One of the key things touted online is the benefits of building a mailing list for your business. While it is easy to say, these days with so many companies asking for email addresses, people are no longer as willing just to give you their email address for nothing, they want to trade it. Give them something worthwhile and they will happily give it to you.
So now we know we are going to have to give them something of value, how can we do this without:
- spending a lot of money?
- spending a lot of time?
One of the best ways we know to build a mailing list is to provide free reports or online courses that can be delivered electronically. Setting up a system to manage and control this will mean that your mailing list will build itself without the need for management. Do the work once and the system will take care of the rest.
One system you can use to manage such an activity is an autoresponder system.
Simply put an autoresponder that will reply to a message that it receives or will send out a message at a predetermined time. An autoresponder is normally an email address that has a set of rules behind it to respond with an html or text message.
Using an autoresponder means you can:
- Automatically send out a PDF / DOC file to a request
- Add people automatically to a mailing list
- Drop users straight into a sequenced list of emails so they can receive information for you at a predetermined time. This allows you to make contact with a user every couple of days and can automate your marketing for you.
- The system also manages unsubscribes and takes care of all your list management issues for you.
Or all of the above, at the same time!
Our recommendation is to provide a multi-part course for two reasons
- It looks more valuable to the user
- It gives you a chance to have multiple touch points with a user before they become a client. (There are schools of thought out there that say online, it will take 7 or 8 contacts to turn a user into a client. Why not automate as many of these as possible?)
We recommend GetResponse or Mailchimp to all our clients, so do check those services out. Both will have some kind of free trial you can use to test the system.
But what do I write about?
Most of the time, users visit your site to get information, so give it to them. Write a 5 or 7 day course about one of your product offerings. Or if you can, segment your mailing lists by creating a course for each of your main products. This way your mailing lists will be much more responsive.
We tend to use a formula shown below to create a course:
- Day 1 What is it and why is it important
- Day 2 Product options / types
- Day 3 Things to look out for
- Day 4 Cost saving tips
- Day 5 Wrap it all up summary
This should give you a framework. We create messages that are no more than 500 words long so it makes the information easy to digest and readable. We also like to try and give the reader an action step in each day so they can get a quote, pick up the phone and ask questions, visit a website, that kind of thing.
Automating your list building in this way is a great tool to improve your response times and allows you to develop a relationship with a potential client without the need to “be there” in the initial stages. You are pre-selling yourself to the client and also educating them at the same time. In our experience, the enquiries we get off the back of our courses are twice as likely to become clients.
What’s more, those that don’t become clients can still be monetised by offering additional services or referring them to online solutions to earn income, such as affiliate programmes.
On top of all this is the added value and calls to action you can get site visitors to take when they read your content. Adding signup boxes and forms on your site pages and blog posts is a great way to get the most out of your website traffic.
Don’t have the time but see the benefits for your business?
We can prepare and deliver course for you. We have three options:
- You can buy one of our pre-written courses on one of your topic areas and you deliver it yourself.
- You can have us write a totally bespoke course based on your requirements
- You can buy our full management and creation package – we write the course and deliver it using our autoresponder system. This removes any headaches and saves you time.
