Build Your Own Email Mailing List

By Martin Lee
Posted Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Building your own email mailing list is the most important thing to do after you have managed to attract traffic to your website. Most customers would not buy something from a website at their first visit. Usually, it takes repeated contacts before a sale can be made. This is because it takes time before a personal relationship can be formed. They have to trust you enough to feel comfortable buying anything from you.

Thus, obtaining their email address is crucial so that you are able to follow up with email marketing even if they do not return to your website. You do not want all that traffic to go to waste!

Here are some ways whereby you can build up your mailing list:

1) Offer information. This is the most common method used to get people to subscribe to your list. You can offer a free download, report, email course or email alerts. You can also provide a regular newsletter or ezine with relevant content that visitors to your website would be interested in.

2) Create a contest or survey with prizes attached. You can make use of viral marketing to spread the message. The way to do this is to offer incentives like "Recommend this contest to your friend and if he wins, you automatically win too" or "For every friend you recommend, you get another chance to win".

3) Don't forget about your customers too. Whenever someone buys something from you, ask them whether it's ok for you to send them valuable information and product updates from time to time. Most of them will say yes.

4) Make use of pop-up boxes that appear after visitors leave your site. Offer them a freebie (report, newsletter, etc) that you can send to their email address. In the past, this has proved to be extremely effective. However, with the increase in the use of pop-up blockers, this method is less effective but nevertheless still useful.

After you have your own email mailing list, always respect your subscribers. A few golden rules to follow:

1) Do not spam them with irrelevant offers.

2) Provide guidelines o­n the expected frequency and content of your emails when they signup and stick to it.

3) Provide a opt-out or unsubscribe instruction at the end of every email that you send.

4) Never sell the email addresses to another party.

I do not recommend buying any lists. First of all, you do not know where they come from. Some people have been known to 'harvest' email addresses from the web and sell them off as lists. Even if they are from a legitimate source, you can expect the conversion rate to be low as most of the recepients would probably treat any emails from an unknown source as spam and delete them without reading. With bought lists, your target audience might also be incorrect. For email marketing to work, the correct target audience must hear of you first (either from a website or by some other means) and sign up volunterily to receive your emails.

Keep o­n growing your list and treat the people o­n your list as gold. As your list builds up to a significant number, you will start reaping the returns.

About the Author
Martin Lee provides resources and articles o­n internet marketing and internet mlm opportunity at (http://www.internetmlm.net/) He is also involved in providing self-improvement seminars via elearning. Find out more at (http://www.skyquestcom.com/opportunity).