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The Importance Of An Email List For Your Online Business And How To Create One

For any business whether offline or online you simply can’t get away from the fact, that without customers you don’t have a business.

These days there are many different methods you can use in your online business to get potential customers into your online store or business website.

Such as; search engine traffic, paid advertising and back links (to name but a few).

However, does it really matter how they got there (but you really should know this if you’re tracking your traffic anyway). The real point here is ensuring you capture their details (email as a minimum) so you can continue to market to them whether they buy on the first visit or not.

The Importance Of An Email List For Your Online Business And How To Create One

That’s where an email list becomes your best friend, and your online business’s greatest asset. You need to capture those email addresses before the visitor leaves. This is so important that the big name online marketers make building a subscriber list THE MOST IMPORTANT aspect of their business and the main focus.

Some of the figures bandied about concerning email lists may be erroneous, but from my own personal experience, they’re not too far out, so I will repeat them here.

Figures quoted for the value of each subscriber range from 50 cents to 1 dollar per subscriber per month, so the larger the subscriber list you have the more you can make each month, you do the maths for yourself.

However, there is a small caveat to this, your subscriber list needs to be targeted, ie it’s no use trying to sell high heeled shoes to a predominately male audience, or sending your best ad for gardening tools to people who are looking for information about rap music, if they have little interest you won’t make anything.

It’s also claimed that sales increase after the potential customer has received several emails from an online business, and the extra sales are in the order of over 50% of customers purchase when they are more comfortable with the seller following receipt of the emails. (Check out this blog post on building a relationship with your list)

So now we know the value of having an email list, how do we start to build our own subscriber base?

The Importance Of An Email List For Your Online Business And How To Create One

The easiest method is to use an online “autoresponder” such as Aweber.com which you can preload with messages ready to send to anyone who signs up.

Then you will need a way for your website visitors to subscribe to your newsletter or sales letter series, and all of the good autoresponders out there will give you some special code ready to paste into your webpages which will produce an opt-in form – just like the ones in the sidebar here===================================================>

Your visitors then place their name and/or email address as a minimum, in exchange for your FREE gift (ebook, PDF, video etc). Check out this blog post for more info on creating an opt-in form.

Now you have a way to capture contact details to give you a second chance at making a sale even after your visitor has left your site.

So that’s it sit and wait for those subscribers to sign up?

Hold on a minute, why would they want to sign up for your newsletter, or email series?

Well, you need to give your visitor a very compelling reason to subscribe to your list, after all they probably already get enough emails from spam, friends sending them the latest joke, and other online businesses who have their address, so you need to sweeten the deal in their favour.

One of the easiest ways to do this, as previously mentioned, is to offer a free gift for subscribing.

The gift can be as simple as making the emails a course to teach them something about the topic of your website, a free ebook (there are plenty available on a variety of subjects if you don’t have one to give away already, search in your favourite search engine) or you could offer a competition where subscribers can win one of your products.

Whatever you do, try to make it an offer the visitor will find it hard to turn down,and they will subscribe to get it.

So these are the reasons to start your own subscriber list, and an overview of how to start getting subscribers, but what sort of emails should you send as your list grows?

Obviously if you are just selling something, and want to remind visitors why they went to your site in the first place, then send them some information about your product(s) in a series of emails, and include a reminder of the original link so they can go back to review the sales page and hopefully buy.

There is a more subtle way though.

The Importance Of An Email List For Your Online Business And How To Create One

Information is what most people are searching for on the internet, so it makes sense to make your emails informational, and gently bring your sales pitch to the subscribers as part of the information.

If you don’t have time to write your own informational emails, one method you can use to overcome this is to search for articles in article directories such as Ezinarticles, Goarticles and Sooperarticles to name a few (there are many out there which are free to join, just search for free article directories on Google) for articles written on the topic of your newsletter.

However, make sure you do not just copy the articles verbatim into your email series, but put your own personality and spin on them, and make them yours. These articles can then be preloaded, as emails, into your autoresponder along with your additional promotional text, ready to be sent.

Once it is setup, it can be all left to run automatically.

Hopefully you will now see the importance of an email list to your online business and just how simple it is to create one, the benefits of using email newsletters to increase your online business, are immeasurable and simply MUST be done, and as you have seen in the blog post above it’s not too difficult to get started.

So make sure you follow the tips contained, take consistent action on a daily basis to start your own email subscriber list today.

Happy List Building
-Jon.