In a world where people are bombarded with emails every day, many internet marketers are wondering whether it’s still worthwhile building a list.
Should you be collecting email addresses, or not?
On the negative side:
1. It’s getting harder and harder to get your emails delivered to the inbox.
2. People are – in general – receiving more and more emails on a daily basis.
3. It’ hard work to build a list, and write useful emails.
Note: All of these can be addressed to improve the odds in your favor.
However, on the positive side…
1. Email is still the most “one on one” form of communication. When someone reads an email from you, you don’t have to compete with a multitude of adverts, or other people crowding his or her (social network) wall. You have – quite literally – their undivided attention.
It today’s world with all of the “noise” (marketing messages) we are constantly being bombarded with, that’s worth a lot.
2. The input versus return (time effort or spending) is better than anything else. Once you have someone on your list, you can benefit from their subscription in multiple ways – for as long as they remain a subscriber. You can sell stuff to them, you can ask them to do surveys to help you decide what to offer them next, and you can send them to new blog posts, which some of them will share – to bring you even more traffic, signups and sales.
You may want to do the math around this one. Just imagine – instead of losing 99% of your visitors forever, you can (for instance) retain just 5% of them on your list. So – for every 1,000 visitors, you may have had 100 clicking through to a product, and made one sale.
Or – if you built a mailing list – you could have 50 new subscribers on your list, and even if you only sell one item per month to your list, you stand to make roughly twelve times as many sales over a period of one year – from the SAME 1000 people that originally visited your blog.
3. Once your list grows into larger numbers, you become eligible for doing joint ventures. This means that you will move into a position where you will firstly be paid better commissions, but secondly – and more importantly – you will be able to partake in product launches limited to short time frames.
These launches are often by internet marketers of high authority, and the fact that the launch is limited to (for instance) a few days or a week, means that the combination of (the product owner’s) authority and scarcity will land you more sales (relative to your number of subscribers) than a normal promotional email would.
4. Even if you don’t feel like sending regular promotional emails of you own, you can still sell solo ads (you allow other people to send ads to your list, and they pay per click you send them). This alone can land you a nice amount of money every month – consistently.
5. Once you have your own mailing list, you have a platform of people you can communicate with, and a reasonable percentage of them will value your opinion and what you tell them. As such, if you get to the point where you start creating your own products, you will have the perfect platform to not only launch it to, but also to get input from while you develop the product.
Now – regarding addressing those negatives:
1. To maximize deliverability – firstly, use a reputable autoresponder, and use an email address from your own domain. Secondly, there are a number of online tools to check your e-mail’s “spam score” – check every email before you send it, and keep that score as low as you can.
2. People are getting more and more emails every day – so just be sure to send yours consistently. Yes, if you can, and your niche allows for it, you can send emails every day. If not, make a point of it to send your emails on the same day(s) of the week, so that your loyal readers will be on the lookout for your emails. In addition to that, if your emails are a few days or a week apart, add a “teaser” about what’s coming in the next email – to generate curiosity.
3. Regarding hard work – yes. It’s hard work, especially at the start. But as long as you offer people a decent reason to join your list, and make it as easy as possible for them (prominent placement of the optin form), you can convert as many of them as possible (into subscribers). As for hard work writing emails – if you are going to send people to blog posts (where you offer them something), the email can be simple and short. If you want to do a follow-up email series, you can write them as blog posts first – and then add them to your autoresponder sequence later on.
In conclusion:
When you compare the positives and negatives of building a mailing list, the massive benefits are obvious. In fact, it is what we call – in internet marketing…
“a no-brainer.”