Email List Management – the key to online business success

If you’re like me, email list management is something you’ve been avoiding. I spent years trying to run my online business without taking the time to properly capture and manage a list of qualified leads.

In hindsight I see what a mistake that was, and it isn’t nearly as difficult as I had always imagined. In fact, there’s a definite science to building a quality email list. Once you learn it, optin email marketing is pretty straight forward.

Email list management starts by building a quality list of customers. In the internet marketing world, we call these “qualified leads.” It’s easy to collect names (and emails) online, but in this case, “size” doesn’t always matter. For instance, if I sell golf equipment, then 10 leads who are avid golfers might be worth more than a hundred leads who are, say, general sports enthusiasts.

Once you’ve collected qualified leads, proper email list management is crucial. There are three important aspects to proper email list management. Botch any of them, and you’ll see that great list of potential customers vanish overnight.

Those 3 things, in order, are:

1. Build Trust
2. Only Promote Quality
3. Maintain the Right Mix

Building Trust

Getting people to sign on to an email list is not always easy these days. We’ve all just about had it up to here with email spam. Personally, I still sign up to some lists, but you’ve really got to give me a good reason to give up my email address to you. More importantly though, if you annoy me with your emails, I’m gone!

As a list owner, you want to avoid losing your potential customers before they get a real chance to know you and see the value that being on your list has for them. So you need to start by doing one thing … building a relationship.

Rule #1 … Don’t be in a hurry to sell something. Instead, spend some time communicating in a non-threatening way with your new “potential” customer. One of the best things to do is to give them free stuff. People love free stuff! Email newsletters are good (if they aren’t just product brochures and sales pitches). Special reports, ebooks, tips and advice, and links to articles and websites of interest to your customers are all great ways to show them that you’re trying to help them, and not just trying to sell to them.

After someone has received a bunch of helpful information from you, then they will start to see you as a trustworthy, credible resource, and be much more open to buying something that you recommend. Of course, how long it takes to build that rapport depends on both you and your market.

Only Promote Quality Products

Ok, you’ve build up some trust and now you’d like to try and make a sale. The first thing to ensure is that what you’re selling is worth every penny and more! There is no bigger way to waist all that hard relationship-building work you did than to sell something that lets your customer down.

Rule#2 … Never promote junk! If you sell someone something of dubious quality or value, you can be sure they’ll never buy anything from you again … and remember that word gets around too!

Maintain the Right Mix

I’ve seen so many internet marketers who have worked so hard to build their list, literally kill them overnight. Why? They either got lazy or greedy, or both. In order to keep your potential customers responsive to your offers, you have to continue to take care of them. You can’t just keep hitting them with one sales offer after another without every doing anything else for them.

Rule#3 … Don’t get lazy and don’t oversell!

Remember in the beginning? You worked so hard building that trust, giving your potential new customer all sorts of great stuff? Don’t fall into the trap that so many web marketers do … thinking “ok, I’ve got a nice big list now, so all I have to do is send out promotions and money will just keep flowing in.” The biggest way to KILL your list is to do nothing but send them sales pitches.

Effective email list management means 1. Knowing how frequently to contact them (once a week? Twice a week? Twice a month?) 2. Maintaining the right mix of free stuff (downloads, tips and useful information) and product promotions. Ever market and every list is different, and what that “right mix” is for yours will only come through careful experimentation.

Does maintaining that mix sound like a lot of work? Well, it doesn’t have to be. Read the next article, The Automatic Responder – Putting your list management on autopilot …

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Mailing list management is easy with FusionHQ’s free list management software …

Click Here for more information about FusionHQ

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Part 1: The Five Step Sales Process
Part 2: The Squeeze Page – the first step in list building
Part 3: Email List Management – your key to online business success
Part 4: Automatic Responder – why you need to use them