Subscription list building

In this article we take a brief look at email and subscription list building

Firstly, why build an email or subscription list in the first place, after all, these can be purchased from companies who harvest and sell their lists to interested parties..

The main answer is about targeting your audience. Email harvesting companies are primarily interested in selling their lists,, with little or no concerns about the usage of the list beyond the sale. What this simply means is, the list may not have the quality or scope to generate  a positive return on your promotion.

However, building you own list is the most effective way of generating an audience. Why, because these are people, who have directly responded in some way to your promotions  either as existing customers,  or people who have requested to receive information from you. You have earned a certain level of credibility and trust. They are therefore more likely to view your content in a positive light  rather than dismiss it as unwanted spam.

Methods of list building

There are many methods, most of which work in many scenarios.
There are literally thousands of surveys and statistics showing percentage
this for method A against method B..
For the benefit of this article we simply illustrate a few of them, and allow you to decide which may benefit your promotion

Content promotion

This works in a simple manner, an article or blog is posted.
Providing some basic content. on a specific subject matter
Further in depth information can be obtained as an added extra,,
either as a freebie or purchase.
This content could be in the form of a free report, an ebook etc
To access this additional content, an email capture mechanism on the
blog/article page will be used, to get the email address in order
to send the content.

Featured promotion

This method can  be used where a single piece of content is available.
This content is not reliant on a blog, and can be marketed in a variety of ways throughout a website. The advertising focuses on that content alone. Hence the term featured content, and can come in the form of banners, side bars etc. Once again all advertising will contain an email capture mechanism to forward the content.

Giveaways

 This strategy is  essentially another form of content promotion.
Here you host a giveaway, this could be anything which relates
either to a product  or service
you are selling .The format of the giveaway can be anything, from an
ebook, podcast, a free subscription etc. 
The giveaway itself, has to be both relevant,
and even better free.
Advertising for the giveaway can be hosted either via a
blog page or a specific website promotion.
Once again, an email capture mechanism is required before t
he content can be sent out.

Social Media

This will depend very highly upon the target market, the product and the company goals.
However coverage and awareness is the prime purpose of advertising and promotion. Here we look not at advertising on social media, but simply getting people to share and like your promotion on social media. How you do this is simply to add social media button links to your promotion ads, and ask for people to click the button. At the same time, ask them to subscribe for further updates. Once again using an email capture mechanism on the form.

Customer Referrals

Using your existing customer list to recommend your content to friends and other users. Once again this method can be aided with the addition of an incentive for those who manage to get you additional subscribers. The bonus can be anything relevant to your promotion/product and once again free. Possibly an ebook or website subscription. Anything deemed to be of worth above and beyond your normal promotion.

The one final and probably one of the most important points is keeping it simple and easy to use. Complex and pretty designs are great provided the purpose of the page is easily understood.. Try and avoid adding pop up adds and additional links to your subscription page.
These take time to load up, and  can cause prospects to move on.
People don't want to wait.

Many of these methods are as can be seen, simply variations on a similar theme. With a bit of imagination and research they are quite easy to set up.

 These then are examples  of email and subscription list building techniques.
There are many other ways out there, but the focus for this article,
has been on those options.
we have found that work for us, .and completes this brief over view of email
and subscription list building techniques.
 
In the next article we take a product from our catalogue, and create the first stages of a marketing campaign..

For parts one, two and four of this article

E Commerce

Direct Marketing

Link Building

 Thanks for taking the time to read this article, and we hope it
proves to be informative and useful.
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