5 Steps To Building An Email List Of Prospects

One of your most important tasks for any online entrepreneur is building an email list of prospects. When somebody provides you with their email address, they are granting you permission to send them information about your business. This means that they are interested in what you have to offer.

People will buy when they are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell, so it's vitally important to keep in contact with them. The most effective way to do this on a regular basis is via email.

Here are the 5 steps to building an email list of prospects.

1. Choose Your Target Market

Your business can't sell everything to everyone and the more focused you are your target customer, the easier it will be to connect to that person. Always keep in mind that you are selling to one individual at a time, not a group. Target your marketing to a smaller part of a bigger group and your marketing efforts will have a much better chance of giving you the results you want.

2. Offer Something Of Value For Free

It's not likely that someone from your target audience group will give you their email address for nothing. You have to offer them something in return that they will want. This could be a high quality report, checklist or e-book, a video training module or audio file. Don't forget that what you give away for free will indicate the standard of your business' products and services. If you give away rubbish, your business will be thought of as rubbish.

3. Create An Email Opt-in Form

You now need a way to actually collect email addresses. For this you will need list building software called an autoresponder. An autoresponder enables you to capture and manage your email list. Your autoresponder can generate an email capture box that you can put on your website home page. Another way to get emails is to build a lead capture page. This is a webpage that is still connected to your autoresponder but separate to your website. Its only objective is to capture email addresses.

4. Set Up Your Autoresponder

There is no point in collecting email addresses and doing nothing with them. You need to set up a series of emails in your autoresponder to automatically send out your freebie when people sign-up. Research shows that it takes at least 7 emails before most subscribers will act. Pre-load your autoresponder with a series of helpful emails that will create a desire for your subscribers to want to know more.

5. Drive Traffic To Your Email Opt In Form

To get people to join your email list you have to drive traffic to your website or landing page. There are basically 2 types of traffic. Paid traffic and free traffic. As a general rule, you should only pay money for traffic that you are directing to a lead capture page. This is traffic that you control and the primary objective is to obtain the visitor's email address. You would use free website traffic strategies to drive traffic to your website, blog, Facebook Group, online articles and videos or other information-style website. All of these pages should feature your email list opt in form or, at the very least, contain a link to your lead capture page.

You're not going to build your email list very fast with a bland opt in offer. If you're offering a boring, "seen it all before" report that doesn't address your visitor's problems with any urgency, they won't be enticed to give you their email details.

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