Building an email list might be one of the most important things that you do for your online business. An email list provides another unique way to service your customers. But try not to think of a building an email list single-mindedly as just a way to generate more sales. You just might be killing the goose that lays the golden egg if you think that way.
Instead, look at building your email list as an opportunity to accomplish many things with both your current as well as your prospective customers, that includes the following:
- Establish and build trust
- Create more open dialogue; build relationships
- Provide unique and valuable content
- Provide updates and special reminders about your products and services
- Market and sell your products and services
As you can see, #5 on our list is “Market and sell your products and services”, noticeably last and for good reason. Over the years, many list builders and email marketers have put their promotional efforts and the marketing and sales of their products first and foremost on their list of priorities in the list building process and have just forgotten about all of the other opportunities that list building can provide.
In the early days of email marketing, people could get away with this sort of in your face marketing, but not so anymore. Over the years, the general public has become very jaded about email because of the massive amounts of spam that we’ve all had to deal with. Broadly speaking, consumers nowadays simply don’t trust email marketers.
Spammers have created an enormous head-wind for all email marketers, even the legitimate ones. Your email subscribers have to trust you for it to work. Building that trust, however, is easier said than done. It’s really up to you to build that trust with your subscribers from the ground up. Above all, remember this:
Successful email marketing and list building can only work if it is permission-based.
Getting permission is the first “hurdle” that you’ll need to jump over to start the process before your subscribers will be willing to provide you ANY information about them. Above all, as an email marketer, you need to understand that gaining permission to send subscribers email is a privilege, it’s not a right. Before people are willing to grant you that privilege, they have to be absolutely sure that you won’t take advantage of the privilege they’ve granted you.
Building trust is an ongoing process that you simply can’t take for granted. You have to remain vigilant about safeguarding and building upon your subscribers’ trust. Building trust also involves things like providing unique content that your subscribers will benefit from. The more unique and valuable the content is, the more valued the relationship becomes between you and your subscriber. Be especially careful not to send too much to your subscribers in the way of product and service announcements. Going overboard and attempting to market, promote and sell too much can backfire and quickly erode the trust that you’ve built. Building trust slowly and not overreaching in your sales and marketing efforts will open up more and more business opportunities over time.
Remember again, successful email marketing is all about establishing and building trust with your subscribers. If you stay focused on building that trust, your subscribers will win, and eventually, so will you.
I use Aweber for my email marketing and list management.
Aweber has several advantages over competing email marketing vendors, but their expertise and strength lies in their list management capabilities.
Aweber’s web forms and newsletter design templates are somewhat limited and not as customizable as they could be, but operationally Aweber has more advantages than disadvantages among email marketing vendors.
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