E-mail marketing is hands down the
most powerful and effective form of
online marketing. Nothing comes close.
Seriously. Even search marketing with
all its hype and tried-and-proven
success can’t even hold the candle to
just how effective list marketing can
be. It’s easy to see why, survey after
survey, marketing firms keep putting e-mail marketing at or near the top of their advertising preferences. Here are the reasons why.
Through e-mail marketing, you can get in front of the eyeballs of your audience members anytime anywhere. That’s right. You can be at a beach in the Bahamas somewhere writing an e-mail update. Plug that in to your e-mail service provider and your audience, regardless of where they may be in the world and regardless of what they’re doing, are sure to get your e-mail. After all, most people check their e-mail inboxes. Isn’t that awesome?
This enables you to sell more products. Since you have a de facto relationship with people who voluntarily got on your mailing list, you are able to keep the conversation going. You don’t get just one bite at the apple in trying to get list members to buy. Every time you send an update, you get a chance to convert some of your audience members into buyers.
Through e-mail, you also get to keep in touch with the needs of your audience. It’s like you’re plugged in to what they need, what they’re looking for and the problems that they face. After all, that’s the reason why they joined your mailing list in the first place. They’re looking for solutions and answers that your list can provide.
This enables you to keep a steady flow of traffic to your blog or online store. Now, this traffic may not convert right there and then but the fact that it is constant enables you to get many bites at the apple. You don’t just get a one-shot chance at converting online traffic. That traffic can come back again and again with each and every update that you spend.
If you’ve heard great things about social media, you might want to think again. Social medial marketing faces many challenges because of the evolving algorithms of platforms like Facebook. As the years go by, Facebook is sending less and less organic traffic. Even if you have a big Facebook fan page with a gigantic following, you’d be lucky for your page posts to reach a tiny fraction of your following. It’s getting worse and worse with each passing year.
With e-mail marketing, you have a higher chance of reaching your complete mailing list instead of being at the mercy of these changing social media platform algorithms. It really all boils down to how well you write your headlines and how targeted your list recruitment is. If you did your homework and you played your cards right, you stand to reach a much larger percentage of your list audience. This is not the case with the typical Facebook fan page.
Finally, with your own e-mail list, you stay in control of your access to your audience. You can even download your list members’ e-mail addresses as you move from one e-mail service provider to the next. This list is your asset. It’s not going away anytime soon.
Given all these amazing reasons, it’s no wonder lots of old-school online marketers say “The money is in the list.”
But wait... If you have just jumped in with both feet into e-mail marketing, I’ve got some bad news for you. You’re probably going to fail. There, I said it. You can fail by:
Putting up a list but it doesn’t attract many members.
Attracting enough people to your list but most don’t open your e-mails.
Building a huge list of people with many opening your e-mails - but most don’t buy anything.
The sad reality is that the vast majority of people who try their hand at e-mail marketing have very little to show for it. They spend money every single month on their e-mail service provider only to come up empty handed.
Failure in e-marketing comes in many different forms because people try many different things. Marketers also have many different circumstances and priorities. However, they all lead to the same place: very low to no income!
If you want to get into e-mail marketing and enjoy the amazing passive income it can produce for you, you are reading the best book to get your started. Seriously. No other book comes close because almost all other books out there try to pump you up about e- mail marketing. They get you all hyped up but they leave you high and dry. How come? They do not step you through a systematic and methodical way of doing modern e-mail marketing.
Let me tell you the old tricks no longer work. Get rid of them. Don’t get excited by them. Otherwise, you are just setting yourself up for failure. Unfortunately, almost all the other e-mail list marketing books out there keep rehashing the same stuff.
In this guide, you are going to get just what you need to succeed in the highly competitive yet also highly lucrative world of e-mail marketing. Put simply, I will step you through the process of putting up a modern e-mail list - one that is engineered to succeed from the ground up. I have trimmed all the fat off. There is no fluff in this book. Instead, you’re going to get clear, easy-to-understand concepts that you need to wrap your mind around for you to be successful.
If you have a fuzzy idea of who your target audience is, you are going to fail with e-mail marketing. You really are. You might as well give up now if you are chasing after some sort of vaguely defined market.
Audience identification is crucial for niche
list marketing. You cannot just target
everybody. You have to drill down to a
specific population of people who are
trying to solve a fairly narrow set of
problems. This is how you define their needs. By directly addressing the needs of these individuals, conducting enough consumer research and speaking their language, you would be able to convert a high percentage of them from website visitors to list members to product buyers.
It is crucial that you go from raw traffic to dollars in your bank account. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time. All the traffic in the world is not going to add one red cent to your bank account unless you target a specific niche market and give its audience the solutions that they are looking for.
Finding the Right Audience
So, how do you know which audience you should target? There are many different audiences out there. All of them cluster around a specific range of needs or problems. Well, it all boils down to commercial value of those needs. There are many problems out there that people are not going to pay top
dollar to solve. Sure, people are looking for the right DVD set of headphones but there is a limit to people’s budgets. Different problems have different priorities.
You need to find a niche that has enough commercial value. One way to estimate this is to use Google AdWords Keyword Planner and do cost-per-click research on keywords related to your niche. If you notice that advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money per click on those keywords, then you’re in a good spot. Chances are there is enough commercial demand for that niche. People are willing to pay a significant amount of money to solve problems related to your niche.
It’s also important to make sure that you are targeting a niche that is big enough. Sure, there are lots of advertisers willing to pay a tremendous amount of money for “structured settlement” keyword traffic. We’re talking about more than $20 per click. The problem is the volume of searches for that niche is actually quite low.
Make sure the niche you are targeting has enough demand as indicated by Google Keyword Planner. This tool not only tells you how much advertisers are willing to pay per click but it will also give you an estimate of the volume of searches for keywords related to that niche. You’re looking for a nice combination of decent commercial value with decent traffic volume.
Finally, you should also pay attention to competition levels. If you pick a niche that is extremely competitive with gigantic brands monopolizing pretty much all the search volume for keywords related to that niche, you probably are going to have a tough time making inroads. You should look for a niche that is somewhat competitive but no so competitive that there’s absolutely no space for newcomers.
How do you do competitive research? Very simple. Just get all the Google Keyword Planner tool keywords for the niches you are interested in. Plug them one by one into Google’s search box and you will see the number of pages competing for those keywords. This should give you a clear enough idea of how competitive certain niches are. At the end of this process, you should have a short list of niches that have decent commercial appeal and enough search volume every single month.
Consider these three factors:
Find Your Customers Online
I’ve got some great news for you.
Regardless of the niche that you
selected, chances are very high your
customers are already online. You just
need to find them. This doesn’t mean
that there is a dedicated website that
caters specifically to your niche
audience. Instead, your niche audience members may simply be asking questions related to your niche. Maybe they’re sharing infographics or photos and videos related to your niche.
Whatever the case may be they’re already online exchanging content. Your job is to find all these areas online and listen to them. That’s the main key you need to do for consumer intelligence.
Pay attention to the words that they’re using. Pay attention to the solutions that they’re already talking about. Understand the shortcomings of the solutions people are already aware of.
If you spend enough time on these online platforms like forums, message boards, Facebook groups, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Reddit, subreddits and Quora or other question-and-answer platforms, you should have a clear understanding of who your audience members are and their expectations.
You should also have a fairly clear idea of who your competitors are. I’ve got some bad news for you. Regardless of your niche, you probably already have competitors. This is not
depressing news. Instead, you could use this to your advantage. Find the competitors competing for your target audience. Create a long list of them. Look for both direct and indirect competitors.
Reverse Engineer Your Competitors
Once you have a clear idea of who your competitors are, reverse engineer what they’re doing. How do they speak to the needs of the people you’re trying to reach? What do their websites look like? What kind of social media accounts do they have? What kind of content do they use for marketing purposes? How are their pages designed? You have to keep these and other related questions in mind as you research one competitor after another.
After you’ve spent some time asking these questions and processing your competitors in a systematic and methodical way, you should have a clear idea of what your niche “industry standard” is. You would quickly find out that your niche competitors tend to look alike. They tend to address the same problems. They tend to have the same solutions. Their social media accounts tend to look similar to each other.
Be mindful of this. Look at these similarities and understand that this is the “industry standard” in your niche. Whatever website or social media account or mailing list you come up with must fit the industry standard.
Please understand that when you figure out the industry standard in your niche, it just gives you a place to start. You shouldn’t start and end there. If anything, it just gives you a head start instead of fumbling around to come up with the right squeeze page or mailing list marketing materials for your niche. It gives you a place to start.
What “Industry Standard” Item Should You Look For
Pay attention to your competitor’s squeeze page layout. This is the signup page your competitors use to get their target audience members to sign up for their mailing list. Pay attention to how they lay out these pages.
What kind of pictures do they use? What kind of text do they present? How did they format their text? Do they tell stories? Do they show videos?
Next, pay attention to their sales funnel layout. Your competitors have a standard way of getting people to sign up to their mailing list and also selling those list members to a wide range of products and services. Be aware of how they do this. How do they step prospects through the sales process?
Understand that their ultimate goal is to get list members to buy something. Try to figure out how their sales funnel is laid out and how it seeks to convert list members. Pay attention to the kind of freebies or incentives your competitors give out to get people to sign up to their mailing list.
Do they use cheat sheets or short reports? Do they give away full books? Do they attract list members by offering a special video? Do they promise some sort of insider information that people have to sign up for to access?
Be aware of the specific “industry standard” digital incentive your competitors give out. You’re going to have to offer the same. You can tweak this later on, but you need to start out with this type of incentive.
Subsequently, pay attention to the updates that they send. Do they talk about news and events? Do they seek to teach e-mail recipients a wide range of solutions?
Finally, pay attention to the stuff that they are promoting in their e-mails. You can bet that your competitors are sending out e-mails intended to make them money. If you click on the right link, it would lead you to a product they hope you would buy. The same goes with services.
Pay attention to these. Identify the most common products that they push with their updates. Again, this forms the “industry standard” in your niche. Look for the industry standard because this is where you will start. It doesn’t mean you have to start and end your e-mail list marketing activities with the industry standard. Instead, it just gives you a tremendous head start because you’re not fumbling around coming up with your own squeeze page and mailing list strategy which might fail.
Instead, by going with the tried and proven industry standard, you can improve on mailing list practices that already exist. You just need to perfect whatever it is your competitors are already doing.
This step is crucial. In fact, it’s so
important that it only comes second in
importance to Step #1. You have to
have the right technology workhorse to
ensure your mailing list business is a
success. You have to understand that
you cannot do e-mail marketing
manually. It’s physically impossible. Even
if you have a list of only 500 people,
sending e-mail updates to those people one by one is going to drive you nuts.
You have to sign up to the right e-mail marketing platform that would automate all mail delivery. You might think that this is a pretty simple process. It isn’t. It’s very hard to manually keep tract of people signing up and unsubscribing to your list. You may be able to get away with it if you only have a handful of members, but once your mailing list starts to grow, it can easily get out of hand.
Pay attention to key common features of e-mail marketing platforms:
Automated Autoresponder Sequence
Regardless of the platform you go with, they must have a way of enabling you to schedule e-mails to send to each and every one of your list members on a scheduled basis.
For example, if somebody joined your list on Monday, they get the e-mail update for Day 1. On Tuesday, they get the e-mail
update for Day 2. When another person signs up for your mailing list on Friday, they get Day 1’s update and so on and so forth.
In other words, your mailing list platform must be automated and powerful enough to market to all your list members on an individually scheduled basis. This is crucial if you want to use your autoresponder e-mail sequence to turn your list members into buyers.
Powerful Universal Update Features
Sometimes, you need to send an update to all your mailing list. For example, if you’re holding a sale or you have some important news to share, you need to be able to reach everybody at one time. Your mailing list platform must be able to deliver your e-mail to its recipients. Otherwise, it’s failed at its job.
Unfortunately, not all e-mail marketing platforms do a good job in delivering your e-mail.
Four powerful players stand out: AWeber, GetResponse, MailChimp and Constant Contact stand out amongst the rest. These services have a solid-gold reputation for getting past spam filters. They are so trusted by mail services like Gmail and Yahoo Mail that their e- mails usually get through.
Deliverability is crucial. Regardless of whether you are sending autoresponder text or you’re sending a late-breaking update.
Insist on E-Mail Templates
mail design each and every time. Others tend to push you to using text-only e-mails.
Pay Attention to Squeeze Page or E-Mail Signup Page Builders
Let’s face it. Most list marketers are not
very good at web design and coding
pages. Unfortunately, if you want to
come up with an online form, you have
to know some basic web design and
coding. Thankfully, some platforms have
ready-made e-mail list signup templates.
You can just make certain changes to
graphics, color and font as well as the text of these pages.
GetResponse is far and away the best choice for ready-made e-mail signup forms or squeeze pages. It really all depends on your needs. If you are looking for something that looks very professional and is easy to use, GetResponse is probably a good choice. If you know your way around HTML, you probably would be better off with AWeber or MailChimp.
Consider Alternatives to E-Mail List Recruitment Page Designs
Sometimes you just don’t have the time to compose e-mails. To make things easier on yourself, you probably would want to use a template. This is an e-mail that’s been formatted a certain way.
There are e-mail systems that are purely template driven like AWeber. Others expect you to come up with your own e-
One alternative you can try for building your own squeeze pages is a service called LeadPages. This online service enables you to use a two-step process to get people to sign up to your mailing list. This is a very powerful alternative to how e-mail lists are normally presented on a page.
Usually, people load a page, and they would see the e-mail form where they can enter their e-mail address and their name. They would then click a submit button, and they would get their freebie.
The problem with this one-step layout is that it doesn’t really qualify people based on how eager they are for whatever it is you are offering to give your page visitors in exchange for the e-mail address. Maybe they’re just curiosity seekers. Perhaps they just want the freebie. Most likely, they didn’t read the e-mail form correctly.
Whatever the case may be they enter their e-mail address, and you end up with a list squatter. This is a person who just stays on your list without reading your e-mails or, worse yet, buying anything.
LeadPages solves this problem by enabling you to use a two-step opt-in system. People have to click an ad link to end up at a page where they can actually enter their e-mail address.
By using this two-step process, only truly motivated or genuinely interested list members are attracted by your offer. Sure, this may result in a lower subscription, but you have more peace of mind as to the quality of list members you will attract.
Let's get one thing straight. People are not going to sign up to your mailing list just because. It is not like they don't have anything else better to do. You have to give them a compelling reason to sign up for your mailing list. There has to be something in it for them.
This is where incentives come in.
You're going to give away something
for free, which adds value to your potential list members' lives. They would look at these incentives as "ethical bribes". You're bribing them to join your mailing list. It's not enough to promise that you're going to give them great information regarding the niche they are interested in. Anybody can make that claim. To create the perception of value in the minds of your potential list members, you have to step up and give them a very powerful incentive.
Now the question becomes: what kind of incentive should you offer? The bad news is that it depends. I wish I could tell you that there is some sort of one-size-fits-all or universal answer to this question. There isn't. The winning incentive varies from niche to niche. It also varies based on the sources of traffic that you have.
Accordingly, you have to play it by ear. Ideally, you should offer the 10 common types of incentives that I'm going to lay out below. You should offer them in sequence. Once you've gone through all 10, look through your conversion records and pick the incentives that got the most signups. That's the best way to know.
Anybody could tell you that you should give away booklets or simply update people, but that's assuming too much. People who are interested in your niche might prefer something else. The best way to find the right incentive is to simply go through all 10 common incentives and pick the best performing type. Once you found the highest converting type, then you can optimize as to which specific giveaway of that type works the best.
I hope we're clear here. You have to go through this list. There are 10 common types of incentives you can offer. Here they are.
Topic-based email series
This incentive spoonfeeds list members answers to the common problems they may have. The value add is the content they receive in their emails. People who sign up for this type of mailing list incentive expect that you would be sending them pre-programmed emails that would step them through common problems associated with the niche
they're interested in. You would start at the beginning, then teach them a few things. After which, you then send another email which teaches the recipient another set of solutions, so on and so forth.
This incentive gives you a tremendous opportunity to build expertise. You're not laying out all your expertise at once. Instead, you are sharing to the recipient certain solutions, which gives them enough time to implement until the next set of solutions come.
Cheat sheet
A cheat sheet is just one simple document. It may be a one-page item or it can run several pages. Whatever form it takes, it is topic-based. A cheat sheet just focuses on one specific topic and breaks it down. Cheat sheets are very popular because they tend to highlight easy-to-know or easy-to- overlook information.
People are constantly looking for "stripped down" info. They don't have time. They just want to scan something that would give them the right answers as quickly as possible. They are also looking for something that spells out the answer in the simplest terms. It's easy to see the value of cheat sheets. It's no surprise that this form of mailing list incentive is quite popular.
Template giveaway
Templates are very popular because people do not want to screw around with solving problems from scratch. They'd rather work with an existing template that they can just plug in specific information into. Of course, template giveaways don't work across the board. While you can probably get a lot of subscribers for resume templates, you probably
won't get as many takers if the template addresses something that is so specific or so abstract that it is not really all that relevant. Templates can work, but it all depends on your mailing list's niche.
Complete starter kit
You can compile all the solutions to a specific problem and give people access via an email link. Typically, this would
involve people signing up to your squeeze page and being redirected to an online resource or PDF file that compiles all the content the reader needs to solve a problem.
This content can take many different forms. It can be a series of videos, audio files or links to PDF's or even other websites. The big value-add here is the fact that you are compiling all these answers and putting them in one place. It solves the problem the user has in a very comprehensive way.
Step-by-step plan
Oftentimes, when people are faced with a problem they simply do not know where to start. Even if they have a fairly general idea of the solution, they don't have a plan to attack the problem in a comprehensive and clear way. A step-by-step plan enables you to guide the reader to solve the problem effectively.
Case Studies
Everybody likes a good story. If anything, most people would like to see stories involving changes to other people’s lives before and after something happened. These personal stories draw people in. They are able to connect on a person-to- person basis.
You can use these case studies to not only
build up your mailing list but also to upsell whatever service or product your company is promoting. You can even upsell members who sign up to your mailing list for case studies to other mailing lists. The possibilities are endless. Case studies work in most niches but this is not a slam dunk across the board. Keep that in mind.
Latest and Greatest News
This is my personal favorite. You have to understand that when you’re giving away some sort of “bribe” for somebody to join your mailing list, you run the risk of attracting people who only sign up for the bribe. It doesn’t matter whether you’re giving out software, cheat sheets, booklets, books, templates, or whatnot. There’s a
chance that your mailing list might be filled with list squatters. This is the kind of risk you run.
On the other hand, if you promote the updates that people would get by signing up to your list, there’s a strong chance that the people ending up on your list would actually read your emails. They will not be list squatters who ignore the updates that you send. As you probably already know, you will only make money off your mailing list when people actually bother to open and read them.
Showcase the latest and greatest news in your niche. Make the value of this information clear to potential list members. Unfortunately, this is not a strong value proposition for all niches. If you run a news website for a very specific niche, a newsletter would be a great way to build up your mailing list.
On the other hand, if you are in a niche where developments tend to come very slowly or people have a fixed idea as to what their problems are and these don’t seem to change, you might not get many takers for your newsletter. Offering the latest and greatest news works best for niches that have constant developments.
Canned Webinars
Webinars are video-based seminars. You can upload these on YouTube and spoon feed the URLs of these videos via email. You should also include a quick cheat sheet or a summary of the information contained in the video seminars with each
of your emails. Let’s face it. People don’t really want to read a ton of text to learn something new. When given a choice, most people would rather watch a short video to learn a specific solution. This is why not surprisingly, a lot of people love video-based seminars. As long as these seminars deliver solutions that people are actively searching for, these make for great mailing list incentives.
Software
While the internet is filled with free software, it seems that people can’t get enough apps, macros, or other software products. As long as they solve a specific problem people face, you can bet that offering this free software in exchange for emails will help you build up your mailing list fairly quickly. The secret to offering software as a list incentive revolves around specificity. The more specific the software is to a problem related to people interested in your niche, the higher the chance your squeeze page will convert.
However, if you’re offering some sort of a generic software that people can get elsewhere or a software that addresses a vague problem that may seem to be related to your niche, you might have a tougher time. Keep that in mind. Also, please note that software is not exactly cheap to code. You can build your own software or more likely, you’re going to have to hire somebody to code it for you. This might cost you quite a bit of money.
Graphics Packages
Depending on your niche, people might be interested in downloading a free package of icons, badges, photos or other graphical materials. While this makes for a great incentive for niches that involve online promotions, web design, web development, it doesn’t apply across the board. For example, if you are targeting the weight loss niche,
few people would be interested in seeing photos of fit people. They know they need to lose weight. They don’t need photos of slim people to remind them of that problem. Instead, they’re looking for other types of content to address their issue.
Custom Consultation
If you really want to turbocharge the
number of people joining your list, you
might want to consider giving out custom
consultations. These involve people
contacting you via Skype and you stepping
them through a problem. You have to
tightly define the kind of consultation you
have with people. Otherwise, you might
sink into a time blackhole. Seriously. There are people out there that just love to talk. They would chat your ear off if you let them. Your consultation must be focused on a very targeted problem so as to minimize the amount of time you spend with a list member.
Remember, there will be people who would sign up for your mailing list just to consult with you and then once the consultation is over, they would unsubscribe from your list. Factor this in to the amount of time you spend on custom consultations. Personally, I would research the most frequently asked questions so I would basically just copy and paste this material into the custom consultation, tweak it a little bit and get that consultation down to as close to one minute as possible. You don’t want to spend too much time on custom consultations. Ideally, you should outsource this to somebody who could copy and paste specific answers to common questions.
Key Takeaway For Incentives
The key takeaway here should be obvious. Giving away a book or booklet for people to sign up to your mailing list is simply not enough. You have to figure out the industry standard giveaway for your niche and try to outdo the stuff that other people are giving away. Ideally, you should go through all 10 incentives above
and pick out the most effective one. It all boils down to coming up with something better or something that has a greater perception of value.
Avoid This Problem!
As I have mentioned earlier, there are going to be people who would join your list just for the freebie. These are list squatters. To some extent, you really can’t avoid these people. You basically have to accept the fact that a certain percentage of your list will be squatters. Your job is to minimize that percentage to as close to zero as possible.
One way to nip this problem in the bud is to sell people on the value of your list. While your squeeze page should do a good job selling the value of your incentive, you should also talk about what they would get in that email updates you'll be sending them. You should be clear that once they join, they will be receiving emails.
Highlight the value those emails contain. Otherwise, when people start receiving emails, they would either unsubscribe or worse yet, they won’t unsubscribe. They would just take up space on your email roster. Depending on the email service provider you go with, you might get charged for the amount of list squatters you have.
It may well turn out that only 1% of your mailing list of 100,000 people actually engage with your emails. These are people who actually open and read and click through your email. 99,000 people, on the other hand, are simply squatting on your list. Depending on your list provider, you might have to pay for those people.
Avoid this unnecessary drama by spelling out the value of list membership in addition to the freebie you’re handing out. Also, when people download the freebie, highlight the value of the email on the confirmation or freebie download page. The key here is to prevent people from being “surprised” by your email updates after they have downloaded your incentive. You really can’t blame people for ignoring your emails if you focus so much of your time on the incentive and people don’t get a clear idea that they will actually be receiving email updates from you.
Now that you have a clear idea of what incentives you can offer for your list, the next step is to come up with incentives that will position your list for success. There are two ways to do this. As I’ve mentioned in step #3, you can just go through the list of incentives and pick which ones work the best with your particular traffic source.
The alternative is to simply do what your competitors are doing. Pay attention to their incentives. Reverse engineer your competitors’ incentives. Start with the industry standard incentive type by signing up to your competitors’ mailing lists. Get a copy of their incentives. Study their materials very closely. Try to figure out their strong points and their weak points. Come up with something better by offering the same stro0ng points while at the same time avoiding any of the weak spots.
Let’s face it. Regardless of how tight and awesome your competitors’ incentives may be, there’s always room for improvement. Figure out these areas and create something better. Remember, there are two ways to play this. You can actually come up with something
objectively better or you can produce something that is perceived as something better. Whatever the case may be, it has to be better.
How Do You Produce A Better Incentive?
This is the question that’s begging to be asked. Now that we’re clear that we have to come up with an incentive that either blows the competition out of the water or is perceived to be better, how exactly do we go about doing that? Here are some ideas.
First, you can offer an incentive that is complete. In other words, when you study your competitors’ incentives, they might be
holding back on certain pieces of information. They might be offering really basic information. If you came up with an incentive that is fully complete, you will stand head and shoulders from your competitors. Word might even get around that the incentive that you deliver truly solves the problem that your target customers have in a very thorough way.
Another approach you could take is to offer simply longer content. For example, if your biggest competitor is offering a free booklet that lists out 10 solutions to potential list members’ problems, offer a booklet that offers 20, 30 or even 50 solutions. The key here is to come up with an incentive that, on its face, is so vastly superior that people can’t help but sign up for it. Don’t just go with doubling your competitor. Blow them out of the water by a magnitude of 5:1 or 10:1. If the industry standard is to offer 10 solutions, come up 50 or even 100 solutions. Like it or not, people tend to equate longer products with higher value products. Of course, you and I know that this is not necessarily the case but there is that mental bias.
Alternatively, you can offer an incentive that is more engaging to people. For example, the industry standard in your niche might involve really complicated or jargon-filled materials for all sorts of products. When you read through this, it seems like you have to be some sort of brain surgeon or rocket scientist to make heads or tails of these materials.
What if you were to come up with an incentive that is written in plain eighth grade English and actually engages people on an emotional level? Your incentive will blow everybody else away because your stuff is more accessible and easier to process. What use is a seemingly “complete” incentive when it’s written in Ancient Greek? Do you see where I’m coming from? Focus on engagement. Understand that the people who will be downloading your incentives are flesh-and-blood human beings with real problems. Start there.
Finally, you can offer basically the same industry standard incentive as your competitors but you packaged it better. When people read the same information but it’s formatted in a nice PDF with lots of helpful pictures and everything is written in a well-spaced well- formatted way, don’t be surprised if people walk away with the impression that you have a better incentive. It turns out that you’re offering the exact same information. The only thing that’s different is that you formatted it in a way that is more accessible, easier to process and most importantly, easier to act upon.
Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ Squeeze Pages
Now that you have reverse engineered
your competitors’ incentives, the next
step is to design a better page to give
away that incentive. Again, your notes
on your competitors will come in handy
here. You need to come up with
squeeze pages that would blow
everybody else out of the water. How
do you do this? Well, you can come up
with better design. Maybe everybody is using the same standard design. You can start there but come up with different elements to get visitors to engage with your page better.
You should also study how your competitors’ squeeze pages focus, present and position their incentive. Are they missing something? Do they forget to highlight certain things? Maybe they’re just assuming that people who land on the squeeze page would automatically want the incentive. Come up with a squeeze page that shines the spotlight more clearly and more efficiently on your incentive.
Finally, you can reverse engineer your competitors’ squeeze pages in such a way that the value proposition this page brings to the table is clearer. You have to remember that people are always asking “what’s in it for me”. You have to answer that question loud and clear. The value proposition that you bring to the table must be compelling enough for people to want to leave their email address.
Make Sure To Do This
Based on my many years of list marketing, I can tell you that the vast majority of list marketers automatically assume that when people sign up for their list, they would actually welcome the updates. This is why most list marketers fail. You cannot assume this. Like I said earlier, there’s a certain percentage of your visitors that are
going to be list squatters. If you’re not careful, this percentage can keep growing until they form the majority of your list.
You have to make sure to emphasize the value of the updates on your list. You have to do this right before they sign up by including such text in the squeeze page. You also have to do this on the confirmation page that they get. You should tell them that they’re getting the booklet, template, book, or whatever incentive you're offering but they’re also going to be getting very useful updates.
You may want to invest some time highlighting the value these updates will bring to the lives of your list members. If you fail to do this, you run the risk of building a list full of squatters. Worse yet, people might be surprised that you’re sending updates and might consider your emails spam. You probably don’t need me to tell you why that’s bad news.
Do yourself a big favor and emphasize the value of the updates of your list because this is the only reason why you’re giving out incentives in the first place. By getting all caught up in the incentive you’re giving away, you end up sabotaging the success of your list. Make sure to keep your priorities straight. Otherwise, your list marketing business might go belly up sooner or later.
Create a Two-Step List Recruitment Setup
A lot of list marketers are under the impression that the more people that join their list, the better. I’m telling you, the whole idea of “the more the merrier” doesn’t work in list marketing. In many cases, you'd make a lot more money having less people on your list than having a bloated list of squatters or uninterested people.
You have to make sure that only people who are truly interested in the value of your updates get on and stay on your list. One very powerful way to do this is to create a two- step list recruitment setup. A lot of list marketers set up their lead capture pages in such a way that when you load a page, you only need to enter your email address and your name and click the submit button. That’s all you need to do. Automatically, you'll get a confirmation and you are on their list. The confirmation page usually has a download link to their incentive that you signed up for.
This is going to be a problem because this can attract curiosity seekers. This can attract people who are not really all that interested but are just curious as to the incentive that they would get. In other words, you risk attracting all the wrong eyeballs. You have to set up your list in such a way where the prospect has to click a button to get to the form.
This added step filters out curiosity seekers. Your form gets in front of the eyeballs of people who are more motivated. They have to read an ad or text that spells out the opportunity and benefit or your list. They then click through to get to the squeeze page form. In other words, you qualify them before you sign them up to your list. Either way, if you do this right, your form should talk about the benefits of the mailing list. This two-step process can go a long way in eliminating curiosity seekers and ensuring that people who sign up for your list are more likely to read your updates.
Modern Email Marketing
Modern email marketing uses a two-step email recruitment process. When people click through to the email form, they’re essentially asking to opt in after they have become aware of the incentives. In other words, they already know what’s in it for them. They are looking to establish a relationship with you. They want to
give you permission to continue talking to them. Using this two-step process is less intimidating and they also are given the impression that they’re calling the shots. It’s their choice whether to click through to the form or not.
Another great benefit of modern email marketing’s two-step email signup process is that this enables you to offer different incentives at different parts of your blog page. When people load your content, they see different ads for different lists. When they read the ad, they learn about the value that the list would deliver and then they click through to join that list.
You get a lot of control over your mailing list because you can qualify people based on their interest. Different people with different needs would sign up to different lists. This segmented email marketing approach can lead to higher conversion rates. Instead of just dumping everybody who’s interested in a wide range of problems related to your niche on one general mailing list, you end up with highly filtered list speaking to different problems. You can then offer laser targeted solutions to each of this list and walk away with better conversions.
The next question that you're going to have to tackle is when you will be sending out your emails. You have to understand that your squeeze page sets up your list members' expectations. If you do things right, your list members would not be surprised that you're sending out emails to them. They would expect this information.
You have to decide whether your list is going to be an update-driven list or a scheduled list. People who sign up for update-driven lists expect emails to come at any time. Maybe there is a late-breaking news in your niche. Maybe there is a hot development that needs their attention. Whatever the case may be, people who sign up for such lists expect updates to come at any time. In fact, they wouldn't mind if they receive several emails within a day.
On the other hand, there are lists that are expected to send updates every once in a while. Maybe there are no late-breaking developments. Maybe there is a shortage of
news in your niche. Regardless of the reason, people expect to receive emails only if there is something really important in your update.
Finally, there are many lists that involve pre-scheduled updates. These are usually tutorials or autoresponder series that people specifically sign up for. For example, if I sign up for an email list that is promising to teach me how to trade bitcoin, on a weekly basis, I would expect that I would receive a tutorial email with links to instructional videos once a week.
Make sure you set up the right expectations because this will decide how frequent your updates will be. Timing depends on subscriber expectations. Make sure that your squeeze page and all other promotional materials set up the right expectations. Be as clear as possible. Do your readers expect to be sent only the most relevant and pressing information? Do they expect periodic emails as they "step through" certain information?
I wish I could tell you that this is pretty straightforward, but it isn't. It really depends on the incentive you're using. It is also influenced by your target niche. Maybe you're in a niche where people expect rapid updates. For example, the cryptocurrency world changes rapidly. There are all sorts of late-breaking news. If you were to sign up for a mailing list specializing in cryptocurrency, you probably would want to be notified about the latest moves by global regulators or authorities involving bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Finally, you might want to consider the industry standard of your niche. If you sign up for your competitor's list and you notice that they tend to have the same schedule when it comes to their updates, then you might want to start with that schedule. You should start there, but this does not necessarily mean that you should end there. Use their schedule as a starting base and then tweak your email schedules based on the actual behavior of your list members.
Pay attention to the following tips to make sure you maximize the results you get from your email lists.
Optimize for maximum opens or responsiveness
Now that you've set up your mailing list, your main job is to make sure your emails are getting opened, read, and acted on. This is the essence of list marketing. If you fail to optimize your emails, then your email list is dead in the water. It really would be. Why? What's the point of getting a lot of
people to join your mailing list when they're not going to be reading your emails? If nobody is clicking on your links or reading your materials, then your business is practically dead.
There is no way you could make money from your list when people are not taking action on the emails that you send out. You have to work actively to maximize the percentage of people opening your emails, reading them and clicking on them. Each of these actions involves fewer and fewer people. You can start with 1,000 people on your list and end up with only 100 people opening your emails. Of those people, only 20 might end up clicking on the link included in the body of your email.
Think in terms of this filtration process.
Try to maximize the percentage of people taking action at each step. Start out with a large base of list members. Try to maximize the number of people opening your email and then work to increase the number of people reading through your emails and clicking through to your target website.
How do you optimize for maximum open rates and responsiveness? It is actually quite simple. First, you need to be clear about your target niche for your list. Put simply, your updates have to be all about your niche. They have to be targeted to the set of problems people in your niche have.
Set the right expectations with your squeeze page.
the emails they will be receiving.
If you put too much emphasis on the giveaways and incentives you are using to get people to sign up to your mailing list, don't be surprised when people get shocked that they received an update from you. They might even be blind to the fact that they signed up to a mailing list. Your squeeze page might have emphasized or played up the incentive so much that your list members were under the impression that you're just giving away free stuff and won't be sending them emails.
Set the right expectations with your squeeze page. Emphasize the value of the emails people will be getting. Clue them into the fact that they will be receiving emails.
Make sure that there is a tight fit between the incentive you're offering and the needs of your audience members.
Whatever incentive you're giving away, it must speak directly to the needs of your audience members. This is how you create value in their eyes. The more valuable, credible, and authoritative your brand appears to them, the higher the chance that they would open your emails and take you seriously. If it turns out
Inform people before they sign up to your list that they would be receiving email updates. Clue them into the value those email updates will bring to their lives. Don't just play up the incentive that you're giving out so people can join your list. That's how a lot of list marketers fail. They put too much emphasis on their bribe and don't pay enough attention to getting their prospective list members excited about
that you are offering incentives that don't really directly address their needs, they are probably not going to be all that eager to open and much less take action on the emails you send.
Another way you can optimize your email marketing is to send only relevant and on-point updates or autoresponder texts. In other words, when people sign up for a specific niche, everything that they receive from you would talk about that niche and nothing else. If you send out updates that have nothing to do with what your list members signed up for, don't be surprised if a lot of them would unsubscribe. You shouldn't be all that shocked when people stop reading your emails. They may remain on your mailing list, but they don't do anything. They are no longer opening your emails.
Make sure to send only relevant and on-point updates.
This way, you preserve your chance of actually making money off your mailing list. It doesn't matter whether you're sending updates or you have pre-programmed autoresponder emails being sent out by your system. Your stuff has
to be relevant. Otherwise, your list members would start ignoring your updates.
Make sure that everything in your email is consistent.
It's not enough that your email talks about the problems of the niche your list members signed up for. Your emails must be internally consistent. You must remain focused like a laser in adding value to the lives of your list members. They should immediately see that reading your emails would add something to their lives.
Finally, once you have people on your main email list, you need to work quickly to segment them.
In other words, when people sign up for your general niche list, you need to start sending updates that would enable them to separate or filter themselves based on the specific sub-problems that they are interested in. You can also send updates with links to low-cost products so you can segment your list membership base into 2
camps: proven buyers and information list members. Once you have these 2 segmented lists going, you can then spend a lot more time trying to convert the proven buyers so they can buy higher-dollar items.
Just because you have a lot of people on your list doesn't necessarily mean you will make you a lot of money. There are a lot of list marketers with huge, bloated lists but are struggling. The reason is that they made the all- too-common mistake of assuming that the more, the merrier. That's not going to cut it in modern email marketing.
You need to get the right people on your list. Otherwise, you're going to get a lot of freebie downloaders on your list. These people don't even bother to unsubscribe, but the damage remains the same. They are not likely to open your emails and not likely to convert. How can they? They don't even read your emails.
Optimize your list by using traffic source-targeted strategies
As much as possible, you should start with free traffic sources to optimize your squeeze page and your updates. By using free traffic, you should be able to get enough clues as to how to tighten up the incentive you're offering, increase your squeeze page conversion rate, and maximize your email open rate.
When you use free traffic to get this information, you're obviously saving money. The downside to this is you're going to have to invest time into this. You're still paying, but not in the form of money. Instead, you're paying in the form of time. Using free traffic, highlight your incentive. Use brand-building content to get people excited about the value of your updates. Keep optimizing your squeeze page and your updates until you are confident that these can convert paid traffic at a high enough rate.
Paid traffic targeting strategy
Once your squeeze page has been optimized by free traffic, start taking out paid adds. Now, I don't suggest that you jump in with both feet and place $100 a day ad buys on Facebook or Google Adwords. Instead, I suggest that you optimize your squeeze page and your mailing list to paid traffic using small, targeted ad buys.
Start with $1 daily buys. Pay attention to your statistics. See if people are really converting at a high enough rate. Keep tweaking your squeeze page until your $1 ad
buys convert at a fairly high rate. Once you've done this, start optimizing your email updates to boost your conversion rate.
This requires a tremendous amount of attention to detail. You can't be lazy about this. You can't just "set it and forget it". You have to pay close attention to your ad campaigns so you can quickly deactivate campaigns that are not working out while increasing the volume of ad campaigns that are producing a higher level of conversions. You have to be proactive. You can't just sit back and spend money on paid ads. Believe me; paid ad costs can spike up very quickly especially if you are not paying close attention. At best, you would be throwing good money after bad on campaigns that are not working out.
In previous steps, I've gone over this topic at some level. Still, optimizing your squeeze page plays such a critical role in the success of your mailing list campaigns that you need to go through specialized steps to ensure your optimization efforts are correct.
It's extremely important that you follow the steps below. Don't miss any detail. Make sure you implement each of the items below; otherwise, you're going to be leaving a lot of money on the table.
You have to understand that these optimization steps assume that you have already set up your squeeze page and have set out your updates. It also assumes that you've already optimized your squeeze page at some level.
Here are further optimization ideas to try to maximize the conversion ability of your e-mail list recruitment page.