10 Things To Avoid When List Building

As useful and as popular as list building is, there is a chance of having some problems when not used properly.

In this article, let’s look at 10 things you should not do:

Don’t Think About List Building As A Once Only Task

List building is an ongoing effort. The process might be getting from A to B, but it hardly ever ends, because your mailing list needs to keep growing over time. You can’t just create a mailing list with your first contacts and then just set them up for your newsletter.

What you really look for when you build a mailing list is to keep the influx of new subscribers coming, engaging them, and making them bring new people. You have to reinvent what you do with your mailing list from time to time and care for it. After all, this is your business!

Don’t Think About Your Mailing List As A Short-Term Recruiting Tool

You just can’t set up an offer to give something free for signing up to your mailing list as a method to lure in prospects, because you’ll end up with a mailing list full of people deleting your messages after having got what they wanted from it.

Make It Personal

One of the key words that successful marketers, salesman and saleswomen alike use for closing a deal is the word YOU. Subscribers already gave exclusivity by granting you access to their inboxes. What they want is for you to talk to THEM individually.

What you have to do is sell in a personal manner, even if you’re forwarding a promotional sales message to your 20,000 subscribers. Don’t just talk about the product and the market. Talk about how YOU can benefit from getting what YOU are being offered.

Don’t Focus Entirely On Marketing Somebody Else’s Product

Let’s face it, if you don’t own a product, you’ll be perceived as less trustworthy, as far as marketing efforts go. If you just focus on selling products and nothing else, especially if those products are from a third party, you’ll be end up being seen as another internet marketing robot.

Don’t get me wrong; affiliate marketing is a great online business model, but you will be much better off in the long run by creating your own product and then having affiliates promoting your offer to their lists!

Don’t Buy Lists Of Email Addresses

This is a big no-no. Never, ever buy email databases. An email address coming from a mailing list for hire is surely receiving lots and lots of unwelcomed emails on a daily basis. If you send them an email without them knowing who you are, your message will get dumped as spam along with the others.

If they’re receiving unknown email for the first time, they will see you as an invasive, untrustworthy source of spam. They will block you and trash you in front of other prospects, so this practice will not pay off, even in the short term.

Don’t Take Email Addresses From External Websites

Don’t just go to a website or social media site and take email addresses and start mailing them without permission (and, yes, people will do this). Remember that a mailing list is built upon the interest and trust of prospects, and by sending them unsolicited correspondence is just out of touch with that fact.

Just like with email addresses taken from a mailing list that you bought, you’ll end up blocked and with a bad reputation, plus with ever tightening laws on data privacy, it is illegal. Try not only to be careful, but to completely avoid these kinds of practices.

Don’t Flood Your Subscribers With Email

This is kind of an obvious and valid point, but companies and individuals alike tend to forget that people don’t like to be inundated with email.

It is good to engage your subscribers with news, offers and contests, but there’s a fine balance of how many times a day you should message your subscribers.

Of course, this will depend on the kind of activities and products that you promote, and we recommend keeping newsletters limited to a daily basis, mailing offers and promotions two times during the day and mailing contests at random intervals.

Remember that not messaging enough can turn out to be as bad as messaging too much. You can end up losing subscribers and worst of all, customers, to the competition.

It’s all about balance and emailing daily or every other day should be fine. You may want to send a couple more if you are promoting a launch but do this sparingly.

Don’t Send Out Information Without Value

This is also something that some marketers and especially business owners without enough marketing guidance end up being guilty of, emailing the wrong kind of information.

This pitfall can be as simple as promoting poorly selling items, thinking it would sell, or by promoting the wrong kind of content to the wrong audience. Therefore, it is important to know who you are targeting certain email content to.

This churn and burn model is an awful way to conduct business, because you are constantly needing to find new subscribers to replace those that are leaving because you are not providing value!

Instead, try offering value and building a tribe; it’s much easier to keep someone on your list once they’re on it!

Don’t Make Your Mailing List A One-Way Channel

One of the most prevalent, yet most harmful practices in email marketing today is making email a one way communications channel. What this means is that companies use it to message customers and prospects, but not offering them a way to communicate back.

This is bad for business, because if customers feel that they don’t have an effective way to directly communicate with a company, they might start looking elsewhere. Remember, that email is not only about advertising, but also about communicating with your clients.

Another mistake is the reliance on auto responders. Auto responders send out an automated response to an inquiry or complaint from a customer, and then another one until the inquiry is resolved. As a business, you have to think twice about how this makes somebody think about your business ethics.

Don’t get me wrong; autoresponders are an amazing email marketing tool, but they need to be used correctly.

Don’t Trick Prospects

This is obvious, of course, but it is too often used as a cheap way for attracting prospects. You use a call to action to join your mailing list to enter a contest to get a big, sometimes unrealistic, prize.

While it is true that this sometimes works, it isn’t long term. If prospects don’t receive your promised prize, they forget about you as easily as they enlisted to your mailing list.

Also, most careful and educated prospects won’t just fall into this, so please don’t resort to underhand tactics as they aren’t sustainable long term, and you will get a bad reputation as one to be avoided.

If you want to know more about nurturing you list, check out the featured resource below for a free Simple List Building report; download, read it and take action 😊

10 Things To Implement For Successful List Building

If you have been marketing online for any length of time, you will know the importance of building your own email list.

You own your list, whereas you don’t own the social media platforms you may use to build an audience, and it can be taken away from you, and where would that leave your online business?

This article will cover 10 of the things that you can implement to grow your business with an active email list, and are a key to effective email marketing.

OK, let’s dive in…

Personalize Your Emails

It goes without saying that first impressions matter, and this is triple important for emails. Quick question: What would you do if you subscribed to a company’s email newsletter only to find out that their emails are kind of boring? Simple fonts, no backgrounds, no signatures, and so on.

What will happen is that you will ignore them, and eventually they’ll automatically end up in your spam folder. This is exactly what would happen to your emails if you don’t pay special attention to your email’s presentation.

Of course, you need to be careful and limit personalization to the subject line and the first line of the message, or your email may seem forced or fake. Also, don’t overshoot its design, just use something related to what you do as a business or professional.

Use Blogging And Landing Pages

Your mailing list will go as far as the means you use to market will take it. This means that you can’t just use a corner of your website to show a sign up form and call it a day. What you really want is to get traffic, and put your mailing list out there.

You can do that by having a blog dedicated to content outside your website, with carefully structured information that can be used to get traffic from wherever you can and then insert a landing page with a call to action to join your mailing list.

Make Good Use Of Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are teasers or incentives that you offer in a call to action to motivate your prospects to join your mailing list. The trick behind a lead magnet is giving away something that can only be obtained by joining your mailing list.

For example, giving away a free eBook, tips, or pieces of content that is not going to be published on the website and is exclusive, can be wonderful lead magnets.

Even if your prospects only sign up for the promise of a one-time free piece of content, they will be on your mailing list. From then on, it’s up to you to keep them engaged.

Use 100% Effort When Creating Your Email Content

If a personalization is the appetizer, then quality content is the full meal. You already sent emails, but what you really want is for your customer to read them and make use of its contents.

Creating quality content for your emails guarantees that your customers will be waiting for the upcoming email. Build up anticipation by creating special content from time to time, hosting contests, sending gifts to random customers, anything to keep them on edge!

Allow Guest Posting

Guest posting is a great way to make your prospects and repeated customers perceive you as a reliable source of information. By allowing guest posting and announcing it on your newsletter, you can have people wanting to read something from a different perspective.

It will also generate traffic by means of word of mouth. If somebody on your mailing list sees a guest post from somebody that knows someone is going to enjoy, they will forward that email to that person, so you’ll probably add someone to your mailing list!

Use Paid List Building Services If You Can Afford Them

While it is true that you can use some free services to manage your mailing list, it is also true that their usefulness will get limited as your mailing list grows. Not only will you be limited to a low number of subscribers, but your options to refine your list will be limited, as well.

That’s why we recommend using paid services to manage your mailing lists and to assist you in expanding it. In any case, you have to remember that the costs of email marketing are the lowest among marketing methods, and it also offers the biggest return of investment!

Give Away Stuff To Your Subscribers So They Reciprocate

There’s a simple yet all too often overlooked rule for email marketing, and it is simply about not offering something for your customer to buy during their first week on your mailing list. Instead, give them something like a gift card, or a free eBook.

By giving them something that they don’t have to pay for, you are in fact building up loyalty. This way, you’re teaching customers that you trust them by giving them a gift, and at the same time you’ll be teaching them to trust you back.

Study Your Customers So You Can Properly Target Them

You can use multiple ways to study your customer base and prospects. You can do it by using metrics, by visiting the kind of websites they visit, or by the kind of products and services that they buy, but you have to do it.

This will be helpful, because if you know your customers, you don’t have to offer them everything you sell. You only have to target them and give them what you know they want. Email each of your customer segments with what they’re looking for, and they’ll stick with you.

Work On Follow-Up Emails

You need to have a follow up email ready to be sent once somebody signs up for your mailing list. It is as simple as sending out an email welcoming a new subscriber and taking them to a start page with instructions and information about what he or she can do now that they’re signed in!

Run Periodic Maintenance Checks On Your Mailing List

You need to run a periodic maintenance check on your mailing list to know where your resources are going. It is just not worth it to have users getting your emails in their spam folders, or have dead addresses on your list. Make sure you do this clean up from time to time.

If you want to know more about nurturing you list, check out the featured resource below for a free Simple List Building report; download, read it and take action 😊