Strategies for cultivating a good relationship with your email list?

Don't be afraid to sell. You don't want to keep sending mails to people who only read them, instead of buy something on it.

Wow, 482k is a lot, great job buddy! Will you share with us what niche you are in?

To your question: Even though you might often hear that the best practice is to send 3 "value" emails vs 1 promotional email, I don't think there's a one-fits-all approach.

My advice is this: Treat your subscribers as if they were your real-life friends. Imagine them in that position. When composing emails for your lists, try to imagine your dearest friend right in front of the computer and while typing, be sure you are telling the truth and are completely honest with your list(s).

This approach has helped me build warm relationships with my lists. That's the key, being completely honest and telling the truth. If you don't know something or aren't sure about something, don't share with the list. Don't lie. Don't try to make up stories. Your subscribers will after some time feel that different nature of your emails and they will disregard you as someone trying to look like an expert but only faking it.

Instead, if all of your messages are structured the similar way and your message is clear and honest, they will love you and value your emails. They will know you are genuine and not trying to be anyone else. They will love your authenticity and follow anything you will try to sell to them.

Sounds to me like you have a list of freebie seekers and I would imagine it took a long time to build that list. Issues with building a list like this are two things that end up bitting you in the butt.

1. The list is only looking for free offers and they want everything for free from now on. If you pitch them something on sale your results are going to be very low if at all you could get a solid amount of unsubs as well.

2. Im sure its taken months if not years to build that large of a list. In doing so most of the list is prob dead or junk emails. If your using any solid auto responder that shows you open and click rates id be curious what your %'s are i would image they would be 3% or lower.

On a positive note to turn things around. I would offer something to the list selling them but make sure its honestly something good that's helpful and not some new hit junk on clickbank etc. Find a way to convert the ones that buy over into a new list so you now have a list of people you know who act and buy. Take extra care of this list and keep filtering between the freebies and the buyers.

i would focus on separating your freebies from people that have the ability to pay ie buyers

even if its only a $5 report

once you generate a list of buyers you can then offer them additional products and then send them deeper into your funnel

having a list the size of what you do have you should survey them first, this will give you a lot more information as to what to create a product around

paul

Segmenting the email list is a good idea so that we can give according to what they want. In my experience, giving freebies alone can't make our lists happy. Feeebie seekers is, has been and will be freebie seekers always.

Survey your list at least in 6 months, is a good idea to know the pulse of your lists.

The only freebie my list got was when they opted in, apart from that I only mail, once maybe twice a month with detailed reviews for 2 or 3 products. It sounds mad, but before I was sending tons of freebies and promotions and my open rae and CTR sucked! So I changed to what I'm doing now and built a new list, the only freebies they get is when I occasionally mail if I have found a blog or comments on a forum I think theyh would like to read! apart from that, thats it, and my open rates are massive. CTR rates are very high and my sales far exceed what they once were!

One of the main ideas when owning a list is to make them wait and want to read your emails. One of the techniques I'm using is to have a blog where I constantly add new content and since I'm making sure to only post quality information, when I email my list they know I'll have something of value to communicate to them and indeed the open rates are extremely high.

I always make a paid recommendation and the end of my post and this strategy simply works.

Mike.

A list of a 100 buyers is more worth than a list of a million freebie seekers, focus on people who are going to make you money. Put your massive list to work and throw an offer in there to get to your buyers.

All the best

Start mailing more frequently and what I do is have multiple autoresponder series inside of my autoresponder series (if that makes sense).

For example, when they signed up they may have gotten 5- 7 follow up emails with content, a soft sell, some more content etc. leading up to a product promotion ... Do this for each product you are selling.

The first email may bring up a new problem that you know they are facing..the second you can tell a story about how you was once facing this problem..third can be a soft sell..fourth can be a about a product that can help them overcome this problem..5 will be a hardsell..etc.

Doing this will allow you to connect with your list, provide solutions for them and lead to alot more sales all at the same time.