Anyone who works online knows the importance of building up a profitable mailing list. When done properly it is your go to for any new product or service launches as well as a perfect channel to promote sales and specials online. The art of building a profitable mailing list is to make sure it continues to grow day in and day out.
Choosing the Right Sign Up Incentive – The first stage of building your mailing list is choosing the right incentive, or ‘ethical bribe', to offer people in exchange for joining your list. This step is all about getting permission to follow up with your potential customers over time. There are lots of options you can choose from – the key is to make sure it's something that's compelling. For most ecommerce businesses, this is usually an immediate discount or the promise of getting future discounts and information about special, members-only sales delivered by email.
Creating High Converting Landing Pages – Once you’ve decided on your incentive, your next job is to create a landing page – sometimes called a squeeze page. A squeeze page is simply a page on your website that is 100% focused on getting people to subscribe to your mailing list.
Placing Strategic Opt-in Forms – Aside from your landing page, the most important element for driving opt-ins on your website is strategically placed opt-in forms. Opt-in forms are just a fancy word for the email sign-up boxes. Popular email marketing software solutions will have handy opt-in form generators that will provide you with a snippet of code that you can just drag and drop into various places around your site.
Staying in Touch – As you start growing your mailing list, you need to make sure you're staying in touch with your subscribers. The last thing you want is to build up a great list, not email them for months, and then have them either not open your emails or unsubscribe because they’ve forgotten all about you and why they joined in the first place.
Bringing it All Together – When it comes down to it, building your list is all about getting permission and providing value. To get permission, think about what incentives or high quality content you can create in order to drive sign-ups. Once you've got people joining your list, focus on sending your subscribers a balanced mix of more high quality content with occasional sales and promotional messages mixed in.
Do you think other important steps should be added when trying to optimize your mailing list online? Please share them in the comments below.
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