Tag: mailing list
Why Your Email Subscribers Hate You
The last time that you sent an email to your list, did you get less responses than you wanted? Did you get less sales than you wanted? I hope your answer to both of questions was yes. You should always be moving forward and growing. In order to take that next step, let's figure out what you are doing wrong in your email marketing.
You Don't Email Enough
When I explain list building and email marketing to most people their problem is that they don't contact their list enough. I know that this was my problem for years when I first built a list. I had no idea what to say to my list. I didn't know if people would even care what I had to say.
But guess what, they joined your list and the only way to find out if they like what you have to say, if they hate what you have to say, or even if they will unsubscribe is to email that list. You just won't know until you talk to them.
Please email at least once a week, if not more than once a week. Send them to your latest blog post. Cut, copy and paste your latest article in there. Buy a pack of private label-right articles and use those for follow up content. Pitch your latest offer and copy and paste chunks of the sales letter into your message.
You Email Too Much
The problem I see with those marketers who have built their list from a bad traffic source is that they email too much. People who have built their list from ad-swaps, JV giveaway, and even safe lists are dealing with such an unresponsive list. They have to email those people three or four times a day with different offers just to make any money at all.
The problem with this model is that it gets the gullible people to keep clicking and keep buying. But gets your real long-term buyers to leave your list. It is possible to hit your list too much, and too much is more than once per day.
The only exception to this is if I am launching a product and its launch day. For example, I am running a webinar, I will email three times a day. But on a regular basis, I will only email my list a maximum of one time per day.
You Email Crap
It is not enough to just email regularly or email just the right amount per week. You need to send people good emails. Do your emails blend your teaching and your pitching? If it is too much teaching or too much pitching, you are doing your subscribers a disservice.
Think about it, if all you are doing is pitching, then all you are saying is buy, buy, buy, buy. If all you are doing is teaching, you are giving them ideas, but you are not telling them how to take everything to the next level.
Your emails should be short and to the point. You should give people at least one thing to think about today, and then transition into some URL you want them to click on. That way, no one can complain.
Even if they don't like the offer you are giving them... they can at least read the email and not click the link at the end, so they will walk away with some free piece of advice.
It's Just Not A Good Fit
When people sign up for one of my free courses, or purchase one of my products. I let them know that they are getting on a list where they will receive updates from me about all my future products, not just the one they bought.
Some subscribers don't think that should be the case. That's okay, that's their opinion. What I know is that if there is someone online who I really like, whose products I like to buy, who I want to be like and emulate, I want to get regular emails from them. Because otherwise I will start thinking about and wondering what they are doing today and what their latest project is.
Your true fans want to know what you are up to, what you are launching, and how they can buy it so they can get more value out of it than the price they paid. Just like everything in life, it is not for everyone. That is why if someone wants to get off your list, it should be easy and permanent for them to leave.
Do you know now why some of your email subscribers hate you? Which of the four reasons above is the reason? What are you going to do differently in your email marketing now that you have this information?
Leave a comment below explaining yourself.
Build Up a Mailing List by Attracting Web Traffic
You send traffic to a squeeze page and people opt-in to a list. Then you send them more free info over time to build trust, and eventually start hitting them with offers related to that niche.
How the heck do you get traffic to that list?
Method 1: Join forums in that niche and post real content. Don't mention your site, don't try to sell people on anything, just participate in conversations and get people to recognize you. After you get 25 posts, edit your profile and place a link to that squeeze page in your forum signature.
Method 2: Create a blog. When news hits in your niche, write a blog entry about it, and add your link at the end. For example if a local news story about a cat massager business hits the news, talk about it and link to your squeeze page at the end. Locally hosted blogs like WordPress will "blog and ping" ... so your posts will hit the search engines in seconds. You can also get free accounts on services like Blogger.
Method 3: Article marketing. Write some articles and post them to those same article directories with a linkback to your squeeze page. If these get you lots of opt-ins, consider hiring freelance article writers to write these articles in bulk for you. Then guess what? You can post some of those articles to forums and post them to your own sites as blogs.
Method 4: Social networking. Join MySpace groups and post MySpace blog posts to your profiles with your articles. Get Camtasia Recorder, create PowerPoint presentations of your articles and record those videos. Then post them to video sites like YouTube and Revver, with your squeeze page URL watermarked right in and your URL in the video description.
Method 5: Create a free, lead-in product. Write your own articles and package them as a product, or hire someone to write articles and assemble those into a PDF yourself. Make sure the URL to that squeeze page is prominently displayed on every page. Then sell resale rights to a select number of people, or offer your product on giveaway sites.
Method 6: AdWords. That's probably the hardest method of them all, but what you can do is look at the ads that appear on the right hand side of Google searches that stay listed over time, and try to model those ads. Worried about paying too much per click? Look at the top 10 search results, choose to only show your ads in the content network, and say you only want your ads to appear on those top 10 pages.
If you don't know where to begin, I recommend you dedicate an entire week to doing nothing but method #1. Then dedicate the next week to method #2. All the way to method 5 (only try method 6 if you know what you're doing) and build up that mailing list.
