How important is your list to your overall income?

I think the power of building a list is that you control how you want to market to them - you dont have to buy their eyeballs anymore.

The important of having a list is be their friend, not as a seller which most of us don't like. Threat them properly. Provide them with free tips, ideas etc. Then if you have any affiliates product to sell/recommend to them, they will trust you and willing to purchase as they now believe in you. They know that the product you recommended is valuable as the tips provided to them.

Well said.

Think of a list as repeat, ultra-targeted traffic. It is the equivalent of Adwords traffic that you don't have to pay for. Why spend tons of money on traffic and SEO attracting visitors when you can bring your offer to them indefinitely or until they unsubscribe. All methods of traffic generation should be used to build the list. Once you have it, you nurture it and sell to it.

Thanks for all the input people. Very helpful.

A related question:

If you are selling your own product from a landing page, and this landing page includes an exit-popup to capture email address, what do you try to sell the prospects on?

Do you always first try to sell them on the product you were promoting on the website, or try other products first. Then later in the relationship, come back around to trying to sell the initial product?

I am thinking that if they didn't buy it the first time, why will they buy it the second time? Am I missing something here....?

Thanks

Research says that you will normally not make a sale until the 7th to 10th contact. So with this is mind, you really need to build the relationship with your list. How I market my main list (which is geared towards newbie IMs) is I basically just pretend they know nothing and try to educate them before trying to sell to them. For example, I offer a free ebook that details several ways to make money online for opting in to my list. This automatically lays a foundation. I also offer some backend products in the book as well.

I will wait a few days so they can actually read the book before I start emailing them. Now, on the first email I tell them all about myself and how I got started and how I am just a college student and not a professional marketer, but still earn enough to pay for tuition. By doing this i'm in essence selling myself but also it makes me a 'real' person. Maybe I will remind them of their son or grandson or brother.

And guess what? If I remind them of their favorite grandson they will listen to me. So I ease into them by telling them about affiliate marketing while refering them back to my site to read an article i wrote about affiliate marketing and traps to avoid failure, i also tell them about my own affiliate program and give them the link. I like to wait at least 3 to 4 days usually between contact but will space it out further at times. The reason I do this is to avoid bugging them. Because how many times have we opted in to a list and then by the end of 2 weeks we've already got at least ten emails from somebody and all of them trying to "Hard sell" us on something. I continue sending them 'education' emails with links to resources like how to get a free domain and hosting companies, etc. all of which I am affiliate of. I also try to redirect them back to my site as much as possible, usely by means of referring them to an article. So I'm making money and helping them w/o really selling. But of course I do also send them discounts and offers and what not to get them to purchase my own products and affiliate products but only sparingly. I try to educate them. I've also found that giving them free 'viral' e-books occasionally is helpful to both them and my affiliate sales.

So to wrap this up. By the time I contact them the tenth time they are educated (can't sell them something they know nothing about or dont know why they need it) and they trust me. They realize I'm not out to scam them and hopefully I remind them of their favorite and smartest grandson or whatever. I've found this too really be the key to my success.

Now, a sidenote of how to build the list. I do this a few ways:
I participate in giveaway events
I offer free products for opt in
I write articles and include a link to my opt in page
I write articles that pertain to the specific product i'm giving away and include a link to it
Adwords
Videos on youtube
Ad swaps/solo ads

I use aweber as my autoresponder and they have a good selection of templates that really make my emails stand out.

Hope some of this is helpful.

Great post Coby. The tip about telling them about yourself is so obvious but I somehow missed it with my own list...duh! Thanks for pointing that out.

Chris - I might take you up on that. But then again, I struggle to find the time to do what I do already let alone a blog on my progress lol! But a great idea!

Coby is right on the point! There is nothing more to say.

Simply put: 90% of my income comes from traffic who've entered my mailing list.

Getting a sale off a one-time or first-time visitor is super hard (typical conversions on a standard sales page is below 1%). That's why you must pre-sell them appropriately via your email sequence.

One thing I'm really trying to build more analytics around is *calculating expected lifetime customer value* - BEFORE HAND - since this is important when you are BUYING TRAFFIC.

Also, different traffic sources will generate different quality leads and also cost differently (i.e. different per subscriber acquisition costs)

Anyone have any ideas about expected lifetime customer value calculations when buying traffic or do you guys just go with the standard industry estimate of * $.50-$1/per subscriber per month in revenues?

Also, how do you guys go about calculating sales conversions? Do you do it per email or per month i.e. "if I send out x amount of emails per month I know that at least y% will translate into sales....or if I send out x amount of emails per day I know that y%will translate into sales

Tx

It is my friend. As long as you're offering a free offer and people are getting on the list, and you're building a relationship, it's like printing money. Of course don't abuse it!! Be real with your list and treat them right, they are going to really make you a lot of money.

i do everything old school as far as lists go. my main business is a service buisnes. every customer has a contact email. if im having a particularly slow day, i'll send out a special to all my customers. i have yet to fail to get some sales for that. so even though i don't have an autoresponder, i see alot of high value in having some kind of list of people interested in your products or services.

My list is a VIP notification list for when I have new sites available and sales are always very good after I send out a new notice. It's still a pretty small list, but very responsive.

The way you market to your list is essential on how responsive they are.

So its all on your efforts on how you market and manage the people on your list.

How are you communicating with your list?

Are you connecting with these people?

You can start by inviting them to your facebook and connect with them on a personal level.

Yes i agree to use article marketing.

The main thing about building a list is to keep building.

You only have your subscribers attention within the first 3-6 months.

Hope this helps
Craig

You can make money without a list. However, you don't really have a business without customers(list).

I love SEO but google flip flops everyday.
I use to love adwords but they have no love for internet marketers.(Especially in the IM niche)

If you have a responsive list you will never have a traffic problem or a money problem. You have an actual asset. Personally I would not even get into a market where I felt there was no need to build a list.

Listbuilding is vital to the stability and longevity of your business.

Don't let anyone tell you it's not important, and if you ask most successful marketers they would tell you, if they could change anything, they would have started building a list sooner.

Thanks for the compliments guys! I hope someone can benefit from my blabbing, lol.

I just wanted to stop by and leave a quick note on building a list. I got lucky when I first started because I only had a slight clue what I was doing but knew I needed to get a list so I offered a free product for opting in. As I became more experienced I realized the importance of the list and the relationship and noy just blasting sales messages away hoping for the best. It took me several months just to make one sale, but by that time I had a good start on a list and once it starts growing it keeps growing.

I also want to talk about giveaway events. I am currently participating in one and am getting around ten subscribers a day just from that and last I looked my gift was on page 12! yeah, one of the last pages and still getting that great of a response. Giveaways are kinda a hidden secret because ppl dont talk much about them but once I heard about them and tried them I was completely amazed at how easy it was to get subscribers. It can be hard though to get into your first event but just be creative. What I did was ask a couple of my buddies (not IMs or even interested in IMs) to sign up so I could get the points I needed to participate. This isn't exactly how they want you to promote the event but I had no other options. And it only takes a few friends to get enough points and the person running the giveaway still gets to add them to the list so everyone is happy.


Hope someone finds my information helpful.