Building A List That Takes Action

At times, doesn’t it feel like list building is like walking through an endless maze where it seems every turn you make ends up in a dead-end?

The first hurdle is getting traffic to your site.

Then you have to get a portion of that traffic to want to sign up to your list.

Next, you have to make it easy enough, compelling enough and valuable enough for them to hand over their email address…not a trivial task these days when most people online have been trained to ignore ads and opt-in forms. 

As if all of this was not enough, you need to find a way to both get the follow-up campaign delivered and make them relevant and interesting enough to get them to open your emails

Finally, you somehow need to work out the perfect balance of useful/valuable content and promotional material that works so ultimately your subscribers buy. 

No wonder there are so few people effectively marketing online…that’s a pretty challenging process right?

Sure enough, there are many people that have the traffic and perhaps even have the initlal lead-generation down, but then they find they can’t create a relationship with their list.

They won’t open the emails and of those that do, they are not actively engaged in commenting or responding to offers. 

Soon, they stop opening your emails altogether.  Now you have LOST them forever!

4 RULES OF EMAIL ENGAGEMENT

Fortunately, there are 4 techniques we have found to work best for making sure your followers, blog readers, content consumers DO take action and remain an active part of your community

1. FOCUS ON A HOT DESIRE

To begin with, your mind and your business must be focused on a specific market…and ever more important…the hottest, most desired transformation that your market wants, but has been unable to achieve.  Having this as your focus will mean you have the chance to become one of the most important parts of your prospect’s life…now that’s pretty compelling. 

2. IN THEIR LANGUAGE

When you market online you do not have the opportunity to read body language, repeat your messages in different ways or to change your dialog according to the silent feedback we so often do when we see who we are communicating with.  That means it is more important to know HOW your subscriber phrases the desires and frustrations they have…the closer you get to these, the more engagement you will have with your prospect.  We like to continually create ways for our readers and content consumers to submit feedback so we see THEIR WORDS…even if we know what they are going to say, it is worth GOLD to know how they will say it. 

3. WRITING LIKE YOU WOUL D TALK

Writing in a onversational tone is the single best piece of writing advice I have ever received…and it’s more important today given the content channels than it used to be.  Imagine your prospect has just asked you a very speciifc question about one part of their desired transformation, now imagine you are explaining the answer and write that down (or dictate it and get it translated).

4. HELPING NOT PROMOTING

Change your focus on promotion within your email campaign…instead think of it as helping your prospect with part of their transformation.   When I teach online marketing to new people I run through the tools we have found of most benefit when marketing online…the value I bring is that we have USED these tools for 4+ years operating multiple businesses online so we can save them time, lost dollars and lots of frustration by helping them quickly know how to find, setup and run these tools.  Find value to recommendations and you will no longer be promoting, instead you will be helping. 

Being on-target, using the language your prospects would use, coming across as a human instead of a marketer all will improve your list loyalty, engagement and ultimately will end up putting more money in your pockets. 

What question do you have around list building?