Category Archives ⇒ List Building

List Building – Newsletter

· Brandon Hann

This is what it all leads up to. All that hard work of creating the structure around your mailing list has finally come down to what it is you’re actually mailing. There’s no need for me to explain what a newsletter is, but I will give you some advice on how to make it more effective.

I want to start by explaining why it is important to even have one of these in the first place.

Purpose of a newsletter


Think of it this way. You have a website and on it you sell a product. If someone finds your product through a search engine or an ad you placed somewhere out in the world, they can go to your site and buy it. That’s great, but what happens when they leave? Do you sell more products? And if so, will your customers come back to buy them too?

These are all valid questions that most businesses often ask and one major solution to getting your customers to come back (besides offering quality products and service) is to tell them why they should come back. Newsletters are great promotional tools. Here are some things you can include in a newsletter to increase its effectiveness:

  • Provide information about special offers for products on your website.
  • Attach coupons for more money-saving opportunities.
  • Send free stuff like ebooks, offers to other websites and helpful downloads.
  • Offer helpful information that a customer can use to get more out of the products they bought from you.
  • Include direct links to specific areas of your website to help people find things easier.

Use to bring in more income

Newsletters can used in conjunction with your mailing list to send out mass offers for your website that can bring in extra income at just about any time you wish. As an example, if you have a list of 10,000 people and only 3% actually respond to a $20 offer you sent, you can potentially make $6000 in one email blast! Now that’s power.

Building your mailing list is a vital tool for promotion of your website, your products and services and a way to get related offers, discounts and important information into the inboxes of your trusted visitors.

<< Back to Squeeze Page Forward To List Building >>

List Building – Squeeze Page

· Brandon Hann

Internet marketing is competitive and you need to be on the cutting edge of the competition if you want to stay afloat. A squeeze page is just one more way to extract (or squeeze) business out of your website. Think of it like squeezing the last drops of juice out of a lemon. Since every visitor on your site counts, it’s important to find ways to get them on your mailing list without running them off.

What is a squeeze page?


You may find various definitions about what a squeeze page actually is and some might even consider a squeeze page the same as a landing page and they are right for the most part–they are very similar.

I make the distinction between the two by reserving landing pages specifically for the advertising of a certain product and a squeeze page for simply the advertising of your site and mailing list as a whole. The main difference would be that one page is very targeted and one is not.

How do I make them effective?

Testing, testing and more testing. That’s the short answer! Nobody can answer this question for you because every website is different than the next. Your visitors might have very different needs than those that come to my site and only you would know what it is they need. The good news is that I have some general tips on how to make a squeeze page! Take these tips and mix them with your own style of branding and you’ll have the advantage.

  • Optin form – This is the most important part! If your users don’t have anywhere to signup, it’s pointless to have. Make this form easily found and clearly marked. Don’t hide or dress it up too much otherwise, you’ll lose potential signups.
  • Benefits – This is where you tell your visitors what they get out of the deal. Remember, the whole point is to get subscribers to your site so offer them something they will be interested in based off the content that your site is about.
  • Header graphics – Ensure that you have an attractive header graphic. Consider the squeeze page somewhat of an advertisement, so this graphic should draw people in. Keep it simple, but effective.
  • Headline text – Provide captivating headline text to help with the graphical “sales pitch” of your newsletter. Once again, the idea is to draw interest to your ad, but most of all, maintain that interest long enough to produce a sign up.
  • Sample product – If you can, provide a sample of the product such as a lengthly product description or a video of your product in action.

More info

As I stated in the beginning, the success of your squeeze page will depend heavily on your audience and you need to know who you’re promoting to in order to increase signup frequency. As an example, if you run a blog about gardening, it’s probable that your users aren’t going to like (or care for) large, colorful, in-your-face graphics and crazy sounds or music, so tone it down.

Beyond that, I hope you got the basics down! Have fun with it!

<< Back to Reviews Forward To Newsletter >>

List Building – Reviews

· Brandon Hann

Setting up a ‘reviews’ page is a great idea to help promote the products and services you have listed on your landing pages. It might not come as a surprise, but today, more and more people are trusting what the Internet has to say about the quality and effectiveness of new products. This is causing less effectiveness over traditional advertising.

What is a review page?


Just as it sounds, it’s a place where people can discuss your products and website. If you’re running a blog, you might already have somewhat of a review system in place and that’s your comment space. Each post you make has the capability of receiving comments from everyone that reads it. By the way, make sure you read my tips about comments while you’re here.

Giving your users access to such content is very important to help sell your stuff. Of course, when you make your own website, you’re going to biased about your products and people can see right through that. It’s not to say that you’re lying, but people want to really know what the facts are.

How important are reviews and testimonials?

Ask yourself these questions: when you made your last purchase, how much research did you do on the product? If you did any, how much weight did a user’s personal review of the product hold up against the manufacturer’s description of the product?

Look at it this way, if your product starts making it around the Internet, people will review it anyway, so you might as well put some of these comments on your own site to help people along. Using review pages in conjunction with your landing pages will create a successful marketing plan.

What not to do

  • DON’T lie – Making up fake reviews and testimonials will only take you so far. Eventually someone will buy your product and if it’s not like your fake reviews said, they will blast out the truth. In time, your site will be the only one offering positive reviews on your product. And how bad will that look?!
  • DON’T disparage – Never disparage a competitor’s product that’s similar to yours. Even if yours is truly better, putting down another business will only harm your reputation and image.
  • DON’T ignore comments – If you ignore negative comments, you won’t have the chance to improve what’s wrong. Also, flooding a space with only positive remarks can have the same effect as making up reviews. Somewhere else, the truth will come out.

Go look for reviews

It’s true that not everybody will care to write positive comments for you. If you are selling products, you should go out and ask your clients to say a few things about their experience. Offer them a free link on your website or something.

If you notice your business is getting listed on sites like Yelp.com, start linking to them to show your customers you’re not afraid of presenting 3rd party information whether it’s negative or not.

<< Back to Landing Pages Forward To Squeeze Pages >>

List Building – Landing Pages

· Brandon Hann

I’m sure that you have seen quite a few landing pages throughout your Internet travels, but maybe didn’t know what they were called. Or maybe you did, but didn’t understand the importance of these pages.

What is a landing page?


Simply put, it’s a page you land on after clicking a link. This sounds easy enough, but deep down, every little detail you incorporate (or don’t) will affect the quality and performance of this page. So what are they for? When an advertiser is promoting a product or service, they will create a static page on the Internet somewhere that showcases this product or service and is essentially the make or break presentation.

They are commonly used by affiliate marketers as a means to send their visitors to the advertiser’s website to gain a referral bonus. Here’s an example of a successful landing page.

Why is a landing page important?

From an advertiser’s point of view, your landing page should be designed to sell. Unlike a face-to-face sales pitch where you can gauge things like emotion, customer response and even overcome objections, a webpage is a one-shot deal. If you customer lands here and loses interest, they leave the page and your sale is gone forever!

Just like creating effective advertisements like Google ads, banners, etc. you want to keep people interested and above all, you want to make them want your product when they’re done reading the page.

From a visitor’s point of view, your landing page should be straight forward. It should sell the product well and sell it fast. Pre-answer everyone’s questions up front and add just enough visuals to keep people interested.

How should I design this page?

The design should be non-intrusive, but visual enough to maintain interest. For content, some people will tell you that you shouldn’t use a targeted landing page (see below) to promote or discuss anything other than what product your selling. Others might tell you to use landing pages as opportunities to upsell other things you might be offering.

Types of landing pages:

  • Targeted – These pages may be part of your website, but they look nothing like your site because they are only there to promote one item. The entire page is written only for this item and does not contain any other links, pictures or “plugs”.
  • Dynamic – This type of page can be mixed with other types. Essentially a dynamic page, much like any dynamic webpage, will allow you to create custom content based on a referring site or affiliate link. An example would be in the landing page made references to the site you came from, so it appears as though that site heavily endorses this product.
  • Static – This is your average landing page and it can be a page build specifically for a product, or it can simply be a static page located within your site that helps promote the product. Using this type of page may detract a little form your intending purpose, but it could open doors for promotion of the rest of your business.

My suggestion is to go with a page that only focuses on one thing. The reason for this is that you’ll be advertising this page through a PPC network and the traffic generated from these networks is very targeted toward a particular niche. So if you landing page was selling auto-blogging software, you would only be targeting web traffic that was looking for auto-blogging software and therefore you would not want to fill this page with information on other software you’re selling.

Getting started

The first thing you want to do is gather your ideas. Think about what you want to accomplish with your page, who you’re advertising to, how they are able to buy your product and what would make them interested. Once you have these basics down, you should have a clear understanding of how to setup your page.

Just keep in mind that the goal of landing pages is to convert sales quickly. The people that will be clicking through are not there to see your site. They were advised by someone else to click on that link and you need to be there to present them with a valid reason for staying.

Increase effectiveness

Here are some tips on how to increase the overall effectiveness of your landing pages:

  1. Create concise text without being too short. Find that perfect balance so you’re not overdoing or underdoing it.
  2. Add a FAQ to try and answer questions you might already know will probably be asked by your visitors. This way, they don’t need to take time to find out how to contact you.
  3. Keep the content search engine friendly and make sure you’re not using duplicate content on multiple landing pages.
  4. Make sure the page loads fast. Nobody is going to wait for your page to load if it takes longer than 5 seconds.
  5. Consider adding a video clip of the product in use or you explaining your service. Even a video of you reading the same content that’s already on the page will be highly effective.
  6. Add some social media links to increase your exposure. Use sites like Twitter and Facebook so people can readily find you if they’re really interested in what you offer.
  7. If you have a few customer praises about your products, put them on there to let people know what others think of you.

Testing your landing pages

In researching this topic, I found a great site that talked about testing landing pages. Originally I wasn’t even going to mention it because it’s one of those things that webmasters usually do naturally by reviewing page stats and click-through ratios, but this site brought up a really good point.

Michael Bloch from TamingTheBeast.net mentioned that to test a landing page, you should send 5 of your friends to the page without telling them what the page is about and have them look it over for about 5 seconds. When they’re done, instead of asking them “Does it look good?”, ask them what they remembered about the page. Don’t get too specific with the question. Just have them spit out key things that they remembered.

If they can’t even tell you what you were selling or what the page was about, then something is very wrong! Their input might be able to help you pinpoint areas of the page that need improvement.

Further testing is easily done with the web statistics I mentioned, but don’t just look at counters. Look at how long your visitors are staying on the page. If you read your own page from top to bottom, how long did it take you? Are your visitors staying for at least that long?

Further reading

This post was just to touch some key points on landing pages and is in no way intended to be 100% thorough! There are countless possibilities to creating, promoting and using landing pages and your results will vary greatly based on your industry and web skills.

<< Back to Whitelisting Forward To Reviews >>

List Building – Whitelisting

· Brandon Hann

Due to the heavy amount of spam that flows through the Internet on a daily basis, it’s important to let your visitors know that they can expect your emails from a particular email address. This means that your visitors must whitelist your website’s email address in order to ensure that your email will arrive at all intended mailboxes. On your end, when your site begins to grow, you may notice an increase in the amount of mail you get and you may want to check out these services to help you get control of your inbox back.

ISIPP

When you get more emails than you can handle, it’s probably because more than half of them are spam messages. While you could go out and purchase some anti-spam software that attaches itself to your inbox, but the problem is that it doesn’t always block spam and it doesn’t always send good email through.

ISIPP can help you better manage your email. This service is geared toward full-fledged businesses as the total monthly costs can reach $300. However, with one of these systems in place, you can practically guarantee that you won’t be getting any more spam!

Habeas (ReturnPath.com)

Habeas was a company founded in 2002 with the intentions of providing information regarding email reputation to over 1 millions email networks and hundreds of ISPs throughout 190 countries. In essence, it certified email as being legit and created a standard for separating good email from spam. The company was eventually bought by ReturnPath.com after being somewhat of a competitor founded in 1999.

The new company has created a much larger email integrity system that also provides Internet Services. At any rate, this topic is more about protecting your own inbox from unwanted spam, but knowing what kinds of things these companies are filtering will allow you to create much better emails so your visitors aren’t required to place your mailing list on a whitelist.

<< Back to Validation Forward to Landing Pages >>

List Building – Validation

· Brandon Hann

Email address validation is much more than simply checking your list for valid email addresses. It also checks for valid headers to ensure that email is being sent and received to the correct mailbox. The last thing you want is your emails being relayed all over the Internet and bounced from server to server without knowing where it’s going. Your users may end up doing their own validation and you might come off as a spammer.

This section groups all of these smaller sections together:

  • Domain Links
  • Whois
  • SPF
  • Privacy Policy

Domain Links

When you create your newsletter or send out emails to your users, the one major thing you want to check for is valid links. This consists mostly of actual page links, but in the least, you want to make sure your domain is pointed right. This will ensure that your users can match your email address to the domain you have listed in the message.

If your links are dead or full of typos, you’re not only reducing your click through rate to zero, but you’re also tampering with your reputation. It should be fairly obvious how to make sure your links are valid, but just to be sure, you should always copy and paste a link directly from the page you want to link to.

Another good thing about always placing domain links in your messages is because if that person forwards your email to other people they think might be interested, you’re going to get instant promotion. This is more true when it comes to producing ebooks that are loaded with backlinks to your site.

Whois

A whois service is one that provide important information regarding owners of domain names. These tools come in handy if you want to know who owns a domain name of one of your users. When you start seeing a particular domain name spamming up the Internet, this step becomes very useful in tracking down who’s behind operations. Here are some free whois checkers starting with my favorite on top:

  1. Who.is – The reason I like this service so much is because it will check every single domain extension in existence. It’s also super easy to remember. The only downside to this site is that it’s loaded with adverstisements, but once you get used to the navigation, you’ll be fine.
  2. FreeWho.com – I use this site half the time, but only because I used to use it all the time until I found the one above. The advantage here is no advertiseing, it’s usually very fast and it too is also easy to remember. But the downside is that it only supports 6 domain extensions (com, net, info, org, biz and us).
  3. GoDaddy Whois – Another great search tool especially for those domains that have special business contact info. GoDaddy formats this information much better than some of the other whois servers. Drawback: you must enter a captcha code unless you’re logged into your own GoDaddy account.

Of course there are thousands and thousands of other whois services out there. As long as you get the info you need, any one of them will work.

SPF

SPF (in email terms) stands for Sender Policy Framework. It is an anti-spam measure that allows domain owners to control the emails that pass through their servers based on domain name. Essentially a server admin can allow only certain hostnames to send email over the web server. This generally stops forged mail from coming through.

In case you didn’t know, most email servers are relatively open. This means that with the right settings, I can send an email off of some other webserver using my own email address. It’s called a relay and it’s like piggybacking. An example would be if I sent an email to your address from my address, but used Yahoo!’s servers to do it instead of yours or mine.

An SPF record created by Yahoo! would prevent me from doing this because my computer (host) is not on their network. It’s certainly not fullproof and it shouldn’t be considered the end-all for spam, but it’s a great start.

I wouldn’t be given SPF justice if I tried to explain everything here, so please check out the SPF group website called OpenSPF. To view more specifics on this technology, check out their FAQ page.

Privacy Policy

Your website should have a Privacy Policy. It should discuss everything you do and don’t do on your site regarding your user’s information. This is important for many reasons, but here are a few you should consider:

  • Covers – It keeps you covered. One example would be if you told your users up front that you would send them 20 emails a day and they still signed up, then they would be liable for the “spam” that they get from you if they wanted to complain.
  • Informs – It informs your users of an potential 3rd party emails that might be coming their way. Let them know if you work with other partners and wish to send them special offers.
  • Protection – It protects your users from themselves. As mentioned above, your users won’t have a leg to stand on if they don’t abide by or understand your policy.
<< Back to Can-spam Act Forward to Whitelisting >>

List Building – Can-Spam Act

· Brandon Hann

Since this is an actual law, I’m going to simply post the text directly from its source at www.ftc.gov below.

Do you use email in your business? The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:

Do you use email in your business? The CAN-SPAM Act, a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.

Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

Each separate email in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000, so non-compliance can be costly. But following the law isn’t complicated. Here’s a rundown of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:

  1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who initiated the message.
  2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
  3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
  4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
  5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future email from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting email from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return email address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
  6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
  7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.

What does this mean?

Quite simple put: DO NOT SPAM. The Internet is already full of junk and you don’t need to add to it by sending out bogus offers and junk mail to people that don’t expect it from you. Worse yet, if your site or your server gets marked as a spammer you can consider your reputation done.

It is hard to bounce back from being labeled a spammer. Don’t do it and if you know of other people doing it, you should report them. You can find more information about this law at the FTC website.

<< Back to Auto Responses Forward to Validation >>

List Building – Auto Responses

· Brandon Hann

I’ve been going over many list building ideas and they all seem to point to the relationship you develop with your visitor using the very first message you send to them. This is called an auto response and just as the name implies, it’s the very first thing your customer reads when your mailing list welcomes them to your site.

There are three sub-sections in this area, but I am grouping them altogether because I’ve touched on each topic in the previous sections and there’s no sense in going over everything twice. However, I did want to show you the correlation between each item, so I’m going to touch on a few more key points with each below.

Content

Your auto response should contain some content. It should not be a simple 1-line message that says “Thank you for signing up!”. While it’s perfectly ok to thank your visitors, you should also include something for them to read. Maybe create a snapshot of what they can expect from your future emails. Here are some ideas:

  • Sample newsletter – If you publish a regular newsletter, send them your previous copy. If you have a few “back issues” send a link to an archive page that allows them to click through and download any past issues they wish to view.
  • Related content – If your blog is relatively consistant, you should have no problem adding links to the auto response that offer various content on your site that you think might interest your visitor. This is also an opportunity to tell people about any other blogs you run.
  • Site updates – If you’ve made changes to your site, you might also want to add this information to your email if you think the changes will benefit a user directly. This one is more for your future emails, but it’s also nice to let the new subscribers know that they can expect to see these items again.

You don’t want to overdo it, so find a perfect balance to try and make that first message very similar to what your next emails will look like. The point is to make you visitors feel welcome, show them what they can expect from you and not overwhelm them at the same time!

Newsletters

I’ve been talking about newsletters throughout this entire section, so you should already have an idea of how these can greatly benefit your site. Here are some tips on how to create awesome newsletters.

  • Design – A lot of people are still getting email in the HTML format and you can use this to your advantage. Try to design an email that somewhat matches your site. I wouldn’t use a lot of images, but a logo and maybe a few borders are ok, but try to get the colors right. This will go a long way for keeping your “image” in your visitor’s heads.
  • PDF – An alternative to fancy HTML emails is to create your newsletter as a PDF file and attach it to a standard email. You want to be careful here because a lot of email programs and services can be set up to remove attachments on delivery. There are tons of viruses running around out there and people are more fearful of receiving emails with attachments. Just inform your visitors before they sign up and they can make arrangements.
  • Content – What you should include in your newsletter is entirely based on who your audience is and what your business is. Ideally you want to add content that will get a response. Simply recycling content from your site won’t help. If someone just wanted updates on that, they could bookmark your RSS feed. Give them some content that’s not on your site. It also helps to add some engagement tools like surveys, contests and free offers.

Offers

It may be hard to understand what an “offer” is. It could be a free item, a download not available to anyone else, access to a special section on your site, the newsletter itself, etc. The idea is to entice your visitors to come back for more. How they come back is not the point. They can come back for your newsletter, your daily blog post or to leave some comments. Here are some offer ideas.

  • Starting offer – Give up something valuable right out the door. Let’s say you’re writing ebooks on how to eat healthier. Your first offer could be something like “Join my site today and receive my free ebook on how to lose 10 pounds in 10 minutes!”. You would then attach this ebook to your auto response for first-time subscribers and you’re done.
  • Special access – Create a small section for your members. Let them feel like they belong to your site and that they have a unique place that they can come to get information tailored for them.
  • Repeat offers – Don’t spam your users, but you should send periodic emails that let them know about special things going on with your site or how they can access new content. Don’t be afraid to offer things. Your users won’t consider it spam if done every once in a while. Remember that they signed up!
  • Partner offers – Try to work with other websites out there to offer each other’s products for discounts if they sign up at either site. You always see John Chow out there partnering with Shoemoney to give price breaks to recommended sign ups.

All of these offers can be included in your auto responses, but should definitely be included in all your future emails. Don’t let any opportunity for informing your subscribers get past you!

<< Back to Follow Up Forward to Can Spam Act >>

List Building – Follow Up

· Brandon Hann

One important thing to remember when communicating with your mailing list is to continuously provide follow up communications. There’s no sense in creating a wonderful newsletter one time, blasting it out to your list and then never speaking to anyone ever again. This might generate some buzz in the beginning, but think about the long term. How could you continue making money online without constant follow up?

You’d be surprised how many websites out there are here one day and gone the next. There are countless people that hear the get rich schemes on late-night tv, pour a little money into them, start a website and gain some traffic, but then give up after realizing this whole process is not as easy as it sounds.

Constant Contact

This term is such an industry standard, that there’s a company named after it! Big companies that sell products that are familiar to everyone in the world practically sell themselves, right? Then why does a large company like Coca-Cola spend millions of dollars every year to send out marketing materials emails to people like you and I?

The reason is because they understand that constant contact with consumers is the only way they will survive! The Internet marketing industry is no different, but this term is much more important here. The competition is much heavier and it’s much harder to get your name out there.

Consistency

One key element to keeping follow ups going smoothly is to maintain consistency with your messages. If you’re mailing list offers a weekly newsletter, send one every week. It’s that simple. The moment you lose this pattern, you’ll see your viewership dwindle.

If you promise specific things like content or free downloads, make sure you keep the same patterns going when performing follow up messages.

My two cents

Don’t lose your current subscribers because of something as simple as follow up. Let them know that you’re always there for them and that they can expect certain things from you, your website and your mailing list.

<< Back to Instant Gratification Forward to Auto Responses >>

List Building – Instant Gratification

· Brandon Hann

Along with enticing your visitors, you need to provide some instant gratification. People like to feel like they’re getting something for giving you their email address. It may be hard to think about what everyone wants and how people repsond to various things, so always put yourself in their shoes.

As yourself these questions: What makes you sign up to a mailing list? Do you like getting free items sent to your inbox for signing up? Would you have signed up had you not gotten a freebie? Of course, your opinion might be different than the next person, but it’ll at least get you thinking about ways to marketing your mailing list.

Instant Gratification

For the most part, getting people to sign up for your mailing list involves enticing them to do so. I covered this topic previously, but instant gratification ties in a little bit. The most important thing to do is make your visitors feel like they actually got something for their time spent on your site. You can accomplish this a few ways:

  • Have an automated, yet informative message delivered to their inbox as soon as they sign up. This message should contain important links on your site, “starter” information about your content and maybe even a free attachement.
  • Send them to a ‘Thank you’ page after signing up which contains something unique that nobody else has access to until they join your mailing list.
  • Consider sending the very last edition of your newsletter to them instantly with links on how to download previous newsletters.

My two cents

Think of it from a sales point of view. How great does it feel to walk out of a Best Buy with your favorite music cd and be able to play it on the way home? It’s that instant gratification that helps justify the purchase. The same goes for mailing lists. You want to make your visitor feel like they got something out of it. But not just something–something great.

As for that image above, I just chose it because I thought it was funny!

<< Back to Enticement Forward to Follow Up >>