Off the Web, mail marketing is hated by customers. It’s unwanted, uninvited and stuffs mail boxes. But it’s pretty clear that it’s also incredibly popular with advertisers. Why? Because while most potential customers toss away their junk letters with barely a glance, enough take action to make it all worthwhile. They do buy—and in high enough numbers to more than cover the cost of those who don’t.

Email marketing is pretty similar, but with one important difference: on the Web, you can only send marketing emails to people who have already chosen to receive them. A bit tricky. On the other hand, because those people have already chosen to receive your emails, you can be confident that they’re going to buy.

We will read how to produce marketing material that gets results!

Collecting Opt-In Email Addresses

Email is still the most popular and most used application on the Internet. It’s also an efficient means of distributing your message to large numbers of people who have requested that information. As a form of marketing, it generates high response rates—and gives you measurable results with instant feedback.  

But because email marketing been so abused, it’s just not accepted any more to send emails to people who haven’t chosen to receive them. Bust that rule, and there’s a good chance you’ll be out of business. That gives you the problem of building up a list of willing subscribers.

When you’re first starting out, there’s often a temptation to simply purchase an opt-in email list. Lots of people sell them and you can easily pick up a million or so addresses for just a few bucks. But while that may appear to be a fast, easy way to build up customers, the names on the list may not be up to date, or even opt-in contacts at all. You could well find yourself inadvertently spamming. 

Similarly, there are also programs that surf the Net, recording every email address they find. These will let you quickly build up a huge list of e-mail addresses—none of whose owners will thank you when you stuff their inboxes with marketing material. Forget about them; they’re not worth the effort. It’s much safer, and much more effective, to take the time to build your own list. 

Double Opt-in

Marketing by e-mail can attract new customers, keep existing ones, upsell, cross-sell, and cut costs. E-merchant Wine.com, for example, found e-mail campaigns drove twice as many “best prospects” to their site compared to banner ads or other Internet marketing programs.

If executed improperly though, e-mail campaigns can backfire with disastrous business consequences. How to minimize the risk and maximize the return? Part of the answer is a common sense approach called “permission” or “opt-in” marketing, in which customers or prospects volunteer to receive e-mail.

The odds of users joining a list can be improved by providing three opt-in opportunities, all with low entry barriers. First, there should be minimal sign-up work. Many sites require only an e-mail address; all other personal information is optional. Second, there should be several sign-up opportunities on a site, including on the inquiry, order, and feedback forms. These forms may use a checkbox asking prospects if they would like to receive occasional special offers/newsletters by e-mail. If so, it must be placed conspicuously on the form. Third, a privacy policy that addresses what will be done with user information should be posted in an obvious place.

Continuing on the lines of “opt-in” marketing, one of the most successful methods is the double opt-in technique. In double opt-in a user elects to receive e-mail newsletters or standalone commercial messages. A confirmation e-mail is sent to that user, who is not required to take further action to be included on the list. The confirmation e-mail includes an opportunity to unsubscribe or opt out.

Although, the double opt-in techniques runs the risk of losing subscribers during the confirmation process, it gives the subscribers more control and thus, has proven to be more successful. That said, here are some measures e-mailers who practice, or are considering, double opt-in can take to reduce confirmation drop-offs.

1. When a user enters his address, mention an e-mail will be sent to him and include its estimated arrival time. Indicate the user is required to respond to that message to receive subsequent mailings. With transactional customers, consider placing this information on the page with order confirmation.

2. Ideally, a confirmation message is sent immediately. It should be sent while the subscription is fresh in subscribers’ minds and they’re still engaged in an online session. If you notify them it will be within a day or two, make sure you follow through on that promise. If your systems are slower, then requirements related to message content are even more relevant.

3. If you need a confirmation, that’s the only thing you should ask for. Explain to users they will not be added to the list until they take the necessary action. Most desirable is a one-click confirmation link embedded in the message. Giving users a reply option with subject line intact is another good approach. Requiring them to write something in the subject line or body of the message or asking them to forward the e-mail on to another address is not as effective. Ensure the brand is clear, the list subscription is identified, and contact information is included. It’s also a good idea to link to your privacy or e-mail policy.

One of the most frequently asked questions, in the online marketing scene, that comes especially from people who haven’t created their own products yet is how do I build my list. Everyone has grasped the concept of building your own media outlet, that you can promote to again and again without having to pay a penny, that usually consists of the most targeted people, and those who are going to buy your products on the grounds of trust and the quality of your previous work.

And that right there is the key to it all. By the time you have your own list that stretches over the five thousand mark, you should at least have one product, and the majority of people should have come from the promotion of that product. Avoid anything that asks you for cash to put subscribers on your list, because, if you haven’t tried them already, let me assure you that compared to what you can achieve through joint ventures and other means, the quality of the list will suffer although not necessarily it’s size. As we talked about above however, it’s the quality that matters for both your current promotion and your future promotion. Size is definitely not everything here.

The ways in which we’re building your list don’t involve direct methods. Something that you can plug money into to, wake up in the morning and suddenly have a massive responsive list to promote to. Agreed you might end up with a massive list but they’ll be far from responsive.

Concentrate your efforts on promoting your products and at the same time, whatever action someone takes through your sites, make sure that they end up on one of your lists. If we look at things this way, all it takes is for them to either buy something, signup for something, jump into some follow-up, join your affiliate program and so on.

Never create anything that allows customers to go through the sales process on your site, or any process at all for that matter, and then lose contact with them. This is not the way to do things. Of course, speed is also an issue for many people out there. I’m sure you don’t want to be hanging around only to find a few years later that your list has only reached two or three thousand subscribers.

You want a lot, you want a big list and you want it quickly. I understand how it is and I hate waiting for things to build up over time too. This is exactly why we make sure that everything you do, related to your site, involves collecting names and email addresses for your list at some point or another.

Let’s look at some numbers starting off with the simple joint ventures. Say for example you score a joint venture that brings you two thousand visits from someone’s personal list. Now with standard e-zines I can understand how you might not see this as being much, as the number of people who subscribe, compared to the number of people that visit, can indeed be lower than you expect. But through joint ventures, with these quality lists, I’ve seen subscription rates top one in three, and it’s not unusual for at least 25% of your visitors to subscribe to something if your sales copy is doing it’s job.

That may not seem like a lot right now, but let’s say you take ten joint ventures and manage to pull in a list of 5k, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem if the quality of your JV’s is nice and high and you get a good number of visits. A 5k list is all great, and you’ll also be making money through sales on those joint ventures. Although when you start to couple in your affiliate commissions that you make sure are real high, in fact, so high that you may not even be making a direct profit, the resources will sail in.

This is your profit. Not the money from the sales, but the resources that you’re building. This is why you gave up $50 per sale, and it’s your affiliates coupled with joint ventures that are going to, if you’ll excuse the cliché, set your list building on fire, not just numbers wise, but speed wise.

Every single time you release a new product, you’re going to be adding more and more people to your lists that you can promote to and have promote for you. It’s another snowball effect, which is great because this means that you know the more you put in, the more you’re going to get out, and every single product that you release will increase your resources, your list size included, and will add to your promotion power for future products. Thus you’ll make a whole load more cash than you would have done by other means and methods.

Before we move on I want to make one hundred percent sure that you understand how this works. People create their own list building sites that are geared directly to building their lists. This is great, it works, but when guides tell you that you should concentrate all your efforts on building your list, it kind of makes me a little bit angry sometimes, for the simple reason that they’re not giving you the whole story by far.

It’s ok to look at list building as one of your main priorities, and indeed it should be, along with building affiliates, customers, long term customers and joint venture prospects, but for it to be successful, you have to integrate it into your other marketing methods, and this is what most fail to tell you.

Once you’ve mastered this and understand, again, how each of these resources tie into each other, and cannot be seen as separate entities, you’ll start to see bigger and better results, and they will come more quickly too. Now if you think about what I’ve just told you, and step back, you should be able to see immediately how this isn’t a case of go out and get as bigger list as possible, as quickly as possible, on your own. This is what many guides teach, but as with the success of the whole system it’s tying resources in together through the launch of your own products.