Getting started with the power of building your email list

It was around 2008 when I started the website. I tried to do a niche site for football (American). I built one meant to cover all football in the Dallas – Fort Worth area.

Unfortunately, at the time, I didn’t have access to guys like Jon Morrow. Morrow, undoubtedly, would have stopped me (hopefully!) to tell me that the niche was still too broad.

So, as I started this website, I thought that a good place to start was with semi-pro football.

As I interacted with players, coaches, and fans, I noticed a rise in my traffic. Therefore, I kept going that direction while adding in posts about some of the college teams and the occasional article about the Dallas Cowboys.

The blog was really a news blog site. One of the biggest mistakes I made at the time was not starting an email list right away. I had pretty decent traffic but did not have the email newsletter to accompany this.

You keep hearing people say, “the money is in the list.” My copywriter friends will agree. Of course, the type of list matters.

If they aren’t buying what you are selling, there is no money in that list. Therefore, it is imperative that you have the right subscribers on your list.

Why do we have email lists?

Well, we are businesses. The end game is alway client work or projects. The end game may also be people buying product services from our company. Frankly, we don’t have people on a list just to entertain them.

Building an email list is something that eludes many of us, myself included. We look at folks who get large lists and wonder how they did so. Naturally, sometimes, it takes patience.

There are three basic things you need to have to build an email list. Those three include An Email Newsletter, Traffic, Conversions.

An Email Newsletter

One of the things to have to build an email list is to have an actual email newsletter. This may seem overly simplistic, but it is paramount.

As with anything, when you have a product, it has to have an agenda, a goal. An email newsletter is no different.

Just like building content in a different area, you have to match the target audience with the message and provide the format.

There are different ways to do email newsletters.

When I was running the football blog, it became easier just to create an RSS feed newsletter. You just plug in the RSS feed of your blog, set the newsletter to go out once per month, and let it run. If you are regularly publishing, as a news site does, you will have regular emails.

The RSS-driven email is a “set it and forget it format.”

Business blogs, however, might want to do something differently. These RSS feed driven emails do not have a specific call to actions to entice users to take action.

There is a host of other things that you can do with various email marketing software including autoresponders and sells funnels.

One of the things that RSS driven emails can’t do is build relationships. The key to a healthy business is having relationships with its target audience.

What are the goals for your email newsletter?

Traffic

One of the things you really have to have is traffic to your website or your social media channels.  Without traffic, you can’t build an audience, and you can’t build an email list.

That is why it is necessary to build traffic to your website or wherever you can capture email subscriptions.

Just driving traffic isn’t enough either. If you drive the wrong traffic, they will not convert to subscribers. You have to drive the traffic that is your target audience and connects with your enticement for signing up.

You get traffic from either organic (SEO), paid (PPC, Facebook, etc.) or through networking. For someone just getting started, there are two options to focus on according to Robert Van Tongeren in Sumo’s monster guide for email marketing.

To get the result you’re after, you should target the following two traffic sources: Paid traffic and endorsed traffic.

Endorsed traffic is driven by well-trafficked blogs or guest posts from those blogs.

Conversions

Conversions are pretty important. After all, if you are getting traffic, but no one converts, then you aren’t getting email subscribers.

People have to see your optin forms several times to be prompted to make a decision. How many times? Well, according to marketer Melyssa Griffin,

“Have you ever heard the Rule of 7? Well, it says that someone has to see something SEVEN times before noticing it and taking action.”

This means that you will need to coming up with several, maybe even 7, optin forms placed in various places on your website to begin increasing your conversion rates.

There are a few ways to increase your conversions for email subscribers.

One of the most popular ideas is to offer some kind of lead magnet or incentive. The prevailing thought these days seems to be a PDF ebook. That is certainly something you can utilize.

Several websites have used this, and it still has relevance.

One that I like to recommend is content upgrades. What are content upgrades? According to David Khim,

“A content upgrade is bonus piece of information that elaborates on or complements a piece of content the reader is already interested in. The bonus is both highly valuable and in context with the page’s content so we gate the bonus by asking for an email address, a Facebook share, a tweet, or an email to a friend.”

Content upgrades can be in the form of a checklist, a set of templates, or even Google Sheets template containing some kind of useful formula.

There are a lot of other ideas you can explore in these here and here.

Wrapping it up

What tools do you use to help you build your email list? Tools are a big help, but we have to make sure that we have the basic elements in place including our email list, traffic and that we have a way to convert subscribers.

We will explore WordPress tools in a future post to help with the conversions.

What kind of tools do you use to help you build your email list?