There is nothing more exciting than watching your list of subscribers grow. Each day, you look and your email is reporting that you have 2, 3, maybe 5, or even 10 more subscribers. Perhaps you get even more. But then you get busy with something else and you forget about those subscribers.
If you have never had a list built before, you may be thinking I am a complete nut case for saying this. Seriously, how on earth could people forget about their list? Well as one who has several lists I can tell you it happens all the time. And I am not the only one. I have heard from others that it is not all to uncommon. Creating a business online (no matter what type) is work. You really do get busy handling other aspects of your business.
Here Is The Problem
So let’s say you forgot about your list and then a couple of months go by and you revisit your autoresponder service to see that you have 500 subscribers. All of a sudden you get excited. Even at a conversion rate of 2% and a $30 product, you are about to make $30 off your list just by sending them a sales email. But there’s a serious problem here. You didn’t nurture your list.
When you send them that email, expect to get about 1/2 to 3/4 of them unsubscribing. Why? They signed up several months ago and you didn’t establish any kind of relationship. These people hardly even know you after the first day of signing up – imagine what it’s like several months down the road. You’ve got to establish a rapport with these people.
Consistency And Frequency Are Key
So what are the keys to establishing a relationship? What you want to do is make sure that you give them consistent and frequent content. However, and this is huge, you want to limit the sales stuff greatly. Why? Because if you establish the relationship as I am suggesting, the sales will be much easier than if you just bombard them with “buy my stuff!” This is the cornerstone to building trust with your list and without it you list building efforts are a waste of time. As a side benefit, you won’t even have to do much when you do send sales emails because once the trust is established, they’ll actually read what you send them.
Setting Up Follow Up And Broadcast Messages
If you have several lists (and you should if you are looking to make any money) then it can be pretty daunting to remember when to send what list and how often. Here is where a decent autoresponder service will shine. Most of the major autoresponder services will allow you to preload messages and you can control the frequency of when they are sent. This is a must for nurturing your list. Do NOT ignore this feature. Use it for every list that you have.
I know you may be thinking, is there a ratio of non sales/sales emails that should be utilized? I think it varies depending on the type of market you are in but you certainly can experiment with it. I would start with something like 3 non sales to every 1 sales email. If you find that you are getting too many unsubscribes with this ratio increase it to 4-to-1. Selling online is all about experimenting and tracking.
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I hope you liked this article on nurturing your list. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to leave them in the comment box below. We’d love to hear from you and we do answer our comments.