1 © Copyright 2015
LIST BUILDING PROFITS
BUILD YOUR LIST THE RIGHT WAY
Jonathan Leger
COURTESY OF LEARNFROMJON.COM - PRIVATE BUSINESS COACHING FROM A
MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR INTERNET MARKETER + ACCESS TO PREMIUM AND
EXCLUSIVE TOOLS!
2 © Copyright 2015
EARN MONEY BY REBRANDING THIS REPORT
THEN GIVING IT AWAY!
You read that right! After originally publishing this PDF (and
others in the email series) I received a great deal of feedback
from subscribers asking if they could share the PDF. I've
decided to allow sharing , but I've gone a step further.
I wanted to allow my subscribers to not only share this PDF
(and others in the email series) but to earn cash too!
All you have to do is click the link below, add your affiliate ID (instructions on that
are provided on that page), click a link and you'll receive a copy of this PDF, but
your copy will contain your affiliate link to LearnFromJon.com!
Ready to start making money with this report? Just click the link below:
Rebrand this Report with MY Affiliate Link!
Rebranding Terms: You may rebrand this PDF with your affiliate link through the link above. You will receive a download link for your rebranded copy of the PDF which you may share. You may not modify this report in any other way, nor share/publish the content contained within this publication in any other way.
3 © Copyright 2015
“The money is in the list.”
You probably already know that you should be building an email list if you're
doing business online. All marketers preach it (including me) because it's true –
but there's a catch. You have to be building your email list the right way, and you
have to manage and treat your email list the right way, or it won't do you much
good.
So how do you do that? What's the “right” way to build and care for a list so that
it pays off for you in the long run? That's the focus of this report.
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WHO WANTS A SKINNED CAT ANYWAY?
Another saying goes that “there's more than one way to skin a cat” (though who
would want to skin a cat, and what the purpose of a cat's skin is has always
eluded me). The same is true with how you build and manage an email list. Each
one has its pros and cons. I'll discuss the three most common ones. The last one I
discuss will be the method I personally use.
The three methods of list-marketing are:
1. Churn and Burn
This is probably the most common method used – and not just in Internet
Marketing, but by business in general. It involves sending nothing but
promotional emails to your list.
2. Slow and Steady
This method is the opposite of Churn and Burn. It's where you almost never send
a promotional mailer at all. Rather, the products and services you want to sell are
linked to naturally within informational emails that you send. This is probably the
least used method (you'll see why in the details).
3. Constant Quality
This is a hybrid of #1 and #2. You send out a lot of informational emails with
promotions in between. This one has been my go-to method for years, and for
good reason (more information on why in the details).
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BUILDING THE LIST
Before you can market to your email list, you have to have an email list. So before
I get into the details of how to skin the proverbial cat, let's talk about the methods
you can use to build up an email list first. There are multiple ways to do this, too.
I'll list the most common ones in order from the worst method to the best method.
1. SPAM
This is a very common method used for email marketing. It's illegal in a lot
of countries, and it's not very effective, but your SPAM folder likely attests
to the fact that it's very, very popular.
Back in the early days of the Internet, unsolicited email wasn't called SPAM.
It was just unsolicited. It was also very effective (much like the junk mail you
probably get in your mail box – if it didn't work companies wouldn't spend
the money to send it).
Now, though, SPAM is highly ineffective. I'm sure it still gets some results or
people wouldn't do it, but SPAM filters are just so good now (at least
Gmail's is—I can't remember the last time any SPAM email actually made it
to my inbox).
It may be tempting, but don't do it. Especially if you live in a country where
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it's illegal, all it will do is get you in a lot of trouble. Put your money and
effort into something that will work well long-term. You have been warned.
2. Rented Lists
Some people don't want to take the time to build an email list, so they buy
or rent one instead. There are some big problems with this method, though.
The first problem is verifying that the people on these lists actually opted-in.
How do you know that they really asked to receive these offers? You're
taking the selling company's word for it – but it's your backside on the line
(legally speaking) if they didn't really do that. So if you're going to do this
you better do your homework and make absolutely sure these are verified
opt-ins.
But let's say that all of the email addresses were, in fact, opted-in properly.
How do you know that those addresses are any good now? How do you
know if people ever check those email addresses? Honestly, if you were
opting into something for free information and suddenly got bombarded
with email from people you don't know with offers you weren't interested
in, would you keep using that email address? Probably not.
Even if all of the emails are opted-in and they are all verified as real, active
email addresses, how many people do you think are going to buy something
from somebody they've never heard of—especially since you have no idea if
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they're even interested in what you have to offer?
Overall, bad idea. It seems like a quick way to get started, but logically it just
doesn't make much sense.
3. In Exchange For Information
For most people starting out, this is the most common (and the best) way to
get people onto your email list. Give them valuable information in exchange
for giving you the right to send them email.
Having people double-opt in is usually best (that's where they give you their
name and email and you send a link for them to click to that email address
to make sure they really own it).
This method makes sense. The people who are getting on your list are doing
so voluntarily. They are targeted – they asked for information on a certain
topic so you know they're interested in that topic. Legally you're covered
because you have their consent to email them. They're expecting you to
email them!
The only downside to this method is that you get a lot of tire-kickers and
freebie seekers. They want what you're giving for free, but may not be
interested in anything else. Given how little it costs you to build the list this
way, though, it's a great way to get started (and something you should
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continue to use even once you're successful).
4. Contacting Customers
I am not an attorney – so don't take what I say in this section as legal
advice.
Emailing existing and past customers is by far the best way to build your
email list. In the United States (which is where I'm based) you have the right
to email anyone that has a business relationship with you until they tell you
not to email them anymore.
So anytime somebody buys one of my products or services they are
immediately put on my email list (the new autoresponder system I'm using
that will be available to LearnFromJon.com members for free makes it easy
to do that). I have the right to do that in the USA, and they can unsubscribe
at any time by simply clicking a link in the email.
Existing and past customers are the best list members because they've
already proven they're not just tire-kickers or freebie seekers. They've put
their money where their mouth is, so to speak. They obviously have a
degree of trust in you because they've bought your product(s). Getting a
happy customer to buy again is much, much easier than getting somebody
on your list who's never bought from you to take a chance and become a
customer.
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I see a lot of vendors who ask customers to opt-in on a thank-you page
rather than just adding them to their email list. They feel like it's “safer” to
ask permission. I used to do that, too. But according to United States law
they have already given you permission by buying from you (again, I'm not
an attorney). It's up to you, but I haven't had any problems. The vast
majority of people will simply click the unsubscribe link if they aren't
interested in what you send them.
So if you're selling products already but aren't immediately adding
customers to your email list, you're seriously missing out on your profit
potential.
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LIST MARKTING METHOD #1: CHURN AND
BURN
Once you've got a growing list, the next step is to market to that list. A very
common method of list-marketing is the “churn and burn” method. This method
is simple: email promotional material to the people on your list – and not much
else.
Does this method work? Yes, to a degree. It works a lot better if your list
members are customers and not just people who opted-in for free information.
You have some of your contacts' trust already, so they're more likely to buy.
The advantage of this method is that it's easy. You can just send promotion after
promotion without ever really getting to know the people on your list or taking
the time to build up helpful information. I can tell you from experience that being
willing to respond to emails from people on your list and writing up reports like
this one and the others you've received from me requires a lot of time and work.
The churn and burn method frees you from all of that labor.
There are a few problems with this method, though. The first problem is that you
lose the attention of our list members much, much faster. They learn quickly that
every email you send is a promotion. They also learn quickly that you're not
interested in their success – just your own bottom line. That means they won't
trust you much.
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With big corporations we expect that. When you get on an email list for your local
car dealership you expect them to send you emails about deals on new cars, and
when it's time for you to get an oil change or specials on other maintenance, etc.
You know that's what's going to happen. It's what you expect. And, of course, you
ignore the vast majority of those emails (or just opt-out). If one happens to catch
your eye, great for them, but it doesn't happen often.
The second problem with this method comes as a result of the first problem.
Because you lose your lists' attention fast, you have to continually work to add
new subscribers to your list as quickly as possible to maintain sales. That's
because you're not likely to get a lot of repeat customers. That's the “burn” part
of “churn and burn”.
You can make a lot of money quickly using this method, but as a long-term
method it doesn't work well unless you can continually add a stream of new opt-
ins fast. Some people can, and so they do well with it, but it requires a lot of work.
You'll have low open rates and even lower conversion rates.
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LIST-MARKETING METHOD #2: SLOW AND
STEADY
I like to call the second list-marketing method “Slow and Steady”. With this
method you almost never send out strictly promotional emails. Once in a blue
moon, sure, but mostly you just send a lot of
great information to people.
The way you make money with a list like this is
by including links to your products or to
products that you're an affiliate for within the
content of the emails you send out. This is done
naturally.
So, for instance, if your list is about gardening and you send people information
on how to care for a rose garden, you would use affiliate links to send people to
the various products that you use to take care of your own garden.
The benefits of this method are high open rates and long-term retention of the
people on your list. With the churn and burn method people are conditioned that
everything you send will be a sales pitch. With slow and steady they are
conditioned that everything you send will be helpful information. So naturally
people are going to open and read your emails much more often.
The downside of this method is that its short-term profitability is low. Since you
never focus people's attention on an offer, you only earn from the few people
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who click-through and buy from you. Even if 2-3% of people do that, you'll either
need a very large list or a very high profit margin on the products that you sell to
earn a lot of money.
There is an exception to this: memberships. If your product is a monthly
membership, then converting one person will earn you money every month that
they stay subscribed to the service. In that case a low conversion rate pays off
well in the mid-term (as long as the membership is good enough to keep people
subscribed).
My LearnFromJon.com membership is an example of this kind of success. I've
gotten two dozen new LearnFromJon.com members in the past 7 days just by
sending out these informational emails that are branded with that name. Two
dozen new members is around $750 in net profit. At that rate I'm looking at about
$3,000 a month in new memberships if I can sustain it, so that by the end of one
year the new members coming only from the informational mailers will be
earning me close to $40,000 a month.
So memberships can work very well. But again, the membership has to be able to
convert readers into buyers and then retain those buyers as members long-term.
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LIST-MARKETING METHOD #3: CONSTANT
QUALITY
The marketing method that I personally use is a hyrbid of the first two methods. I
send out a lot of quality information that lead people to LearnFromJon.com and
also periodically send promotional emails.
I'm leaning more heavily toward sending out the informational emails lately
simply because I have a lot of paying customers on my list and I would like them to
become members of LearnFromJon. LFJ is my focus this year, and that's proving to
be a very good move, but I'm still sending promotional emails as well.
To me this hybrid approach makes the most sense. Yes, you can and should earn
the trust of your list by sending quality information that they can use. Yes, you
should avoid pitching products very hard in those emails. But if there's a product
or service that you really believe in and that you have proven works well, it's a
benefit to your list members to tell them about it and get them to buy.
Will you lose subscribers that way? Absolutely, and that's the downside of this
method. But you'll mostly lose the tire-kickers and freebie seekers – as long as
you're providing quality information in-between. This is the method of list-
marketing I have always used because it has always made the most sense to me.
I get people who don't want to seem salesly or pushy. That makes sense. But if I
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needed work done on my car and my neighbor knew somebody who was an
awesome mechanic I'd want him to tell me about it – and I wouldn't care if that
meant he got some kind of benefit from the mechanic for referring me.
I don't promote anything I haven't seen first-hand results with, either personally
or from a member of my senior staff who I asked to evaluate it. We have to prove
that a tool or service has value before I'll ever offer it to my email list. I don't want
to lose credibility by sending out emails about stuff that doesn't work.
Of course not everybody is going to use a tool or service properly, and not all
products work well in all situations, so sometimes you're going to lose some
credibility anyway with certain people on your list. For me, though, that's where
always having an iron-clad money-back guarantee comes into play. If people know
they can get their money back if something doesn't work, they're much less likely
to hold that against you. So be sure that anything you decide to promote does
have a guarantee like that.
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PROOF THAT MY METHODS WORK
Like I said, I always like to prove that what I'm telling you is true, so let me give
you some screenshots that demonstrate that my list-building and list-marketing
methods really work:
This is the same image from the title page of this report. It shows you my recent
activity in my custom-written autoresponder (which LearnFromJon.com members
will get for free).
You can see that I get a lot of opt-ins. I also get a lot of opt-outs (though much of
the opt-outs shown here came from recently importing all of my paying
customers and some of them deciding they'd rather not get additional emails
from me).
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This back-and-forth tends to keep my list size at around 60,000 individuals.
Obviously I know how to build a list.
But is my list responsive? Do they open the emails and click the links? Take a look
at another screenshot:
In the last 30 days 21,322 different people have opened the emails I've sent (that
number isn't the total number of opens, it's the number of people on my list that
opened at least one email). That means that about 37 percent of my list members
have read at least one of my emails in the last 30 days. That's incredibly high! (I
just started using my new autoresponder system in the last 30 days, which is why
the 60 / 90 / all time numbers are the same as the 30 day.)
In addition to the 37% open rate, about 24 percent of people are clicking-through
to the offers I'm linking out to or to the PDFs I send. Again, that's incredibly high!
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When I do promotions for other people's products they're always amazed at how
well I do just by sending a few emails. That's because I work hard to earn the trust
of the people on my list. Churn and burn is not for me. But then, neither is never
sending promotional emails to my list members for products and services I
believe in.
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WHATEVER YOU DO, DO SOMETHING!
It's up to you to decide how you're going to build and market to your email list.
But whatever you do, do something. I can't believe how many people write to me
and say that they haven't “gotten around to” building a list! You're robbing
yourself of profits every day that you're not building a list, and you're preventing
people from benefiting from the knowledge you can share with them as well.
People join and stay on email lists because it benefits them. You need to create
and market to an email list because it benefits you. It's a win-win situation. People
who disagree that it's win-win will opt-out – but you have to give them the chance
to do so by having a list to begin with.
So get busy building your list and winning their trust. In fact, don't send any
promotional emails to new list members until you've sent them a lot of quality,
useful information first. Build the trust in advance of a promotion and your
promotion will do much, much better.
Here's to YOUR list-building success!
Jonathan Leger
COURTESY OF LEARNFROMJON.COM - PRIVATE BUSINESS COACHING FROM A
MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR INTERNET MARKETER + ACCESS TO PREMIUM AND
EXCLUSIVE TOOLS!