How to create a Targeted Customers Email List: How to create a specific mailing list

How to create a Targeted Customers Email List: How to create a specific mailing list

Direct mail is an extremely effective way to make your sales appear in the hands of potential customers. A targeted mailing list will ensure that you receive your message in the right hands. By focusing your message to a more specific audience, you will save money on shipping and printing. There are several simple steps to create a specific mailing list for a direct marketing campaign.

Small steps

The first thing you need if you are serious about accessing email marketing is a website. You need a place where your audience can find it and read what you plan to share. If you still do not have your own space on the global network, it 's time to create one.

This is not only extremely important for your personal brand, but it is also crucial if you want to start with email marketing. Since I want to keep this publication focused on email marketing, I'll assume that you already have your own website or blog. If you do not, I strongly recommend that you do the research and set up your first website (here's a good place to start).

Next, you must choose an email service provider.

What email services should you use?

I could go on and on about all the different email marketing services that exist, but for reasons of time and simplicity, I will say that I currently use Mailchimp (which is great for many reasons), but I have also experimented with Aweber and Campaign Monitor.

The main reason why I love MailChimp is simplicity and user - friendly interface. In addition, Mailchimp allows you to maintain a list of up to 2,000 subscribers for free, which is a great advantage if you are just starting.

In the next few weeks, I plan to spend time with MyMail, which is a WordPress add-on to @ revaxarts, which offers a multitude of premium features for a one-time cost of $ 40. Compare that with Mailchimp, where you would pay $ 40 per month for a list of more of 2,600 subscribers, and now that's what I call saving your money.

How does it work?

Before plunging into fun things, let's leave the basics behind us. Once you choose an email provider, here's how to ask people to join your list:

You add a registration form to your site.

You ask people to insert their email and subscribe.

Subscribers are added to your list.

Between steps 2 and 3, users must confirm their email (more about that soon).

Once you have people on your list, you can usually do one of the following actions:

Send a broadcast email to your entire list (or a segment of it).

Automatically send email based user actions (ie after purchase).

Automatically send a sequence of emails to your subscribers (ie, educational series).

Transmission vs. Automation

Transmissions are unique emails that are sent to your audience; announcing a new product, wishing you a happy new year, sharing the latest publications, general updates ...

Automation campaigns are emails that are automatically sent to your audience based on specific triggers; After completing a purchase, after clicking on a specific link within your email, after abandoning the cart and my personal favorite, a welcome series.

A welcome series allows you to send a series of emails to each person who subscribes to your list, and this is huge.

Take my scenario as an example:

Last year I wrote a series of five well- designed and designed marketing emails.

Each month an average of 350 people join my list.

The 5 marketing emails that I wrote last year, are automatically sent to each of those 350 people, without me doing anything. After setting up once, I do not do anything. It is 100% established and forget it.

One step back

I know I know, I'm moving too fast. It is possible that some of you do not even have an established list, and I am already talking about creating a marketing series. My plan is not to scare you, but to give you a glimpse of what is possible once you start. Email marketing is not like running a sprint, it's more like a marathon. But once you roll the snowball it's hard to stop it.

So, if all this sounds interesting, I invite you to plan the time in your schedule and go back to the student chair. There are tons of amazing teachers and lessons through which you can learn about the best places to put your registration forms, what words to use in your email subject lines, how to increase opening rates and clicks ...

Start with Derek Halpern of Social Triggers to learn about the social aspect of email marketing, and then move on to Neil Patel for detailed publications on how to do it. I'll leave all the hard work for them.

I am here to share practical and practical advice on what I found as the best way to build a highly specific mailing list.

How to get the target people to subscribe?

The most difficult way: write blog posts that contain high-quality content related to your target audience and add a registration form in the sidebar and at the end of the publication. This method has great potential, but it is very difficult for someone who has just started to build an audience from scratch. Not to mention getting to a stage in your blog get enough organic traffic to see significant growth in your list.

The Friend form: create a promotional gift and ask people to return your email. Super simple, highly effective.

Think about it, who does not like to receive free things? We all do it Especially if they provide a high value and otherwise would cost money. Would you mind giving your email in exchange for a high-quality free item? Probably not.

Now remember this: that person who is interested in downloading your free article (for example, a free template for after effects), is someone who is already:

Familiar with Adobe After Effects.

He knows exactly what a template is.

Which means that they are your target audience.

As an added benefit, that person is becoming familiar with your work and with you as a brand.

What gifts should you give?

Ask yourself who your target audience is and what they need. If you create WordPress themes, giving away a free WordPress theme could be perfect. If you are an audioJungle author, give a music track. In codecanyon? Give a free plugin.

The items you give away do not have to be your best absolute job, but the better they are, the more you will increase the possibility of someone willing to give you your email in return.

Processable steps

Create the promotional gift and upload it to your website.

As I am the author of Vid, I give several After Effects templates for free. So the first step after creating the template is uploading it to the site. I recommend creating a gift section on your website, where you will host all your free items.

Share the gifts

Depending on your field of interest, you must find the best place to promote your freebie. As my gifts focus on the video, YouTube provides the most appropriate platform. Other great platforms to share your gifts are Dribble, Pinterest and Behance.

Do you realize how this freebie has 56,942 visits? Not everyone continued to download the free program, but a very high percentage of them did and continues to do so.

Create a registration form
 

Next, create a subscription form in which you will ask people to send you their email in exchange for the free gift. I currently use a free WP add-on called MailMunch because I discovered that their forms have high conversion rates.

Confirm the email

Now you need to ask people to confirm their email. The reason you do this is to make sure that the user does not just provide a fake email in the hope of getting the freebie. Only those who go ahead and confirm their email will receive the free gift in their inbox.

Give the gift

Finally, it is time to give your newly added subscriber the gift you promised them. Your subscriber is happy because he gets a high-quality article and you are happy because he added another potential client to your mailing list. It is a win-win situation.

One more step

For those of you who want to go a step further, here is something more you can do if you already have a blog that receives a good amount of organic traffic.

Create a short PDF to summarize the content of your publications and then, for free, in exchange for an email. I recently used this method in my publication How to increase organic search traffic by up to 300% using Google Trends, which resulted in several hundred subscribers in that publication alone.

Setting up this technique called Content Update is quite simple, but you should definitely follow this step-by-step guide by Brian Dean of BackLinko.

It's time to increase revenue.

Once you have a mailing list of highly specific people, it's time to turn all your hard work into income. As mentioned above, sending a sequence of well-designed marketing emails is a super powerful technique that you should definitely use. My automated series has been sent to 16,278 to date, and I almost never do maintenance.

But when it's just beginning, you may want to send a broadcast email to your audience to inform them about the new articles that you released to the market.

As an example, when I published an update for my application's promotion toolkit, I sent an email to my entire list to inform them about the update.

Since most of my audience is not specifically interested in the application promotion templates, the opening rate was low. But most of the people who opened the email also clicked to see the item. Today, my mailing list sends approximately 40-60 new potential buyers to Mobi each month (partly automatically and partly via streaming emails).

Valuable contribution from a fellow author

While researching this post, I got in touch with @ Mad_Dog to get their opinion on the topic, since I've been on their mailing list since I bought one of their articles in Themeforest and then I signed up on their list.

Alex, who is the author of @Mad_Dog, provided the following information statistics:

Q1 What are the most effective ways you found to collect targeted emails and grow a healthy mailing list?

A. The most effective way to collect emails is to create a promotional gift, in my case, were the HTML templates and WordPress themes. If visitors are interested in that type of product, in the future they are potential customers :)

Q2 Could you share an example of an email campaign that you have sent to your list?

Q3 What are the average participation rates (open / link clicks) for your email campaigns.

A. Here are the statistics from the Mailchimp panel for a recent campaign:

Q4 What is the size of your list and how long did it take to reach that amount?

A. I have more than 30 thousand subscribers, but once every 6 months I have to delete invalid emails and subscribers who did not open the emails. This way I keep the mailing list active. I spent 3 years to have such a list. If I did not eliminate the inactive users, the list would be much bigger, I guess 50k +.

As you can see from Alex's answers, he also uses the free method to attract potential customers to his list. His 3 years of dedication and focus on the goal were really worth it, and now he has a huge database of potential buyers on his mailing list. Remember, building a health list is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes some time, but that time is well spent.

A problem I have with Envato

One of the key factors of email marketing is the ability to measure the return on investment: compare your investment in a specific campaign against the amount of revenue earned by that campaign.

Measuring ROI with your own website is super simple. Send a campaign to your audience and, using Google Analytics, track how many people on your list completed a purchase and the exact revenue that those people generated for you.

The problem I have with Envato is that Google Analytics is enabled only for Elite authors who have earned more than $ 75,000 in sales, which means that only authors who have already rolled the ball. This is great for Elite authors, and I think they deserve each and every one of the benefits they receive from Envato.

But, my point is this: if you are already an Elite author, it means that you are doing a lot of things well, and the question is whether adding Google Analytics at this stage really provides value. I'm not sure he does.

On the other hand, authors like us can get valuable information about which marketing strategies work and which do not. This is also true for advertising, where we would like to monitor if a certain campaign was worth it or not.

I brought this topic up on the forums a year ago, since I was starting with email marketing, but nothing has changed since then. But who knows, maybe this post will make a difference :)

Your challenge and final words.

My goal in this series was to help the community learn about email marketing as a superior alternative to social networks.

My hope is that during the course of these last 3 publications, I managed to teach you some things you did not know about before and send you to experiment with email marketing.

To be honest, in this post I only touch the tip of the iceberg as there is much more to cover. Maybe someday I will share another series with more ideas.

But if you found this series interesting, I recommend that you start creating an email list TODAY. Then, next year, around December 2016, come back here where everything started and share your experience and your achievements with us.

If you are ready for a challenge, try this year to have at least 2,000 people join your list.

And speaking of email. if you want to get more information about marketing, Google, animations or even if you are only interested in seeing what kind of emails I send to my subscribers, feel free to join my personal email list on my site web, or my mailing list in Amigo.