Why The Money is in The List
It's a common term bandied around Internet marketing circles, but knowing why the money is in the list is what's needed to motivate a person to make it happen.
Building an email list from scratch takes a lot of work and can become a little tedious at times, but if your goal is to make good money from the Internet, it is definitely worth the effort in the long run.
It's true that money can be made from a variety of different sources online, but few offer the consistency and resilience of a targeted email list of people that trust you.
Let's look at some of the prime reasons that the money really is "in the list."
Building a Trusting Relationship
The mechanics of list building can be simply boiled down to a set of tried and trusted steps, but it's how you work and interact with that list that determines how dynamic it is.
Creating a trusting dynamic is essential if you want to not only keep those emails on your list, but have them buying from you not just once but multiple times over the course of the years. You do that by making sure the emails you send out provide value to the recipients and not merely selling them offer after offer with every posting.
I like to write my emails so they come across as friendly and helpful, providing some value for the recipient. That value usually takes the form of sharing some information that might help them progress in their own journey to making money from their own endeavours on the Internet.
I generally work my list by sending a few conversational, value-packed emails spaced out a few days apart and then one with a suggestion of a newly released product or service that they might find useful if they buy it. No pressure sell, no scarcity or fake discounts, just the suggestion that the product may in some way be beneficial to them.
Then I follow with more conversational emails.
By not emailing every day, I avoid getting on people's nerves. I know I hate being emailed daily by someone I opted into. I also hate receiving a barrage of sales emails hard selling me or trying to make me "buy before the offer expires" or tactics like that.
Personally, I tend to opt-out pretty quickly if that's their tactics.
Since I don't want my list to start opting-out en masse, I do my best to keep my emails to a sensible post rate and only suggest they buy something every now and again.
Making Money with a List
Of course, I'm aware that there comes a point where too many conversational emails can have the adverse effect of annoying the recipients too.
The goal is, without doubt, to be making money off this list.
I like to approach this problem with a "softly, softly catchee monkey" technique. That is, keep them interested in receiving my emails by offering useful tips and info that might not be so easy to come by via mainstream sources, then every once in a while slotting in a potential sale item that they should find irresistible.
For sure it results in more work for me, because I need to keep crafting new emails to send out that don't sell anything or make me any cash, before I can release one that does. But my philosophy is that by keeping people on my list because they get something of value from reading my emails, I am growing a more loyal base of repeat customers for the long term.
There are plenty of super affiliates making money out there that will tell you how important it is to not only build a list but to keep it happy and productive long term.
Summary
Keeping a loyal customer base that buys from you when you suggest a product you personally recommend is the key to maintaining a cash-flow from an email list.
Loyal recipients are far less likely to want to opt-out because they don't want to lose out on the value your regular (but not too regular) emails provide them with, making them long-term customers. Any brick and mortar store will echo this sentiment, that their loyal, local customers are the lifeblood of their business.
So as you build your list, be sure to keep them on that list by providing value and engendering trust as your main objective with selling to them as a secondary aspect of your project.
After all, it's not so easy getting people to opt-in to a list. So you want to do your best to keep them there once you've got them to grow your list into a dedicated customer-base that you can rely on to keep the cash flowing in your direction!
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Posted on Sunday September 29, 2024 in the-list
