Before you can start building a list, you first need to understand exactly what a list is.
A list is actually just a database of names and email addresses. Since you want to grow a TARGETED list, this database should contain the names and email addresses of people interested in your niche and what you promote to them.
So why is it important to build a targeted list? If you were promoting a product about email marketing, would you want to spend your time and money promoting that product to someone who is interested in dog training? Of course not! You want to promote only to those interested in what you are actually selling.
By targeting your list, you are looking for and finding only those people interested in your specific niche. And, if your list is targeted, it will be much easier to sell the products you are promoting than it would be to a huge list of people interested in other topics.
Some new marketers think that the bigger the list the better. They think that although John Doe is interested in dog training, he might just be interested in one of the products they are promoting. Nothing could be further from the truth. People search on the internet for the specific information they want to learn about, not a bunch of information that does not increase their knowledge.
Just remember that you are spending a lot of time, energy, and maybe money, acquiring every subscriber for your list. It is just common sense to spend all of that effort on finding only those subscribers who really interested in what you are promoting.
As your business grows and starts expanding, you will need many different lists. You will need different lists for different product campaigns as someone may opt-in to your list for Product A but not be interested in receiving emails related to Product B. You may need a different list for your newsletter, another list for any e-courses you create, and on and on.
While you may want to have a master list of all of your subscribers, you will need multiple lists depending on what messages you want to send to which subscribers. Set up multiple lists before you even begin building your subscriber base.
You can always delete a list if it doesn’t function as you wish. For example, you may set up a list titled List X but then find out very few people join that list but lots join List Y. So you may want to delete List X.
However, before deleting any list think about how much it cost to get even one subscriber to join it. While you may have not spent much money (perhaps just for a domain name and hosting), you will certainly have spent time setting up the subscription form, maybe a squeeze page, ethical bribe and so on.
So before deleting a list completely, you may want to split test the wording on your squeeze page, rework your ethical bribe or even create a new one.
In order to build your subscriber list you will need to invest in an autoresponder service. These services allow you to capture the names and email address of your visitors so that you can send e-mail messages to them in the future.
There are many autoresponder services, also known as email marketing companies, available on the internet. Do some research to find one that meets your needs. However, do not under any circumstances choose a company because it offers the lowest price. And NEVER use a free autoresponder service.
