How To Create An Email List (And #1 One Reason Why You Need One For Your Business)
With this article, I wanted to cover how to create an email list and why you really need one for your business.
With any business, you need a blueprint to follow and the appropriate tools to do the job quickly and effectively. One of the big mistakes that I see new affiliate marketers make is that they send people directly to the affiliate offer that they have chosen without collecting the email address. This is called Direct Linking. Now you might be thinking, what’s the problem with that as long as I am making sales why do I care? Watch the following video.
The big problem!
You are leaving yourself out of the equation and you are not building your email list. You are not able to build trust and authority with your customers because you are not able to follow up with them.
I wrote an article about the 7 Laws Of Influence. In this article, I discussed the importance of having influence and trust with your target market and how it affects your sales. Even if the prospect does not purchase immediately because you have built a bond they are more likely to open your email and possibly make a purchase later on.
What really needs to happen is that you need to run your prospect through a bridge page funnel where they get to “meet” you through a video or sales letter. Essentially you are bridging the gap between the ad and the offer.
So the first thing you collect is their email address with an ethical bribe, freebie offer. After they enter their email address then they go to the bridge page. This is where you tell your story. This is where you build trust and influence with your customer and provide empathy and compassion. You address their anger and frustration. Only after that do you send people on to the affiliate offer. (I explain what a sales funnel is in this article.)
So, you run an ad and send people to the affiliate offer. The product creator gets the benefit of all those people because they get added to the product creator’s email list and they follow up.
Would you rather pay for traffic all the time or have free traffic?
If you create an email list and build your list up over time it becomes your number one source of free traffic. If you have 10,000 subscribers on your email list the majority of statistics will tell you that you should be able to generate at least $1 from each subscriber in a month.
So over the course of the month, you send different offers to your email subscribers. You should be able to generate at least $1 for each subscriber/month. You can see by the math how this could be really important to the longevity of your business.
I said that there needs to be a blueprint as well as tools. There are three main tools that I use in creating my funnels and building my email lists and following up with my clients.
ClickFunnels is a software for creating landing pages/lead capture pages. With this software, you don’t need a website, you will be able to create beautiful funnels with a click and drag software. I am not very tech-savvy and I have found the software very easy to use. ClickFunnels has a 14-day FREE Trial.
The other software that is needed is an autoresponder.
This software collects the email addresses into a database. You are able to create different lists of people for different offers.
The autoresponder makes it very easy to schedule emails and broadcast newsletters to your whole list. You do not need to email each person individually. The software that I recommend is Aweber. The other autoresponder that works well for people who are just starting out is GetResponse.
Both of these companies have a 30-day free trial as well as many tutorials available and the software is very intuitive and easy to use. They are both easy to use and very similar in price. Just play around in the software and pick the one that suits you the best.
UPDATE: 4 FREE Autoresponders
In my efforts to provide great information to the people that follow my blog…I wanted to let you know that I have come across four autoresponders that have a free plan. There may be more than this but these are the ones that I am familiar with. I know when I first started my online business the cost of all of the tools really started to stack up. Having a free plan to start with would have made a big difference for me.
1: AWEBER
Aweber has now started a free plan. You will be able to use all of the tools and it is a free service up to 500 subscribers. After that, it goes to $19/month or $16.50/month if you pay annually. With the free plan, you get access to the tools you need to build your email list. I have found that Aweber is very intuitive and easy to use. They also provide tons of tutorials.
2: ConvertKit
ConvertKit is an excellent autoresponder. They have a version that is free for up to 1000 subscribers. Many people feel that you will get better deliverability with ConvertKit…meaning that it is less likely that your emails will end up in the spam folder. My one concern with the free version is that you are not able to set up email automation. This means that you can only do broadcast emails and are not able to schedule emails to go out on a daily basis.
I usually write and schedule all of my emails on the weekends when I have the time to work on my business. So you will need to weigh out better deliverability against not being able to do email automation. The lowest cost paid version runs $29/month. It may end out being a little less if you pay annually.
3: SendinBlue
You can get started with SendinBlue for free with no limit to the number of contacts that you can have. They do restrict you to 300 emails/day. So if you are sending daily emails you would only be able to have 300 subscribers. After that, the Lite version is $25/month. I have not personally used Sendinblue so I do not know if there are any other restrictions beyond the 300 emails/day.
4: MailerLite
The last one that I will mention is MailerLite. With this one is free up to 1000 subscribers. I signed up for a free account so that I could take a look at the back office. It appears that you get full functionality with the free version with is awesome. Even first level of the paid version is less expensive that some of the other services that I mentioned.
With many of the free services, you do not get full functionality or they restrict the number of emails that you can send. If you would like to see more behind the scenes of these free services I created a YouTube video on my channel. At the time that I made the video Aweber had not come out with their free version. This is a fairly new change.
In Closing:
You need to create an email list so that you can follow up with your subscribers and provide them with value and training. As you grow your email list you will be creating free traffic for your business. this is where you create profit for your business. If you cover the costs of your advertising with your front end over then everything that is sold after that would be profit.
If you are interested in learning more about this topic I highly recommend the 15-day business builder challenge. This challenge will teach you how to set up and grow your business the right way, lay a good foundation, and give you the blueprint for success.
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* If you purchase anything through a link in this article, you should assume that I have an affiliate relationship with the company providing the product or service that you purchase, and that I’ll be compensated in some small way at no extra cost to you.