7 Tips For Building An Explosive Opt-In List
By Sean Kells
Anyone looking to make a serious income from home as an internet marketer should incorporate an opt-in email list at the earliest possible stage of their business. Why? Because it’s a known fact that it usually takes 7 or more communications with a prospect before they are comfortable enough to make a purchase. Using an opt-in email marketing strategy will allow you to continue communicating with your customer after they have left your site and, therefore, will greatly increase your sales.
Building Your Opt-In List
Incorporating an opt-in list into your web site is fairly straightforward. The only additional tool required is a subscription to an “autoresponder” service such as AWeber or Get Response. This will allow you to put the opt-in form on your site and send out follow up emails to your subscribers.
Keep in mind that you can’t just slap an opt-in form up on your web page and expect people to subscribe to your email list. Visitors to your site are looking for information to help them solve a problem. People generally won’t opt-in to your list unless you offer them something of real value, like a free bonus report, ebook or email course which provides information addressing the issue that brought them to your site in the first place. The more exciting and valuable the bonus is perceived to be, the higher the opt-in rate you will experience and the better your return on investment will be. So get creative when it comes to the incentive for people to sign up to your list!
Maintaining a Strong Relationship with Your List
Once you have started capturing email addresses and building your list of “leads”, you will have an asset that can be leveraged over and over again. You can use that email list to deliver offers and drive traffic to other websites and sales pages again and again. In order to maintain the value of this asset, you need to treat your subscribers with care and build a strong relationship with them. If you pamper your prospects and provide them with great value, you will earn their trust and respect. On the other hand, if you simply email them one product pitch after another, they will feel abused and will likely unsubscribe from your list altogether.
Here are 7 key tips that will help you build a strong relationship with your opt-in list:
- Send emails regularly – Aim to reach your subscribers every five to seven days. If you email too often you risk becoming a nuisance. If you fail to communicate with your prospects often enough, they will become disinterested or even forget who you are!
- Provide real value – Send your subscribers really useful information and tips. Remember that your subscribers are looking for a solution to a problem so your emails should always contain something that addresses the problem. This will build trust with your prospects.
- Limit your sales pitch ratio – Send at least three or four purely educational emails for every one sales pitch. If you send out too many hard sales pitches, your customers will stop opening your emails.
- Include audio or video – Even if your email contains amazing written content, your message will be lost if your prospects are pre-occupied by distractions (ringing phones, internet surfing, funny emails from their friends…). Delivering your message with audio or video will keep them focused.
- Ensure your emails are readable – Although animated graphics and fancy logos can give your emails a sexier look, they also increase the risk that your message will be blocked by email filters. Most often, it’s a good idea to limit the body of your email to text. (If you are going to imbed audio in your email, make sure that your message is displayed in text format as well in case your reader cannot hear the audio file.) To deliver a video message, upload it to your site and include a hyperlink to the video in the text of your email.
- Allow your subscribers to interact with you – If practical, include a discussion forum, comment system or email submission form on your site. Blog style websites which allow your subscribers to comment on your blog content are particularly good for this.
- Track your results – Once you have set up your series of emails, track your results to see which ones are being opened and getting good click-through rates (AWeber and Get Response provide detailed reports on this). You can then tweak your email strategies to increase your results.
If you follow these 7 tips, you will have an eager list of subscribers who look forward to receiving your communications and value your advice. In turn, you will enjoy an explosive boost to your bottom line.
Sean Kells is an internet marketing consultant. Learn more strategies for online success and grab a copy of his latest ebook, 7 Days to Online Profits at:==> ReviewAroo.com
This article courtesy of SiteProNews.com