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Email List Building from Scratch That Sales: How It is Really Done
Email List Building from scratch Strategies
Email campaign marketing is an actionable but cost-effective means of passing across your marketing message/services over to your prospects as well as your current customers, through electronic mail campaigns.
You are very okay if you have an effective email list but no blog rather than the other way round. Email List Building Strategies from scratch is your sure bet for success in any online business model as well as email affiliate marketing.
To start building out an email list, you have to really know what you’re building a long term marketing asset.
And to start this marketing model, discussed here are some of the effective and creative how-tos to build your email list up to 10,000+ from scratch, fast and makes sales from it.
So if you do not have an email list is yet, or your list is short, scanty, or just not on-track with your targeting.
You’re welcome because this post is specifically for YOU.
Keep reading because below is a guide to help you create, grow, and leverage your email list to get sales.
How Does A Good Email List Building Strategy Grow My Blog Into A Business?
You can learn how to drive all the traffic you need. But you only have the shadows of those visitors unless you have their email addresses intact.
According to a research finding, every successful email campaign returns an average value of about $35+ for every $1 cost email campaign.
The same study discovered that email marketing has a higher possibility to get affiliate sales than any social media platform (such as Facebook), and is proven far better than organic traffic.
This clearly tells you that if at all you intend to become wealthy or at least earn a living from any online business, you’ve got to learn from scratch, email list building strategies that really work.
And that you will find here!
Lots of bloggers and marketers have testified of more purchases, recurring referral/affiliate sales, lots of leads, great social sharing, and other financially relevant opportunities.
Isn’t that enough value to start building an email list now!
Surely it is.
The Top Marketing Tools And Systems To Build An Email List
Without quality content, you have nothing to promote that your visitors will find interesting.
Any system or tool will only work with great content in place. What actually boosts your email list growth is your quality blog posts.
So start writing great content.
After you are done, because you have laid the foundation, to set up and manage your email list becomes simple.
Also, publishing and promoting your content (via email and social media), capturing new subscribers, and tracking overall performance also becomes super-easy.
The tools you need are:
- A blog/website
- An email marketing software (autoresponder)
- Web/signup forms
- Social media platforms
- Social media management tools
- Tracking tools
You will surely want to have all of these systems in place before you get going.
The integration of all these marketing tools together will allow you to achieve lots in the shortest possible time.
You will easily create content and promote it effectively through social media, easily get referrals from other digital marketers, bloggers or websites, and seamlessly convert email subscribers into instant customers.
STEP 1 – EMAIL LIST BUILDING FROM SCRATCH
Marketing Tools and SYSTEMS you Need
- Build A Blog (Very Important)
Your blog provides a great way to build a personal relationship with customers and prospects — and to gather their email addresses.
Consistently end blogs with a call to action that encourages readers to sign up for your email messages.
Warmly ask blog visitors to provide an email list and to leave comments. And set up your blog so that visitors can actively opt-out if they don’t want their email address included on your mailing list.
To Build Your Blog You Need One or More of:
WordPress.org (Self-Hosted)
This is my top recommendation to get a blog. You don’t necessarily need to host your blog on your own server. After all, that is why there are lots of top web hosts out there.
WordPress.com
The service will host your
“yourdomain.wordpress.com”
blog for you for free and charge a small premium if you want a “dot-com” domain name.
Weebly, Blogger
- Employ Freebies
That very long exhaustive blog post can also be a good e-book. And it can also help build your email list.
When visitors to your website, ask them to complete your opt-in form to download.
- Optimize Your Website For Opt-Ins
Don’t miss the opportunity to add your visitors to your email list.
Any time a customer or prospect visits your website, it is an indication of their interest. Include email registration forms on every main page of your site (header, footer, sidebar).
- Organize a Giveaway
If you already have some people on your list, prepare a catchy giveaway. Your offer can be in any form, as long as it is value-packed.
- Leverage ‘Email Only’ Specials
Offer rewards. Rewards that are only accessible to subscribers.
- Harness The Power of Social Media
Being active on those very popular social media platforms will help you make new connections, reach more audience and always be in touch with your customers, easily.
Get them closer with trending topics that are of interest to your customers and prospects.
Use social media to encourage people to visit your landing page or one of your cornerstone blog content where they can sign up for your email list.
- Don’t Let Website Visitors Get Away
Setup a lightbox that gets triggered asking for an email address, whenever someone is about to navigate away from your website or blog.
When a visitor goes through an entire post, you really did a good job. Do not give them the chance to go without opting in, grab them one last time before they go.
- Create An Online Community
If are using platforms like WordPress, you can easily add the BuddyPress plugin. The plugin makes it easy to set up a community and foster that interaction between you and your prospective customers.
Every weekend, offer a giveaway of value or fun item (based on your niche). Send it to anyone who signed up for your email campaign newsletter.
Include a sign-up form for your newsletter on every page of the community.
- Also, Embed Signup Forms in your Campaigns
Be sure every email you send has an opt-in form so that anyone who receives one of your emails, maybe through forward from a friend, can sign up directly to be on your list.
- Be Active On Popular Blogs And Forums
Forums like Quora.com and Nairaland.com have a lot to offer to YOU. Not only will you get lists to get easily converts, but you will also get lots of traffic to your blog site.
Social Media Profiles
When it comes to setting up your social media profiles, you should set up one or more, on each of the following social media networks:
Facebook (Business page)
- YouTube
- Word of Mouth Still Works
Over the desk at the office. You can also ask your well-satisfied customers for their email addresses. You also have the opportunity to introduce the services you offer through word of mouth.
When they wait for your emails, they wait expectantly.
- Encourage Mail Forwarding
Include a share button at the footer of each of your campaigns.
With this, your newsletters will easily get shared with friends and family.
When the recipients want to forward your content to someone they think will find it interesting, they will surely see it useful.
Ensure the button directs new signups to a page with your opt-in form.
- Speak Up For Yourself
Talking is also a means of marketing
Offer free consultations in exchange for signing up for your newsletter and emails.
- Share Exclusive Offers
People like the feeling of being in for something special.
Offer your email subscribers something only they can get. It might be a checklist or an e-book.
Always disclose the exclusiveness of the offer to all new visitors to encourage more interests.
- Give Them Subscription Options
People like more choices, so consider creating subscription levels that let people sign up to receive content that’s relevant to them.
For example, if you sell widgets and tax advice, provide three options on your opt-in form that allow users to sign up to receive info about widgets, info about tax advice or both.
Further, customize by allowing them to designate how frequently they’d like to hear from you — weekly, monthly or only when something really special is going on.
People may be more likely to sign up for your email list if they have some control over the content they’ll receive.
- Don’t Woo but Use A Scroll Box
First-time visitors to your website might overlook the call to action to sign up that you may have at the header of your home page (or on all of your every post/pages), but it’s harder to ignore a lightbox or timed pop-up.
Lightbox or pop can be effective for encouraging a user who has already indicated an interest in your content (by staying on the page long enough to scroll and read to an extent).
They will sign up for your email list.
STEP 2 – EMAIL LIST BUILDING STRATEGY
Writing Your First Email And Blog Post
After you’ve got all your tools and foundation elements set up, you’re ready to drive your very first email address and send the first email newsletter promoting your content.
If you don’t have any mails in your list yet, no problems. If you already have an email list from a previous campaign, that’s great too.
But make sure the audience matches with the content you’ll be sending to avoid spamming people, which can hurt even your brightest email list building strategy.
Why? Because our goal is to set up not only a from scratch email list building strategy but a habit and SYSTEM for growing your email list the best way.
So, the email campaign you’ll be sending across should be much like a featureful summary, enticing people to click through to read the full blog posts.
- Optimizing For A Higher Email Opt-In Rate
Include more forms in the right places on your blog (top, bottom, right-sidebar, about page)
Add a landing page to your blog or website focused on your newsletter as the sole call to action
Set up a well-timed or action triggered pop-up
Write simple, clear, compelling copy around your pop-up, landing page, and on-page opt-in forms that explain the benefits and incentives for subscribing.
Consider requiring one two-form fields (email and first name only)- remember that we are learning about from scratch email list building strategy that converts even from the start.
Getting the first name together with the email address will help your mails get right into their inbox folders and not SPAM.
STEP 3 – EMAIL MARKETING SOFTWARE FOR YOU
(Auto-responders)
An autoresponder is a key ingredient in this system that helps convert some percentage of your email list subscribers into leads or customers.
The reason why prospects don’t buy or become leads is usually one or more of the following:
Problems
- Your offer does not solve a problem for anybody
- Trust is not yet established
- The description of your offer is not yet clear
Solutions
What you’re offering doesn’t solve a problem for them
If number one is true, that’s something an autoresponder cannot help you overcome. Only this post can. And the solution is: a product or service that doesn’t solve someone’s problem is a zero multiplier.
The value of what you’re offering is unclear & They don’t trust you.
Autoresponder is extremely effective at addressing the value of what you’re offering is an unclear problem. Since it teaches something specific and actionable, making obvious the value and benefits at first sight.
It makes more sense when it is a mutual relationship. They put in their time and trust and you give them value.
They will be even happier to put in more time and money.
STEP 4 – MAKE THE OFFER AND ALWAYS FOLLOW-UP
For A List That Really Sales
The way you present your offer(s), and continue to follow-up is critical to your success.
The best time to make an offer for your product or service is at the end of an autoresponder after you’ve delivered value, as I explained above.
For Email Marketing Software, Here’s What I Recommend:
Mailchimp –
This is the most affordable option on the market today and their email template design editor is quite feature-rich. It also has a drag and drop interface.
Their major downsides to Mailchimp are (a) they’re terrible, robotic customer support and (b) it feels like a lot more steps than are necessary to send a newsletter or to set up an autoresponder.
Aweber – They offer a paid trial starting at $1 and many people seem to like their auto-responder. When I last used their service, I found their interface a bit confusing.
One plus is they’ve got a nice email opt-in form builder.
But this is less important when you consider that…
Many times having a dedicated service for hosting and customizing your web forms is more effective than making the forms yourself with HTML code or using the forms generated for you by your email marketing software.
For this reason, I use and recommend Wufoo, which gives you complete control over your form’s design and also provides some very nice tracking statistics and third-party integrations.
The form stack is also pretty good. They are the main competitor to Wufoo in this space.
For Social Media Marketing Tools
There are hundreds of social media management tools out there right now. I personally believe the best ones are:
Buffer – This tool will automatically try to share the posts you pop into its content feed. It shares them with your connected social profiles/pages at the appropriate time, thereby leveraging exposure.
Hootsuite – Hootsuite is managed conversations pretty good and it requires lots of multi-tasking, but it worths the work.
Note that Hootsuite is free with the basic features.
Tracking
It is useful to know the number of visits to your blog that really opted in to your email list.
Just as important it is, to know how many of those new signups converted to customers, sales and leads. It also pays if you can know when these events occur and how often.
For this, you should employ Google Analytics and set up goal tracking.
The idea is that whenever you receive an email opt-in or purchase the user will be redirected to a “thank you” page.
Whenever someone arrives on this page it’s recorded as a conversion in Google Analytics page, since no other page’s link to that thank you page.
Google Analytics Goal Tracking
When you think you’ve got all the initial elements setup, make sure to test each one to ensure there are no “cracks” in your foundation.
Test out all your forms, send yourself a test newsletter, post some messages on your social media profiles, and visit the various pages of your blog or website.
If you want a faster route to building a large email list, then you’ve got to learn the Law of Distribution and how to build marketing partnerships.
There is no silver bullet to growing your business, but building an audience by building an email list is the most effective in terms of ROI and cost.
To get started costs little or nothing except your time.
All of the tools and resources discussed above will help you save time and get growing faster, with a very strong foundation.
If you walk away with one thing from reading this article, it’s the importance of developing disciplined habits like writing consistently.
Building an email list takes time and is critical to marketing success in the digital age.
With an email list, affiliate marketing becomes a passive income stream.
What tactics do you use to collect more emails?
What are some questions you have about growing and nurturing relationships with your email list?
Please do well to share them in the comment box below.
