Tuesday 21 October 2014

Learn to Build a List




Recently I have noticed a lot of focus about list building. Well why not? It is an essential part of marketing, even an offline business has an email or mailing list. Maybe because recently joining a list was a way to earn a ClickTrackProfit Bigfoot badge. I bought a badge which looked like this:




My efforts for list building from the Bigfoot badge hunt : 40 subscribers...plus 3 still needed to verify their account.

What I find hard to understand is that people joined the list in the expectation of receiving something. Any list should have this vital element. Even if this is only information, but in my case I would be providing a badge. However, people still didn't verify.

Why do people have to verify? This process is essential to prove it is a real email address and that the person is real. You want people to read your emails and this is the part when you say please whitelist my emails, check in the spam folders etc. Sometimes it is out of our control as email providers think its spam and block your email altogether. Occasionally someone will join under several emails as for some reason they are not receiving it or did not verify one email.

I recently decided to purge my list. There is no point bragging you have 10K subscribers when half of them have not verified their email.  If subscribers (or future/ potential subscribers) are not receiving my emails why keep them on the list.

Another fact of list building is unsubscribers. This made me think....There would be a high probability of people unsubscribing after this badge hunt as they got what they wanted out of subscribing.  How can I or what can I do to retain people on my list?

So, over the last couple of weeks I have performed a mini experiment on my list of subscribers to this blog. I wanted to engage the list and offer them an exciting offer too good to refuse! If they didn't open their email I sent they missed out. I named the email: Thank you for subscribing...gift inside. Out of 275 only 14 clicked the email and only 8 people took me up on this offer below. I want to live up to my FREEREWARDS4U name.

I wanted to reward my list and thought how do I keep subscribers reading the emails I send. So I simply sent this email:


I'm feeling very generous today. There is nothing I am going to invite you to join. All I ask is your continued support of my Freerewards4u blog and stay subscribed. Please feel free to send me a splash page of your choice and I will promote it and give you 500 views!

Please email me at freerewards4ucontact@gmail.com with your splash page and name/email address you used to sign up with so I can confirm your subscription.

Enjoy this bonus!

Kris Rogers
http://freerewards4u.net

There was no strings attached just a thank you. Aim: Time will tell me how many unsubscribers there will be. Yes, this was an experiment and I'm also happy I can help some people with their advertising. So to those 261 people you saved me 130, 500 credits! Of course I never imagined any more than a handful of people would take up the offer and I'm not sure I have that many credits to spare. Phew! I am likely to offer other freebies to my list as they are the life blood to what I am trying to achieve...to keep and grow an engaged list.

The whole purpose of a list is promotion. Jon Olson recently said on a TELive that promote to your list and promote on your blog. On a splash page in TEs promote that blog to build your list. I totally agree. This seems to be the best method. Gather your list and promote to that list. This is YOUR list. I want to keep this list growing. Click Track Profit teaches people how to build a list by using an autoresponder and I use Rocketresponder because I get all the stats I need to see what works and what doesn't. It shows who is clicking on your emails and who isn't and much more. These two programs together work brilliantly. Start building your list today and you won't be disappointed. 

Until next time

Kris Rogers






4 comments:

Nick Grimshawe said...

Hi Kris, I really enjoyed your post today on list building. Building a list is a very interesting exercise and people join for all kinds of different reasons.

It's good to experiment and try new things with your list.

One of the most important things is to keep it growing after a promotion like the Badge Hunt.

I will have to check and see why I'm not on your list. I should be.

best Nick

Warren Contreras said...

Yes it is a constant battle to keep your list responsive, but you do a very good job in my opinion. I always find your posts interesting and appreciated the free advertising from your experiment.

Keep up the good work and it will pay off in the long run.

Deya Hroob said...

Hello Kris,
Building a list is very important. I have a list with 210 subscribers, the most challenging thing you face is the number of subscribers who open your emails, I usually got 18 out of 210.
Thanks Kris again for this great post.

Kris Rogers said...

Thank you for your comments. Deya thank you for sharing your stats!