List building is a common ‘buzz word’ in this day and age of Internet Marketing.
“The money is in the list” they say. Only, if you don’t know how to build a list, then where on Earth do you start ?
Well, if you think about why would anybody want to actually join your Newsletter in the first place? The answer is .. “Value”. What value is the person going to get out of subscribing to your mailing list.
This is step 1 of the 4 step process – we create something called a ‘Lead Magnet’. A Lead Magnet is something that is valuable in return for their email address such as a newsletter or “7 top tips to a flatter stomach” – that sort of thing.
You may not know this, but for someone to give you their email address, it is a ‘transaction’, it’s just not a financial one. They recognise that their email address is valuable to an Internet Marketer.
The very first thing that people worry about in giving up their email address is the amount of Spam that they currently receive and the last thing they want is yet more email, so what you give away has to be perceived as being valuable.
If you remember not so long ago to the days when we had AOL and their famous “You have mail” ringtone that went off every time you received an email from someone. If you think back, you were even excited about getting an email, because it was so new.
Could you actually imagine having that ringtone now every time you got an email ? It just wouldn’t happen would it? You would possibly have thrown the computer out of the window after the 50th “You’ve got mail” sound in the last 10 minutes.
No – these days what happens is that we scroll down our emails looking for things to delete first.
Which is why your headline, or your subject line is so important. If you begin to get that right, then people are going to open up your email.
Thats the second step – just getting someone to open up your email and not just delete it.
The third step is to get people to actually read the content. The way forward is here is through the use of Stories. Yep, a good old story thrown in will often get people reading right through to the end of the email, because, deep down, we all want to find out “what happened”.
That leads me nicely to step four. Getting the person to take action. Now you have decide on what the action is you want them to take – do you want them to hit ‘reply’ so that you can engage with them ?
Or do you want them to click a link and go to a website and buy something – in which case the story must entice the person that what you have to offer is worthwhile.
If you get all four steps correct, you’ll be driving more traffic than ever before.
So thats it, the 4 step process for building your list and driving website traffic.
