List building is in my opinion one of the best forms of online marketing which a high proportion of webmaster simply ignore. List building is simply the process of building an opt-in email list from those who visit your site. You simply offer a “hook” to your visitors to opt-in to your list. The hook can be in the form of free information such as free sports betting tips, to an entry in a private poker tournament.
- The success of your list building depends on three key aspects.
- The quality of the “hook”.
- The quality of the sales pitch promoting the hook.
- The quality of the follow up emails.
It’s common sense to realise that the “hook” must be something the users really wants. You really need to entice the users to go the extra mile and enter their email address which is not such an easy task as you would imagine. Think about your own experiences encountering email opt-in forms that appear on websites. How many have you subscribed to from perhaps thousands you have seen?
Form experience I’m not keen on pop-up email opt-in forms or those annoying scripts that float an opt-in form across the screen. Most of these I will close without even reading the promo text. Also it is a fact that the more information you request on your opt-form, the fewer the numbers of subscribers. At the very most you only need their name and email address although even the name is not really required. Add extra fields such as location, date of birth, sex etc and you are simply destroying your sign up rate.
Aweber offer a great list building package for less than $20 a month. They also have a large range of templates so that your emails look and feel professional. IMO Aweber is second to none for email marketing. If you are on a tight budget then why not use a free script such as the WordPress Email Capture Plugin. This script is simple to set up plus of course will give you the option to try our list building for free.