Robert Plank

I want to introduce you to my new kitty.

His name is Peaches (short for "Peaches and Cream") and he is a 3 month old tabby. I got him over the weekend and today (Monday) we are leaving him alone at home for the first time.

He is the most mellow (and clumsy) kitten I have ever met. But here's the thing... he's basically my baby and I wouldn't give him away to anyone.

Heck... look at him... a kitten that cute... if I didn't take care of him, someone else would!

In the same way, your mailing list is your baby. Giving those subscribers away would be a stupid, stupid thing.

Every once in a while someone asks why the heck don't I promote affiliate programs up the wazoo like so many other internet marketers with decent-sized mailing lists.

Why don't I participate in product giveaways... why don't I do lots of joint ventures...

When you promote someone else's product as an affiliate, you are building your list for them. Say you get a sale and get your $47 or $97 commission... your ride ends there.

Meanwhile that guy who runs the affiliate program captures the customer's e-mail address after a sale and gets to market to that person over and over and over.

So, when you have a list and you promote an affiliate program, you are copying some of your paying subscribers to someone else's list... that person can probably outsell the heck out of you too.

When you promote other peoples' stuff, you sacrifice future sales. What you want to do is setup an affiliate program and get others to promote it to THEIR lists.

Of course you can network with other people in your niche... but please, think twice about giving your list away.

Let me tell you something else about Peaches. He is spoiled, even after these first few days. He has a really bad cold... so I got him a humidifier.

He has fancy kitten food. Yesterday we fed him "California Roll" kitten food and tomorrow's flavor will be "Turducken" -- that's turkey inside a duck, inside a chicken.

I was reading some of the ingredients on his "Surf & Turf" kitten food... it contains lobster, and different kinds of apples!

Kitten food!

My question to you today is: do you spoil your list in the same way?

Obviously I have things to do so I'm going to draw the line somewhere. The same is true with my list. I don't treat my list like crap. I follow up with them. I unsubscribe troublemakers from my list.

When you have a mailing list, making money is the bottom line... but if you don't treat it like your baby, someone else could mine the gold out of that list before you can.

My list gets hungry and my best subscribers are more than happy to pay me for my information. There's nothing wrong with that.

Build your list using as many paid buyers as possible. Weed out the freebie seekers. Be very careful about where you send your subscribers and be wary of promoting the latest hyped-up product just because everyone else is doing it.

Honestly, if you train your list to only want free information, or low-cost information, you're going to fall flat when it comes time to pitch the big-ticket items.

Establish a sales funnel. Send automated follow-ups to your list to keep it from going stale. Promote one-time-offers to your other products.

Here is a way to improve your customer relations in one minute or less...

Just say "hi." If you haven't sent a mailing to your list in a while, take a second right now to say "hi" to them. It doesn't matter what you say. Tell them what sites you worked on today. Ask them a question.

You dont have to have some fancy, thought out message, you don't need to write a 70-part follow-up autoresponder series, just say "hi." Do it right now and come back to this blog post... it won't take very long.

My kitty is perfectly happy when I just say "hi" to him... I don't always need to bring a treat. I don't always need to get something out of it.

Comment below and share your favorite tactic to warm up your list... remember, I need 10 comments if you want me to continue posting blog entries.

My question for you today is in two parts...

First of all, do you collect your customers' physical addresses?

Second, do you send your BEST customers handwritten thank you notes in the mail?

I do both -- as of earlier today.

(If you don't feel like reading the rest of this blog post... just scroll down and leave a comment answering those questions.)

To be honest, I only switched from the "no shipping" option on all my PayPal buttons... to optional shipping last year... and didn't lose any sales. Last month, I switched from "optional shipping" to required shipping on all my buttons, and didn't lose any sales! In fact, May 2008 was my best month to date.

Don't get me wrong. I am very much AGAINST ignorant order forms like JVManager that require customers to fill in their shipping information TWICE (once to get them in the order system, a second time into the payment processor).

There is no excuse for crap like that. Processors like PayPal will capture the address info and then save it in your logs or even pass it back into a script.

If someone is paying with a credit card, they have to type in their billing address anyway... and if they are paying directly out of a PayPal account, their primary shipping address is already PRE-SELECTED!

Every time I go to a seminar, the big boys who make $10,000+ per week always tell you to take your customers offline. They offer postcards, free CDs (where you pay shipping only), and big markup for those $997 packages with 30 DVDs that probably cost under $100 to produce.

You don't have to get all fancy like they do. In fact I just about guarantee you that if you try to set something up with Kinko's online, or some kind of automated postcard mailing service, that you will make everything way too complicated and get yourself confused.

Here is what I did. I downloaded the history of all my PayPal transactions of the past 6 months or so, onto an Excel spreadsheet.

I filtered the spreadsheet to include only those addresses that contained the phrase "United States" and sorted by highest purchase amount first.

After removing duplicates, I ended up with a list of about 50 Americans who bought a $30 or higher product from me in the last six months. There were many many people who paid less than $30, lived outside the United States, or just didn't provide any shipping information.

How pathetic is that? I average 566 sales per month with an average price of $19.06 per sale... I made 2,829 sales from January 1st to June 1st 2008... and I only ended up with about 50 decent physical leads.

Don't make the same mistake I did... require shipping on your PayPal account, even for online orders.

To write my thank you notes: I sat down on my couch to watch a movie and made use of some idle time. During that two hour movie, I wrote 50 personalized thank you notes.

I printed out that list of leads and a little bit of buying history from each person (because I funnel everything into a list, it is VERY rare for someone to only buy one product from me). I mentioned the product they bought, thanked them for being a loyal customer, asked them to take action on that product.

If I saw a trend in the products they bought from me (i.e. ONLY JavaScript how-to products, or ONLY the scripts themselves, or ONLY copywriting products) I would recommend something else they might like.

I wrote each of these in one of those fat little diary books, one thank you note per page, then hand-addressed each envelope, tore out each sheet of paper and stuck it in the envelope, added a stamp... then today, I stuck them all in a mailbox.

I did this all with mailing materials I had in my house. I didn't have to go outside, I didn't have time to talk myself out of it... I just needed a monotonous task to get me through a boring movie.

Watching the movie on its own would have been too boring... stuffing the envelopes would have been too boring... but I was completely happy doing both of those things at the same time.

So go ahead and check your order history (cross reference them with your mailing list to make sure they haven't unsubscribed) and write some thank you notes if you're going on a plane ride or watching a boring movie.

If you're one of those people who needs to add it as a routine to their schedule, just write and mail 4 handwritten thank you notes per day. Do it on a trial basis... you can stop after 30 days.

It has to be handwritten. I can't tell you how many pieces of mail I've thrown away just because they weren't handwritten.

They have to be mailed to your current customers ONLY. No cold mailing. I've thrown away plenty of those envelopes in my mailbox as well.

Even if those thank you notes don't bring in any more sales, it felt good to write them. George Bush Sr. supposedly wrote hundreds of thank you notes per day. He carried a box of thank you cards around with him and wrote thank you letters sometimes minutes after speaking with someone.

This was just a test. If the thank you note thing works out then I might send thank you's out to all my high-ticket customers, maybe throw in some Starbucks gift cards, hire someone to write them, who knows.

The important thing was: I took my customers offline, even if it was just a little bit.

Are you doing the same thing?

Please answer me in the comment form below because I need 10 comments to continue posting.