DKSP EP10: Email Marketing Best Practices for Building and Managing a Responsive List
Summary: <br> “The Money is in the List” is something that you hear the moment you jump into internet marketing and it follows you whenever and wherever you go.<br> And the fact that every experienced internet marketer tells you that the money is indeed in the list, goes to establish the fact that your list is your biggest asset and that it is the most important thing in your business.<br> When I started my business, I never really cared about a list. Traffic generation was simple and Google Adwords and other ads networks were also very cheap. I built a lot of micro niche websites and I was able to generate huge amounts of traffic to these sites. I made and these sites did extremely well. But the biggest mistake that I did was – not build and email list. I never really cared about the “Money is in the list” thing because I was making money and that was all I cared. The next couple of years saw a lot of things change on the internet. The traffic to my sites dropped because they were not optimized and some of them did not even follow the guidelines from Google. Some got penalized and yet others dropped of the rankings. As traffic dropped, the money went down. And finally one day, by the time I could realize what was happening, pretty much all my sites were down.<br> I am sure you don’t want to be in that situation.<br> With the changing internet marketing world and the difficulty in generating traffic and visitors to your content and offers, the efforts that you are putting into generating every single visitor is huge. At the same time, the value of every single visitor coming to your website has increased. If you are not able to capture this visitor in the form of an email address, then you are losing a lot of money.<br> If you haven’t yet started building your list, then start right away. Don’t waste time on planning and designing. Just launch it.<br> Keep in mind that you will need some good and reliable tools in your list building efforts. I recommend using Aweber for your auto-responder. If you are looking for a self-hosted solution, you can use IMSC rapid mailer and use Amazon SES services to send your email. For building beautiful and high converting optin pages and landing pages, I recommend, Thrive Content Builder and Thrive leads. They are cost-effective and has a lot of features as well.<br> Now, you have built your list. What next?<br> Email Marketing Best Practices<br> Building your list is important. It is equally important to manage it as well. One of the biggest mistakes that most people do is to ignore the list after you have built it.<br> You don’t want a dead list where your subscribers don’t respond at all. Neither do you want to be building a list where your subscribers are unsubscribing faster than the rate at which they are subscribing.<br> These 4 email marketing best practices that we are going to discuss today will help you build and manage an email list that is responsive and at the same time profitable.<br> The Confirmation pages –<br> I see a lot of people using the default subscription confirmation pages, which we also call the “thank-you” page, for the optin forms. These pages are hosted by the auto-responder services and have nothing but a message to the subscribers to confirm their email. This is sheer waste of a chance to better interact with you new subscribers. Build a custom thank-you page and give it your branding. You might want to personalize it while telling them who you are are. You might want to add a photograph of yours so that they know who you are. I prefer using this same photograph in almost all of my emails.<br> People digest things better if presented visually. Rather than remembering my name, it will be easier for them to relate to my photograph. And after they have seen it a few times, they will easily remember my name.<br> The Confirmation email –<br>
