Finding Potential Subscribers To Your Mailing List

Before anyone can sign up for or subscribe to your mailing list, they have to find you or you have to find them. The difference in how the initial point of contact is established is significant. For example, it is possible to buy lists of e-mail addresses from brokers and online list merchants. Some of these lists are incredibly cheap and they may therefore appear to represent good value. After all, even if you only generate 10 sign-ups from the purchased list of 10,000 e-mail addresses, that would still represent good value for $19.99. However, this is almost bound to end in tears! Sure, just looking at the numbers involved, you would expect to get at least a few new list subscribers. You are also likely to get 10 times as many spam complaints, as lists sold at such a rock bottom price have probably been built from non-authorized sources. In other words, most of the people on this list have been added to it without their consent or knowledge. To receive your invitation to subscribe to your mailing list will not be a welcome arrival in their e-mail in-box, no matter how good your offer or polite your mail is. It is nowadays a legal requirement that you include your name and physical mailing address in all your business e-mails, as well as a clear automatic unsubscribe link. Nevertheless, even if you do follow the letter of the law by including this additional information, you are still likely to get an awful lot of spam complaints, in addition to the people who will no doubt go out of their way to send you rude or abusive mail. There are some companies in the market who sell reasonable quality mailing lists, containing details of people who have responded to their advertisements and given them permission to pass on their name and e-mail address to business partners. The advantage of this arrangement is that there is a degree of consent for you to send your introductory e-mail or newsletter to them. The downside, however, is that the advertiser to whom they gave their original permission is probably involved in a business that is entirely different to your own. The so-called 'lead' is therefore totally non-targeted and therefore extremely unlikely to be at all interested in what you are offering. This means that using leads that you get from anything other than your own efforts is likely to be a complete waste of time! Creating your own leads Without doubt, the leads that you create through your own efforts are far more responsive and more valuable than those from a bought mailing list. This is inevitable, as you have dictated the terms that these people will join your list on in this situation, and this is effectively the first stage of your prospect filtering process. We have already established that the basis of creating your own mailing list is to capture site visitors' names and e-mail addresses. In order to do this, you need a two line form and an offer that entices a visitor to complete it and hit the subscribe button. Creating the form itself is a simple matter of filling in a few details in your auto-responder account, copying the HTML or JavaScript code that this creates, and pasting it into the appropriate position on the page where you want it to be featured. What's the gift? Before doing this, however, you must think about the gift that you are going to give away in order to entice your visitor into giving up their name and e-mail address. The first consideration is that the gift you give away must be appropriate and relevant to the topic or subject matter of your site. If your site is 'acne-treatment-preparation', then it is unlikely to be a very effective business building tool to give away a special report about keeping German Shepherd dogs or tuning Harley-Davidson motorcycles! In this case, you would have to give away something that will have no immediate appeal to your visitor, who is expecting to encounter acne related materials when landing on your website. The next consideration is, do you have a primary product that you are promoting through your site, and if so, what is it? This may give you an indication of the kind of free gift that would be most suitable to give away. For example, if your primary product is an e-book that you have written about traditional acne treatments, you could create a few extra pages that you could then give away as the 'leaked' hidden chapter. Are you creating the primary product yourself, or are you mainly promoting other people's products as an affiliate? If you are promoting as an affiliate, then it is important to understand that it is not smart to send potential buyers directly to the affiliate page. It is far more effective to create your own sales page for the affiliate product concerned, featuring, for example, an in-depth review and then offering a genuinely valuable bonus to anybody who buys the product from your page. You may want to give away a snippet or an extract of the valuable bonus so that your site viewer can get a real idea of the value of what it is you're offering as a 'bribe' to get them to buy through your link. The more accurately you target the gift to your potential site visitor, the more subscriptions you will enjoy.