typing in all caps.
• Avoid using the word “free.”
• Avoid using excessive exclamation points as these can also serve as spam triggers.
• Though unverified, many have said that including the words “news” and “newsletter” in the title of your email will keep the spam filter robots away from your message.
• Including the period by which your message is being distributed, like “weekly,” “biweekly,” or “monthly,” in the title of your email.
• Always use a double opt-in process in every subscription process for your mailing list. 
• Always include a disclaimer in every message, reminding your recipients that they are receiving your emails because they subscribed to them.
• Always include an unsubscribe option in every email so that your recipients will always be able to opt out of their subscription instead of hastily filing a spam complaint.
• Never, ever harvest emails from the Internet.
• Avoid using other words that can be considered as spam triggers.  These include “guaranteed,” “spam,” “special,” and the like.
• Make sure that every message you send has substantial content. 

Step Five. Generating Traffic
Let’s make this perfectly clear. Your email marketing campaign will fail miserably if you’re not able to generate enough traffic for your website. Traffic, of course, is the volume of visitors who load up your web pages.  Before you can have subscribers for your mailing list, you will need to drive people to your capture page.  Hence, the number of people who subscribe to your mailing list will depend on the number of visitors you are able to generate for your website.

You will have to inform the world that your mailing list as well as all the perks it offers actually exists.  And you can do this by employing several marketing strategies that will get the word out about your business, and correspondingly, your beneficial follow-up system as well.

There are many resources on the World Wide Web that will teach you how to generate busloads upon busloads of traffic for your webpages.  Primary of these resources is Web Traffic Explained.  This is an eBook that is perfect for novice marketers since it perfectly explains some traffic-generating strategies in an easy-to-understand language.  It’s pretty much straight to the point, but very comprehensive in including all the latest techniques that successful webmasters use to get the traffic they need as fast as possible.

Bottom line is, you have to drive a substantial amount of traffic to your website; otherwise, everything that we have discussed so far is moot.  Traffic, as they say, is the lifeblood of any online business, and this just proves how critical traffic really is.

Click Here to learn how to flood your newsletter with subscribers Today!

 

Tags: E-Books

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 5:30 pm and is filed under eBooks & Reports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.