Even after you have built a list of subscribers, you must realize that a good majority of them are not going to be ‘buyers’. Most lists are built by giving something away for free as an incentive for signing up. Most of the list will prove to be ‘freebie seekers’ or ‘tire kickers’ who are unlikely to ever buy anything online.

Now is the perfect time to work on developing your relationship with the people on your mailing list. You are a marketer, so it’s your job to persuade these people to be more responsive to your messages and increase the number of sales you make through your emails to them.

In this post I am going to give you 3 tips on how to turn those people who have become numb to your messages into responsive, hungry buyers.

Tip #1

Be Consistent

One of the ways to create responsiveness from your readers is your consistency in sending content to them. You are working on developing a reputation with your list so regular, useful, messages need to become expected by your readers. Sporadic and infrequent mailings tend to leave a lot of your subscribers not remembering who you are, where they first signed up with you, or why you are finally mailing them now. Finding the right interval is very important. Every day can be too much while only once or twice a month is usually too little.

Tip #2

Don’t Bombard Them With Sales Pitches

You do not want to bombard them with sales pitches. Although I know marketers who do this (and I am subscribed to a LOT of these lists), it’s not recommended that you send two of these messages in a row. By sending several emails that provide content relevant to what they signed up to receive in between each promotional message sends the subliminal message that you value them as more than just a potential customer.

As I mentioned, everything you send to your subscribers should have something to do with what they signed up to your list for. All these mailings, free products, information, and recommended products need to be tailored to their interests. By providing targeted information you are branding yourself as not only an expert in the field but a helpful person to know as well.

Tip #3

Ask Them Questions – Ask For A Response

A good way to build responsiveness in your mailing list is to occasionally ask them what THEY are interested in knowing about. This can be done either as a poll or a straight question. Offer an extra special free product for the best suggestions and then send it to everyone who responded with a suggestion or comment. The more you know your list the better you can serve them while increasing the chances of making sales along the way.

Provide your email subscribers with an easy to use way of contacting you. The easiest way to do this is by setting up your autoresponder email address to be an email address that you monitor every day, that way your readers can just ‘reply’ to any one of your emails to contact. Make sure they know just how valuable they are to you and be ready to give personal service when needed or requested. By becoming a ‘real’ person for them, they are much more likely to take you up on your offers when you do send them a sales message.

I hope this series has helped you out in your list building efforts. If you want more in depth information about list building, check out my List Building From Scratch ebook.

As I mentioned previously, my next set of posts are going to be dealing with squeeze pages and how to avoid making ‘the’ fatal mistake.

Stay tuned.

Having a sizable opt-in mailing list can be a great asset for your business. But there is more to list building than just getting the email addresses of potential customers, as I have mentioned in previous posts. It is necessary to test and refine your emails to find their sweet spot and to profit from it. Trying different approaches to your mailing list customer base will help you find the best ways to market to them and give more profitable results when you send messages.

Trial and error plays a part in this process. Once you have discovered methods that give good results, you can modify future mailings to take advantage of what you have learned. Every list is different and some will be made up more of those who prefer product reviews. Others may lean towards a desire to focus on methods and actions they can implement for themselves within their specific niche. Testing will uncover what works best for the people you have on your list.

One of the first things you need to keep an eye on is the number of emails that are “bouncing” back. Emails may not be getting through to their intended recipient for several reasons. Their inbox may be full, the mail client maybe refusing emails from your domain, or the address may have been abandoned or deleted. Whatever the reason, these addresses need to be removed. If you are using a paid autoresponder company (I recommend Aweber) that charges for the number of subscribers that you have (including unsubscribes) you should remove them. Doing this alone could keep you from moving up the next level of service. Although, if you are adding a substantial number of subscribers each day, you may want to contact their support and have them manually remove your unsubscribes on a regular basis.

You should also be keeping track of just who is buying and have them opt in to a new list so that you can track them easier. These loyal customers can then be given preferential treatment and possibly extra bonuses not available to the general list. For those who have never bought from you, a separate list that markets low price items may generate a few more sales. You will have to examine your individual business goals to determine if you want to take the time to continue trying to sell to them. Under normal circumstances though, it is better to separate them and customize your marketing approach rather than just throw away the address of a current non-buying subscriber.

Another way to test your list is to run a survey asking for suggestions and advice on how you can serve them better. People like to be ‘talked to’ and those that answer your survey request are proving they listen to you and actually read your email messages. They deserve extra special treatment as well.

If this process is started early enough before your list grows huge it will not seem like much of a chore. The extra sales you may generate by testing and subdividing your opt-in listw should easily repay you for the time it takes to fine-tune this essential marketing tool.

Having problems getting started with your list building? List Building From Scratch will solve that problem and get you on your way to testing and refining it so you get maximum benefits from your efforts.

Next post I am going to go over some of the ways that you can get your list to be more responsive…now that’s something a LOT of us need! That will be the last post of this series and then next week I am going to start going deeper into the mechanics of your opt in page and how to make it suck in subscribers.

Stay tuned…

When you pass on helpful information to your readers because you feel like that information will help them without necessarily promoting a product it accomplishes two things.

Passing on resources to your subscribers without always worrying about your commissions builds trust because they start to think that you want to help them and not just get money from them. This makes them more willing to give you money when you ask for it. That’s just the way it works.

Prompting your subscribers to send you feedback on the resource(s) you tell them about is what helps to make your list responsive to your future offers. Get your readers used to interacting with you. Get them used to doing what you ask. In order to do that, you have to keep asking them to do stuff.

When you find anything you think is useful and think your subscribers will find useful as well, pass it on to them even if you don’t get a commission from a product they buy.

You don’t have to do that every single time you write something but do it and ask them for their opinions on what you wrote. Writing to your readers without caring about getting commissions for every single product you mention is a small price to pay in the long run for the level of trust you inspire.

That trust (built on the fact that you have shown your readers they are more than just a dollar sign) is what will set you apart from 99.9% of the other publishers out there.

Let’s be real. I publish to profit. Period.

If my subscribers don’t buy from me I stop publishing because at that point it becomes a burden on my time. I am in business to make money and so are you. My readers understand that and so do yours.

What does this mean to your bottom line?

The more you give to your readers without asking for a lot in return the more they’ll feel like the NEED to give back to you. That’s the law of reciprocation at work. Most of us were taught to give back what we get from people. That being the case, be careful about what you give because what you give is what you can expect to get back. That’s a scary thought huh?

Like I said just a minute ago your subscribers understand that you are in business to make money. If you don’t make money, you go out of business. The issue a lot of the time with publishers is that if you haven’t been giving your readers information they actually value, they won’t care if you stay in business or not which means they won’t bother buying the products you recommend.

I buy products from publishers who do their best to give me value because I want them to stick around. The only way I know how to keep them around is to buy from them.

Give your readers some credit. They know that to keep you in business they have to buy what you recommend. The only real question is do you give them enough value in the form of quality information for them to care if you stay in business or not?

On the line of valuable resources, I would like to pass this along – as you know, creating and selling (or giving away) your very own product, is the easiest way to make money on the internet. Well, my friend Joel Osborne just released his ‘Product Creation Success Package’.

If you have ever wanted to create your own product but was unsure of how to do it, the “Product Creation Success Package” has the information that you are looking for! He covers such topics as “What is an Information Product” all the way to “Delivering The Info Product” and everything in between. The Product Creation Success Package contains 3 ebooks, each with Master Resell Rights and each targeting different topics about product creation. You also get the sales page to go along with the main product.

I wouldn’t be promoting it if I hadn’t picked it up myself and gone through it. There are some points in the book that I hadn’t thought of and that will help me with my next products.

I highly recommend it…again, get it here

Stay tuned for the fourth and final segment of Relationship Marketing.

Til then,

Here’s to YOUR Successes