by Charles George
When it comes to building an engaged, responsive email list, there are three distinct phases.
Each phase is essential, and while some people only focus on building the list, you need all three phases to create a responsive, profitable email list.
So let’s look at each phase.
Phase 1 – Build Your List
Building your list is the first phase of building a profitable email list. There are three components to building your list.
- Identify Your Audience
– The first part of building an engaged list is identifying your audience.
– Who is your ideal customer?
– Who is the person that you want to be of service?
– Who can you help the most?
These are some of the questions you need to answer when identifying your ideal customer.
Understanding your ideal audience and your customers can correlate to anywhere from 40 – 60% of the success of a marketing campaign.
So you definitely want to make sure you know who you’re trying to reach and why.
b. Lead Magnets and Landing Pages
Lead magnets are items provided in exchange for a person’s contact information. They can be reports, checklists, videos, ebooks, audio files, or anything else an ideal audience finds valuable.
Make sure your lead magnet leads to the next step in your customer journey.
The lead magnet delivers value and solves a problem. Solving that particular problem creates a new problem that the product solves.
Landing and thank you pages are simply the pages on your site where people can opt-in to download the lead magnet.
The landing page is where people enter their name and email address to get the lead magnet. The thank you page is where subscribers download the lead magnet.
Make sure the copy on your landing page talks about the benefits of the lead magnet. And make sure it calls out to the audience you want to attract.
The lead magnet should also be specific to the audience you want to attract.
c. Traffic
The third component of the audience is traffic.
How will you get traffic to the landing page for people to optin to your email list?
There are free ways and paid methods to get traffic.
My favorite free ways are guest blogging, newsletter swaps, and being guests on specific podcasts in your niche.
Paid methods require you to invest money but can be more consistent. My favorite paid methods are affiliate marketing and sponsored emails.
Dividing the number of people who optin by the total traffic that visits the page will reveal your landing page optin rate.
This is important because if you are paying for traffic (or even free traffic), you want to maximize the conversion rate.
Traffic and conversion rates are both essential to building a list.
Phase 2- Engage
Once people are on your list, then the next thing you need to do is engage them.
Engagement starts the moment they optin to your list.
It starts with your promise on your landing page, the copy on your thank you page, etc.
Next, what does your welcome email contain?
Does it welcome the new subscriber to your list and set expectations for the relationship?
Does it deliver on your promise and provide access to the lead magnet?
These are all key steps to engage your list.
Other things you need to consider for an engaged list are:
– How often do you send emails?
– What are you going to say in your emails?
– How are you going to deliver value?
Finally, what are the different types of emails you will send?
The best way to engage a list is to plan your emails, content, and offers.
The content you send to your list greatly affects how engaged the list is.
Specific Engagement Metrics to Track
Metrics that you can monitor to ensure your list is engaged are open rates and click-through rates.
If people are opening and clicking your emails, then you know the content that you’re providing is valuable to your list.
Other metrics that you can monitor are your unsubscribes. Almost every email sent will have some unsubscribes, but tracking your unsubscribes will let you know if there was content that did not resonate with your audience.
For instance, if one email has a considerable number of unsubscribes, then you can determine what your audience didn’t like about the email.
Remember, conversion happens after people click, and an engaged list naturally leads to conversion.
Phase 3 – Convert
The third phase of a responsive and profitable email list is conversion.
Conversion is when you convert prospects into paying customers.
Conversion is almost always the third phase of a thriving email list.
If you build your list correctly, with subscribers interested in your content, converting them into paying customers can be easier.
Conversion starts with the people you attract to your list.
Are you attracting tire kickers or people who are ready to buy?
Remember that conversion can happen quickly, but nurturing the relationship and building trust takes time.
Plus, the higher the priced product often, the more trust is needed.
Higher-priced products can require more content, social proof, testimonials, case studies, etc.
Ultimately, the more trust you have with your list, the easier it is for conversion.
How much good will do you have with the list?
Build, Engage, and Convert
So when building your list, remember to track your open, click-through, and conversion rates.
Remember, open and click-through rates are signs of engagement that lead to conversion. Conversion always happens after people click. Finally, the other metric to track for a successful email list is the number of new subscribers each day.
If you are building, engaging, and converting subscribers, you are on your way to owning one of the most valuable assets a business can possess.
Soon, you will own a responsive, profitable email list.
Leave a Reply