In this post I discuss the process of building an email list for affiliate marketing purposes and how to do this the right way.
There are a number of very convincing reasons to build an email list in a niche market, the main reasons I’ve listed below. I also realize that not all niches markets lean well towards email marketing, but I must say the ones that do tend to be the ones I do best in.
4 Benefits of Building an Email List
You have more opportunity to make the initial sale
You have the chance of making repeat sales from each subscriber
You can build up a reputation with your subscribers
By sending your list back to your site it helps with SEO
Most of the above points should be quite obvious to you, however to briefly summarize, if you don’t capture the email then you have only one chance to get the person to take the action you want them to take on your site, and you can’t build a reputation with them as easily, unless they bookmark your site and come back later.
As far as helping with your SEO, by this I mean, search engines like Google can tell if someone comes back to your site, and by having a list you can send them back to your site on a regular basis, as you’ll notice I do with this blog. By doing this you increase your chances of your sites content getting shared on the social sites like Facebook and Twitter, and also it increases the chances of people viewing more content on your domain, which again looks good in the eyes of Google as they’ll view your domain as being high quality.
Tips for Building Your Email List
Now that we’ve discussed the benefits of building an email list, let’s now focus on some ways to gain more leads from your sites.
I like to make sure that my sites are optimized for the opt in. You will notice on this site my home page has a section at the top dedicated to the opt in, so it’s very prominent. I also use a popover to collect emails when the site loads. Some of you might think these popovers are annoying and don’t work. However I tested it on this site and it does increase the opt in rate. I’ve added a screen shot below to demonstrate number of opt ins I get, which I track by using a goal conversion in Google Analytics. The blue arrow is where I added the popover. The opt in rate for the site is currently 4.67% which is not too bad really.
Another place on the site to provide the opportunity to opt in is on the side bar, which I have on all the inner posts of this site, and most sites I own for that matter. Again this is very easy to see, however one thing I will say to critique myself is that I really should have a picture in the opt in box like I do for the home page, as this looks more appealing, so shame on me!!
Yet another place on the site for the opt in is at the end of the post, which you can see if you scroll down. I added this recently, when I realized I was wasting prime real estate at the end of the posts, which is where people look once they’ve finished reading my articles. Some of you might wonder how to do something like that, but be encouraged as it’s not hard to find someone who can do this easily and fast. All I did was hire a WordPress coder over at ODesk.com and he whipped it up in a few hours or less!
Marketing to Your List
Once you’re gaining leads and building up your email list, you obviously want to consider how you’ll be monetizing the leads, well actually you should have that planned before start! The key thing to keep in mind is that you want to provide great free advice for people as much as you possibly can. This can be done in a number of ways, through the emails themselves, or by creating videos for your subscribers to watch on your site. I personally prefer to send my leads back to my sites as much as I can, as I want to train them to go back to my site, as they’ll find more great content on the site which will help them.
In order to collect and manage the emails you send out, you first need an email marketing tool, I use Aweber for my affiliate sites and Mail Chimp for my E-commerce store. There are other alternatives out there, such as Get Response and others, but I have not used them myself.
Ideally you should have at least 12 emails lined up in your auto-responder sequence that will go out to new subscribers automatically upon sign up. Of course they don’t all go out at the same time, instead you stagger them over a period of weeks.
When it comes to the content they you want to send out to the list, I suggest researching the niche so that you can get in the mindset of a typical subscriber, this way you’ll have more of an idea of what they would consider helpful information. Once easy way to do this is to opt in to as many other email lists in the niche already and see what they’re doing. Best to set up a new email for this, subscribe to half a dozen, then after you’ve received a decent amount of emails from them spend some time analyzing their content
Open Rates Tips
If more people open the emails you send out, then you’ll do much better with your list. The key to getting a high open rate on your emails is not what a lot of people teach, of having amazing email titles, that somewhat deceive the subscriber to opening the email. This might work once or twice, but “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” tends to spring to mind when I see people doing. By this I mean, people will soon see you as being deceptive, because when they open the emails and it does not match what you promised in the title, you’ll lose trust with them.
A better approach is to train your list to look out for your emails, and to open them regardless of what the title says. If they get used to getting great content from you, they’ll open more of your emails. Sure you still have to make your titles sound interesting, but just make sure you don’t deceive people, give them what you say you’ll give them. Another thing I see people do is placing the – RE: – at the front of the email title, so it looks like the email is a reply to one the subscriber emailed. The idea is that they’re more likely to open and email if it’s a reply to one they sent. However this is just garbage and not ethical, and there’s no need to do these sneaky tricks if you’re providing good quality information.
Promoting to Your List
Obviously we all want to make money from our email lists, otherwise we probably wouldn’t be building them. When it comes to monetizing your leads, there are usually two extremes I see, most falling into the first category. The first thing I see is people doing is being overly aggressive with the selling, and hammering their leads with stuff to buy but neglecting to work on building trust by providing great free content. Ideally someone on your list should enjoy being on your list and see it as worthwhile even if they never buy anything you recommend as an affiliate.
The other extreme is to be too frightened to promote anything to your list in fear that they might get angry with you for daring to sell them something. For obvious reasons this is not a good approach as you’ll not make much money. When doing email marketing you have to accept the fact that some people simply do not like being sold to, as they have very little trust in people, and they immediately get on the defensive when you try and sell them something. You just have to accept that some people will complain and be horrible no matter how much great free stuff you send them.
The best way to approach selling to your leads is to view your emails like a T.V. show. Great T.V. shows have ad breaks in them all the time, as does radio, magazines etc…. it’s just common marketing practice. So as long as you provide good content mixed in with your promotions, and you make sure your promotions are for good products, then you’re doing the most effective approach.
Tracking Your Opt In Rates
Another thing that you really should be doing is tracking the percentage of people that opt in to your list. This is not hard to do using Google Analytics. All you do is login to your Analytics account, and click the Admin tab in the top right corner. One this page you’ll see a tab ‘Goals’ (see screen shot below). Once you’re in the goal section, all you have to do is set up a new goal. What you want to do is choose a URL Destination type of goal, and then just fill in the fields.
Step 1 – Give the goal a name – Opt Ins
Step 2 – In the URL field place the URL of your thank you page that the person is taken to AFTER they successfully opt in.
Step 3 – You can place a $$ value on each lead if you like
Step 4 – SAVE
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