List Building 101

List Building 101

How do you go about setting things up, so you have everything in place – all ready for you build out your email list? Before you worry about traffic, you will need a few things in place.

Step one:

Get a Hosted List Server – Aweber, GetResponse, iContact or MailChimp these companies are some a few of the biggest. You would like to use one of these instead of hosting an email client on your server as email sent out through these providers are less likely to end up in people's spam folder. Also they allow you to easily create an auto-responder sequence and keep statistical tracking allowing you to see open rates and click through rates.

Step two:

It is essential to get people's attention, and for this, you will need an opt-in bribe or lead magnet. This needs to be something that will be seen or perceived as high value and could be:

• a free report
• free software
• a video containing relevant and important information
• or an ebook.

As I mentioned, this is vital for getting people's attention and thus attracting them onto your list.

Step Three:

Setting up your landing page or squeeze page to “capture” the lead/email address. Things to include would be

Bold headline to peak curiosity

engaging bullet points to keep people reading and enhance/sustain strong curiosity call to action, i.e., ask for the email address to entered into the field

It is important to note here that you will need to 2 variations of your squeeze/landing page. They do not want to be completely different looking pages, just slightly different. For example different size or type of font used for your headline or no headline and only an image.

This is vital because you will always want to be split testing your lead/landing/squeeze page to determine which one is outperforming the other, i.e., Which one is getting you the most opt-ins/ leads? Each variation/page will have different conversion rates depending on the different attribute you altered.

Remember for this to be a “fair test” you will only want to change ONE variable only per landing page. This is vital as it ensures your split test is actionable. Of course, you will need to track outperforming the other. For this I use Lead Pages, but you could use Google Content Experiments, previously you would have used Google Website Optimizer, but things have been updated in Google land.

In my next post, I will delve a little deeper into the benefits of split testing.

See you then!