It may surprise you to find an article about your email campaign in the list building category. This is not a mistake. It’s in exactly the right spot. That’s because your entire train of thought must be consistent from the time people first read your content until they buy your product.

If in your mind, the process stops when people sign up, you’ve had it. And that’s because you’re only 60% of the way to a sale.

In this article, I want to help you to understand how your email campaign contributes to your list building efforts.

Let me give you an offline example. Now before I do, let me just say that I hate it when people try to illustrate something online with someone else that isn’t; but I think that you’ll agree that in this case it is apropros.

I’m sure that you’ve seen running events, probably on television. In the heats, only the top three runners make it to the next round. The next time you see a heat, pay particular attention to the behavior of the runners at the finishing line.

You’ll notice, that unless the race is particularly close, that one or more of those who get to the tape first, pull back a bit. That’s because they’re only expending as much effort as is needed to get into the next heat. Their goal is to get into the final bunch, whatever that is, so the can compete to win the contest.

Now I want you to imagine that in one heat, the frontrunners pull back a little too soon, and the third and fourth place runners push past them and take the first and second positions themselves.

What would be the criticism of the people who lost at the very last moment? Probably, it would be, that they didn’t run all the way to the end. In the minds of the runners, the race ended before they got to the tape.

And exactly the same thing is true when it comes to the place of your email campaign in your List Building Chain.

You have to hold in your mind that entire process. You have to make sure that the Resource Box is exactly the right one for the end of the article. You have to know beyond a shadow of doubt that your free product is the natural thing for the Resource Box to lead to, and you have to also be absolutely sure that the email campaign is the next natural step from when prospects sign-up and get their free product.

And the only way that you’re going to be able to do that is if you see the process of signing-up as the penultimate step, not the last one.

If in you’re mind it’s the last step, then completing the form becomes the end goal.

If you’ve been in Internet marketing for any length of time, then you’ll know that when people finally get on your list, that the real work of marketing begins. Completing the form isn’t the end of the process; it’s the beginning.

But if it ends in your mind, then it will also end for your prospect. And that means that the chances that everything that went before they signed up will probably get lost because it’s disconnected from what follows – your email campaign.

The reason you build a list is so that you can sell products. But in order to get people to sign up, their train of thought will need to take them beyond that form.