Has listbuilding lost it's effectivness?

No it most certianly has not, quite the opposite!

It's lost it's effectiveness if you try and push the same junk everyone else has tried pushing which has led to consumers being wary about giving their email addresses.

However, if you offer REAL value consumers will be more than willing to part with their email. Offer REAL value and they will be more than willing to part with their cash too.

Well I sometimes give my email for the freebie then I unsubscribe.

I wouldn't say list building has lost its effectiveness. The subject line of an email has got to be enticing and arouse curiosity. That helps the open rate. Take a look at some of the subject lines from the emails you recieve from some of your fellow marketers for ideas.

I'm still thinking list building works well. As long as you give a real value there and having remarkably attractive persuasion sentences around within a package.

List building has not lost its effectiveness. However, perhaps the way you are building a list is not effective.

We all face the challenge of developing a good incentive to get people to opt in to our lists. Once we figure that out, we have the challenge of providing them enough good content that they like and trust us.

I think we also have to realize that the Internet marketing niche is a beast of its own. Once you get outside that niche, things are often easier as people are not analyzing every move you make.

As far as improving open rate, certainly one of the most important things is the subject line. Also,what are the previous messages you have sent? If they are all promotions, then you're training your readers to expect nothing but promotions. It's pretty easy to not open that.

On the other hand, if you frequently send good content to your readers they are much more likely to open.

One of my niche lists has over 84,000 subscribers that we built through a variety of methods, though mostly paid media. We have found that using very short emails with a link to more content on a webpage has been very effective. It trains our readers to expect a short email and the link. This helps us get much better open rates.

The other benefit is that most of the content is on a webpage instead of in an email. This provides us SEO benefits.

Above all, do not give up on email marketing. It is still the most controllable of our options.

I hope this helps,

Jeff Mulligan

I'd lean towards you are doing something wrong.

Certainly, list building is still one of the most solid ways to make money online. Leveraging other peoples' lists is even more so.

If you are not getting the signups, you are either offering something of little perceived value OR you are talking to the wrong people.

Once you get people on your list, you need to train them to open your emails. One way to do that is to offer exceptional content to let people know that your email is worth opening.

Another way to get people to open your email is to promise special gifts to those people who do. Tell them what to expect if they open your emails, then deliver.

If you have a 0% open rate, then you have not given people an incentive to open your email or believe that your email is worth watching out for.

I hear that most lists have about a 35% open rate. So you are definitely doing something wrong: targeting the wrong audience, not telling people why they should subscribe, not showing them why they would want to open your mail, or otherwise getting lost in the junk mail.

Are you sure you are set up correctly to measure opens?

If you are then try sending the same message but change something like the subject.

It won't hurt to send again, after all they it looks as though no one opened it.

Remember, however, that 0% opening does not mean no one read it, it just means no one downloaded or allowed the images.

Maybe you're using plain text email which therefore won't register opens.

Just sayin'

Cheers,

Neil

I think what you need to do is tweak your email copy and make it stand out from the other emails people receive, if the person is very active in that niche there probably subscribed to a lot of other people, your email is probably getting buried in all the other emails they receive, you could ask your readers to install the gmail notifier plugin if you use gmail....

If your open rates are 0%, you're doing something wrong. I still think list building can be effective.

It is as Frank Kern and a few others say, it is the quality of the leads, and even more so, the quality of the lead magnet you use to attract the leads.
You want your good quality lead magnet to attract the good kind of subscribers, but also repel the worst ones ( biz opp seekers who jump from 1 money making opp to another, freebie seekers, newbies who're not willin to make an effort to learn what u give em etc)

It could also be that your email subject lines suck, you email during the wrong time of the day or they don't remember who u areand they just delete ur stuff. You need to make sure the "From" field is clear in who who are, so they instanntly recognise you.

Offer a good high quality lead magnet, something that'll attract the good kinda leads, provide them with gret valuable content, that blows them away and le;aves them wanting more, and when you promote something, make sure it is of the highest quality and u OVER deliver.

Jagua - our pages are pretty simple - I can easily view them on my Droid.

As for open rates, I saw the graph posted above that claimed an 11% open rate. I think you have to take that with a grain of salt because so many email marketers mail nothing but offers.

Seriously - I know many internet marketers mail too many promotions - but when was the last time you got good content from the BestBuy email?

People are getting overwhelmed with offers and when they can immediately recognize a mailer that constantly sends promotions, they stop opening.

Our 80,000 person list gets mailed weekly and 25% of them are opening the email's and going to our website. This gives us over 100,000 page views per month.

It also gives us a new income stream as we are now selling sponsorships on those pages.
100,000 highly targeted page views is a lot for this niche.

Jeff Mulligan

If people aren't opening the emails, then the subject lines you're using are not attracting them. Are you using too much hype? Or maybe you come across as another person just trying to sell them something.

In order to compete effectively in the internet marketing arena, you have to be creative and come up with things that are not being offered by everone else. People know if you are tricking them into giving you their email addresses. You have to give them value because it is not just about building a list but about building a long term relationship. If you give them something really good, they will be eager to see what else you have so they will open your emails.

you need to find out changing pulse of your audience and market them with what they want

You do need to be different and add value! If there is a free gift or some good value, people will subscribe.

I don't know what you are doing wrong for the 2 lists with a 0% open rate. The qeustion is do you give away good free content in adition to your promotion of products to your list. Do you know how to get good free content? How do you build your lists?

The basic qeustion is do you give real value to your list and how do you do it. If you can anwser these qeustions then we can talk further. If you can't anwser then probably can't help you, meaning if you don't know if you give value. Well maybe we still can help you, I would at least want to try so just reply or PM and I will see if I can help.

Email marketing is an entire system. In order to have positive results, you have to work very hard.

I’m not an expert on email marketing. I’m simply pointing out the complexity of the entire process.

The reasons why your subscribers are not opening your messages could be too many. And you may realize that even when many people open your messages, nothing changes in your life. In order to convert your subscribers into buyers you have to follow various smart marketing strategies. This is not a simple matter.

E-mail is just the medium. Yes, there are technical issues like making sure that the e-mails actually get delivered and the fact that open-rates can't be tracked with 100% accuracy, ever (I ignore them and only look at click- and interaction-rates to gage the effectiveness of my e-mails).

Those aside, it comes down to this: Do people want to stay in touch with you? If you connect with your community in the right way, they will want to keep in touch and they'll find a way. It doesn't matter whether it's e-mail or facebook or RSS subscribers or whatever.

If you're trying to get as many people on a target list so you can soft-spam them for money, you'll always be limiting yourself.

If you can create a fan base and offer them ways to keep up to date on your content, then e-mail is certainly an effective medium. The most effective, in my experience. But still just a medium.