Combating List Building Frenzy: Take The Time To Promote

By Dan J. Fry
Posted Tuesday, December 14, 2004

It is an accepted fact among the experts now that online marketing succeeds only with a quality, highly targeted permission email list in place. As a result, the multi-level marketers have pounced on this and everywhere you look another "matrix" lead generating system springs up.

There is no doubt that these are powerful techniques offering the advantage of building your subscriber base while basking in profits simply from growing your list. This is a best-of-both worlds sorts where the very thing that you are promoting is one in the same with what you are building -> your list.

For "newbie" marketers, it is easy to get caught up in the frenzy since one is desperately hungry to build a subscriber base and actually see the first profits rolling in. However, with working on an initially limited advertising budget, the monthly charges to stay in the "matrix" can take a substantial bite out of other advertising resources.

What is one to do? Can you build a list with highly targeted subscribers, subscribers who are craving for your information, at relatively low cost? The answer: yes, but it takes time.

For those just starting out this is a double-edged sword. You want profits soon, but also want profits to continue to come in. The problem here is that the two are contradictory. They straddle two opposite sides of the fence so to speak.

*Consider the following scenario:

Suppose you have a large subscriber base that trusts your opinions and judgments. On Friday you send to your list a promotion for which you either own the product or are an affiliate. Now suppose that your list is 3000 subscribers in size, your conversion rate is 5% (pretty good) and your profit per sale is $99. That amounts to $14,850 in sales from one campaign! Not bad, not bad. I could easily live with this kind of return.

Now lets take another scenario. You are just starting out, understand that building a list is of utmost importance, but really want to start making profits quickly. You purchase 600 leads advertised as "quality double opt-in MLM". You then quickly blast away your promotion. Approximately 0.5% (note that this is an order of magnitude less than the first example!) actually make the purchase - 3 out of 600, which is not a very good conversion. But hey, you paid $100 for the leads, made $297 in sales, for a $197 ROI! Just starting out, you become giddy and sort of euphoric at the profits you have just made.

All excited, you blast away another promotion the following week. But this time you only receive a single sale. Uh oh! What's going on? So in a panic you only wait 3 or 4 days and try to re- promote. But, over the next few days, not only do you see no sales, over half of your subscribers cancel their subscription.

*Question: What happened?

Your subscribers don't know you. In all likely hood the sales you made were nothing more than pure luck. Within your list you will undoubtedly have a few people who are really serious, perhaps a bit frivolous with their money, and will buy immediately. But you have absolutely no relationship with your subscribers. They simply looked at your second promotion and said "I don't know who this is, but they keep sending me emails", and cancelled.

What has happened here is the marketing analogue of the biochemical "quick fix" you get when eating a candy bar to curve your hunger. It works great initially, but you crash hard shortly after.

*Solution?* Take your time building your list!

One thing that I cannot stress enough is the time between sign up and first contact. When you buy lists, although sellers usually advertise only a few days old, you get addresses of people who don't even remember what they initially signed up for. I don't know about you but if I receive emails from people that I don't remember, it gets canned immediately. Being that over 150 million people are on the internet today, and are constantly hit with advertisement after advertisement, can you really be surprised that after a few days they really can't remember what they signed up for. The information age has catapulted us from one extreme to the next: information no load to information overload. So, you absolutely must make contact immediately after sign up.

There is another very important reason for the quick follow up after sign up - building credentials. People will be much more likely to stick with you if they think "hey, I signed up and immediately received a response. This person cares." And you should care. If your serious about developing an online business you should care about your contacts and you should supply them with valuable information. To succeed first take the time to promote and build a quality list. Profits will come in due time.

About the Author
Dan J. Fry is an independent researcher and owner of e-Kinetic.com, a site devoted to providing resources for small budget home businesses. He has a PhD in Physics, two daughters and two cats. Subscribe to his free E-Zine on home business resources at mailto:e-kinetic@GetResponse.com or by visiting his site at (http://www.e-kinetic.com). He can be reached at mailto:comp@e-kinetic.com . The article autoresponder address is mailto:reprint004@e-kinetic.com .