B3-CH45 – List Building – Your Fan-Base Is Your Lifeline

If you’ve been around any kind of internet-based marketing for any length of time, you will have heard the over-used line “the money’s in the list”. I said as much many times in the preceding pages as well.

That statement is true – but not without some qualification. The money is in a RESPONSIVE list.

Before I elaborate, first let’s be absolutely clear: what is “a list?”

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Simply put, it’s a database of your contacts – your fans. People who have signed up to your fan club, opted into your free newsletter or downloaded your music or a free report through your squeeze page, or people who have bought something from you.

If you’re using an Autoresponder (which I strongly recommend) you can even “segment” your list so that you can have “music buyers” on one list, “newsletter optins” on another, and so on.

So why is having that list so important? Apart from giving you an opportunity to build a relationship with them, they’re your first line of attack when you’re promoting something. And each time you mail them – it costs you ZERO.

Additionally, your list of prospects is one thing, while your list of past buyers is another. Common sense as well as experience teaches us that people who trusted you with their money once (providing that you didn’t let them down), will be MUCH more likely to trust you again.

It therefore follows that if you approach a satisfied customer further down the line, they will be positively inclined to buy from you again. And, needless to say, since you already have the list, your COST OF QUALIFIED LEAD ACQUISITION is, once again, ZERO!

THAT is why it pays to invest in list building and giving stuff away.

So, how DO you manage your list? With an Autoresponder of course. An auto-responder is a program which intelligently automates follow-up correspondence with your list members – an absolute must-have in your toolbox.

Many savvy marketers focus almost entirely on list-building, particularly in the early stages of their promotions, and don’t care very much about making sales – until later. Sometimes much later.

Many experienced marketers can, over time, sell to 50% or more of their list, often over and over again. A highly responsive list like that also has a secondary value: you can “rent it” by providing your own solo ad services.

A “solo ad” is a service you may at some point provide to other musicians, venues or any advertisers you like. If your list contains 2000 rock fans, perhaps they’d be interested in hearing about the latest guitar offer from your local Guitar Center? You can send out a mail blast to your list with that offer and your advertiser will pay you for this very happily. A typical way to do this is to guarantee X number of visits from your list to your advertiser’s website. So, you may tell your advertiser that for 30 cents per visit, you can send them 500 visits. Next, using your autoresponder you mail the first 500 and monitor their “click-throughs.” You’ll see that, say, 300 have clicked. So you send out another batch of, say, 300 emails and you see that another 150 have clicked. Cool, you send another 100-200 and by then you will not only have delivered your promised (and provable) 500, but you will also have OVER-delivered.

In other words, you can use your list to work for you even without directly selling them anything.

So, the trick to list-building is not merely collecting signups but also managing your communications with them by means of automated emails, which you can later track (to see open rates, click-through rates, etc).

But an even more important aspect is being able to reliably deliver your emails to each person on your list. This is perhaps THE most compelling reason for paying for an autoresponder, rather than either building your own or getting one for free.

If you have your own autoresponder, you’ll also be using your own SMTP server to make mailouts. It will be enough that merely one person on your list complains about you “spamming” them – and your server can be blacklisted. As a result, your delivery rate will plummet.

Professional autoresponders have deliverability rates in excess of 95% with aWeber leading the pack with around 99%.

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Book 3 – Chapter 44Squeeze Pages	Course Overview	Book 3 – Chapter 46Autoresponder Campaigns

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