List building profits

LIST BUILDING PROFITS BUILD YOUR LIST THE RIGHT WAY Jonathan Leger

COURTESY OF LEARNFROMJON.NET - PRIVATE BUSINESS COACHING FROM A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR INTERNET MARKETER + ACCESS TO PREMIUM AND EXCLUSIVE TOOLS!

1 © Copyright 2015

“The money is in the list.”

You probably already know that you should be building an email list if you're doing business online. All marketers preach it (including me) because it's true – but there's a catch. You have to be building your email list the right way, and you have to manage and treat your email list the right way, or it won't do you much good.

So how do you do that? What's the “right” way to build and care for a list so that it pays off for you in the long run? That's the focus of this report.

3 © Copyright 2015

WHO WANTS A SKINNED CAT ANYWAY? Another saying goes that “there's more than one way to skin a cat” (though who would want to skin a cat, and what the purpose of a cat's skin is has always eluded me). The same is true with how you build and manage an email list. Each one has its pros and cons. I'll discuss the three most common ones. The last one I discuss will be the method I personally use.

The three methods of list-marketing are:

1.

Churn and Burn

This is probably the most common method used – and not just in Internet Marketing, but by business in general. It involves sending nothing but promotional emails to your list.

2.

Slow and Steady

This method is the opposite of Churn and Burn. It's where you almost never send a promotional mailer at all. Rather, the products and services you want to sell are linked to naturally within informational emails that you send. This is probably the least used method (you'll see why in the details).

3.

Constant Quality

This is a hybrid of #1 and #2. You send out a lot of informational emails with promotions in between. This one has been my go-to method for years, and for good reason (more information on why in the details).

4 © Copyright 2015

BUILDING THE LIST Before you can market to your email list, you have to have an email list. So before I get into the details of how to skin the proverbial cat, let's talk about the methods you can use to build up an email list first. There are multiple ways to do this, too.

I'll list the most common ones in order from the worst method to the best method.

1. SPAM

This is a very common method used for email marketing. It's illegal in a lot of countries, and it's not very effective, but your SPAM folder likely attests to the fact that it's very, very popular.

Back in the early days of the Internet, unsolicited email wasn't called SPAM. It was just unsolicited. It was also very effective (much like the junk mail you probably get in your mail box – if it didn't work companies wouldn't spend the money to send it).

Now, though, SPAM is highly ineffective. I'm sure it still gets some results or people wouldn't do it, but SPAM filters are just so good now (at least Gmail's is—I can't remember the last time any SPAM email actually made it to my inbox).

It may be tempting, but don't do it. Especially if you live in a country where

5 © Copyright 2015

it's illegal, all it will do is get you in a lot of trouble. Put your money and effort into something that will work well long-term. You have been warned.

2. Rented Lists

Some people don't want to take the time to build an email list, so they buy or rent one instead. There are some big problems with this method, though.

The first problem is verifying that the people on these lists actually opted-in.

How do you know that they really asked to receive these offers? You're taking the selling company's word for it – but it's your backside on the line (legally speaking) if they didn't really do that. So if you're going to do this you better do your homework and make absolutely sure these are verified opt-ins.

But let's say that all of the email addresses were, in fact, opted-in properly.

How do you know that those addresses are any good now? How do you know if people ever check those email addresses? Honestly, if you were opting into something for free information and suddenly got bombarded with email from people you don't know with offers you weren't interested in, would you keep using that email address? Probably not.

Even if all of the emails are opted-in and they are all verified as real, active email addresses, how many people do you think are going to buy something from somebody they've never heard of—especially since you have no idea if

6 Š Copyright 2015

they're even interested in what you have to offer?

Overall, bad idea. It seems like a quick way to get started, but logically it just doesn't make much sense.

3. In Exchange For Information

For most people starting out, this is the most common (and the best) way to get people onto your email list. Give them valuable information in exchange for giving you the right to send them email.

Having people double-opt in is usually best (that's where they give you their name and email and you send a link for them to click to that email address to make sure they really own it).

This method makes sense. The people who are getting on your list are doing so voluntarily. They are targeted – they asked for information on a certain topic so you know they're interested in that topic. Legally you're covered because you have their consent to email them. They're expecting you to email them!

The only downside to this method is that you get a lot of tire-kickers and freebie seekers. They want what you're giving for free, but may not be interested in anything else. Given how little it costs you to build the list this way, though, it's a great way to get started (and something you should

7 Š Copyright 2015

continue to use even once you're successful).

4. Contacting Customers

I am not an attorney – so don't take what I say in this section as legal advice.

Emailing existing and past customers is by far the best way to build your email list. In the United States (which is where I'm based) you have the right to email anyone that has a business relationship with you until they tell you not to email them anymore.

So anytime somebody buys one of my products or services they are immediately put on my email list (the new autoresponder system I'm using that will be available to LearnFromJon.net members for free makes it easy to do that). I have the right to do that in the USA, and they can unsubscribe at any time by simply clicking a link in the email.

Existing and past customers are the best list members because they've already proven they're not just tire-kickers or freebie seekers. They've put their money where their mouth is, so to speak. They obviously have a degree of trust in you because they've bought your product(s). Getting a happy customer to buy again is much, much easier than getting somebody on your list who's never bought from you to take a chance and become a customer.

8 Š Copyright 2015

I see a lot of vendors who ask customers to opt-in on a thank-you page rather than just adding them to their email list. They feel like it's “safer” to ask permission. I used to do that, too. But according to United States law they have already given you permission by buying from you (again, I'm not an attorney). It's up to you, but I haven't had any problems. The vast majority of people will simply click the unsubscribe link if they aren't interested in what you send them.

So if you're selling products already but aren't immediately adding customers to your email list, you're seriously missing out on your profit potential.

9 © Copyright 2015

LIST MARKTING METHOD #1: CHURN AND BURN Once you've got a growing list, the next step is to market to that list. A very common method of list-marketing is the “churn and burn” method. This method is simple: email promotional material to the people on your list – and not much else.

Does this method work? Yes, to a degree. It works a lot better if your list members are customers and not just people who opted-in for free information.

You have some of your contacts' trust already, so they're more likely to buy.

The advantage of this method is that it's easy. You can just send promotion after promotion without ever really getting to know the people on your list or taking the time to build up helpful information. I can tell you from experience that being willing to respond to emails from people on your list and writing up reports like this one and the others you've received from me requires a lot of time and work.

The churn and burn method frees you from all of that labor.

There are a few problems with this method, though. The first problem is that you lose the attention of our list members much, much faster. They learn quickly that every email you send is a promotion. They also learn quickly that you're not interested in their success – just your own bottom line. That means they won't trust you much.

10 © Copyright 2015

With big corporations we expect that. When you get on an email list for your local car dealership you expect them to send you emails about deals on new cars, and when it's time for you to get an oil change or specials on other maintenance, etc.

You know that's what's going to happen. It's what you expect. And, of course, you ignore the vast majority of those emails (or just opt-out). If one happens to catch your eye, great for them, but it doesn't happen often.

The second problem with this method comes as a result of the first problem.

Because you lose your lists' attention fast, you have to continually work to add new subscribers to your list as quickly as possible to maintain sales. That's because you're not likely to get a lot of repeat customers. That's the “burn” part of “churn and burn”.

You can make a lot of money quickly using this method, but as a long-term method it doesn't work well unless you can continually add a stream of new optins fast. Some people can, and so they do well with it, but it requires a lot of work.

You'll have low open rates and even lower conversion rates.

11 © Copyright 2015

LIST-MARKETING METHOD #2: SLOW AND STEADY I like to call the second list-marketing method “Slow and Steady”. With this method you almost never send out strictly promotional emails. Once in a blue moon, sure, but mostly you just send a lot of great information to people.

The way you make money with a list like this is by including links to your products or to products that you're an affiliate for within the content of the emails you send out. This is done naturally.

So, for instance, if your list is about gardening and you send people information on how to care for a rose garden, you would use affiliate links to send people to the various products that you use to take care of your own garden.

The benefits of this method are high open rates and long-term retention of the people on your list. With the churn and burn method people are conditioned that everything you send will be a sales pitch. With slow and steady they are conditioned that everything you send will be helpful information. So naturally people are going to open and read your emails much more often.

The downside of this method is that its short-term profitability is low. Since you never focus people's attention on an offer, you only earn from the few people

12 © Copyright 2015

who click-through and buy from you. Even if 2-3% of people do that, you'll either need a very large list or a very high profit margin on the products that you sell to earn a lot of money.

There is an exception to this: memberships. If your product is a monthly membership, then converting one person will earn you money every month that they stay subscribed to the service. In that case a low conversion rate pays off well in the mid-term (as long as the membership is good enough to keep people subscribed).

My LearnFromJon.net membership is an example of this kind of success. I've gotten two dozen new LearnFromJon.net members in the past 7 days just by sending out these informational emails that are branded with that name. Two dozen new members is around $750 in net profit. At that rate I'm looking at about $3,000 a month in new memberships if I can sustain it, so that by the end of one year the new members coming only from the informational mailers will be earning me close to $40,000 a month.

So memberships can work very well. But again, the membership has to be able to convert readers into buyers and then retain those buyers as members long-term.

13 Š Copyright 2015

LIST-MARKETING METHOD #3: CONSTANT QUALITY The marketing method that I personally use is a hyrbid of the first two methods. I send out a lot of quality information that lead people to LearnFromJon.net and also periodically send promotional emails.

I'm leaning more heavily toward sending out the informational emails lately simply because I have a lot of paying customers on my list and I would like them to become members of LearnFromJon. LFJ is my focus this year, and that's proving to be a very good move, but I'm still sending promotional emails as well.

To me this hybrid approach makes the most sense. Yes, you can and should earn the trust of your list by sending quality information that they can use. Yes, you should avoid pitching products very hard in those emails. But if there's a product or service that you really believe in and that you have proven works well, it's a benefit to your list members to tell them about it and get them to buy.

Will you lose subscribers that way? Absolutely, and that's the downside of this method. But you'll mostly lose the tire-kickers and freebie seekers – as long as you're providing quality information in-between. This is the method of listmarketing I have always used because it has always made the most sense to me.

I get people who don't want to seem salesly or pushy. That makes sense. But if I

14 Š Copyright 2015

needed work done on my car and my neighbor knew somebody who was an awesome mechanic I'd want him to tell me about it – and I wouldn't care if that meant he got some kind of benefit from the mechanic for referring me.

I don't promote anything I haven't seen first-hand results with, either personally or from a member of my senior staff who I asked to evaluate it. We have to prove that a tool or service has value before I'll ever offer it to my email list. I don't want to lose credibility by sending out emails about stuff that doesn't work.

Of course not everybody is going to use a tool or service properly, and not all products work well in all situations, so sometimes you're going to lose some credibility anyway with certain people on your list. For me, though, that's where always having an iron-clad money-back guarantee comes into play. If people know they can get their money back if something doesn't work, they're much less likely to hold that against you. So be sure that anything you decide to promote does have a guarantee like that.

15 Š Copyright 2015

PROOF THAT MY METHODS WORK Like I said, I always like to prove that what I'm telling you is true, so let me give you some screenshots that demonstrate that my list-building and list-marketing methods really work:

This is the same image from the title page of this report. It shows you my recent activity in my custom-written autoresponder (which LearnFromJon.net members will get for free).

You can see that I get a lot of opt-ins. I also get a lot of opt-outs (though much of the opt-outs shown here came from recently importing all of my paying customers and some of them deciding they'd rather not get additional emails from me).

16 Š Copyright 2015

This back-and-forth tends to keep my list size at around 60,000 individuals.

Obviously I know how to build a list.

But is my list responsive? Do they open the emails and click the links? Take a look at another screenshot:

In the last 30 days 21,322 different people have opened the emails I've sent (that number isn't the total number of opens, it's the number of people on my list that opened at least one email). That means that about 37 percent of my list members have read at least one of my emails in the last 30 days. That's incredibly high! (I just started using my new autoresponder system in the last 30 days, which is why the 60 / 90 / all time numbers are the same as the 30 day.)

In addition to the 37% open rate, about 24 percent of people are clicking-through to the offers I'm linking out to or to the PDFs I send. Again, that's incredibly high!

17 Š Copyright 2015

When I do promotions for other people's products they're always amazed at how well I do just by sending a few emails. That's because I work hard to earn the trust of the people on my list. Churn and burn is not for me. But then, neither is never sending promotional emails to my list members for products and services I believe in.

18 Š Copyright 2015

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO SOMETHING! It's up to you to decide how you're going to build and market to your email list.

But whatever you do, do something. I can't believe how many people write to me and say that they haven't “gotten around to” building a list! You're robbing yourself of profits every day that you're not building a list, and you're preventing people from benefiting from the knowledge you can share with them as well.

People join and stay on email lists because it benefits them. You need to create and market to an email list because it benefits you. It's a win-win situation. People who disagree that it's win-win will opt-out – but you have to give them the chance to do so by having a list to begin with.

So get busy building your list and winning their trust. In fact, don't send any promotional emails to new list members until you've sent them a lot of quality, useful information first. Build the trust in advance of a promotion and your promotion will do much, much better.

Here's to YOUR list-building success!

Jonathan Leger

COURTESY OF LEARNFROMJON.NET - PRIVATE BUSINESS COACHING FROM A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR INTERNET MARKETER + ACCESS TO PREMIUM AND EXCLUSIVE TOOLS!

19 © Copyright 2015