BOOMER ENTREPRENEUR

THE IMPORTANCE OF BUILDING A MAILING LIST

In all the research that I have done on being successful on the Internet, the most common theme that runs through the success of the most successful individuals is to build a list of customers who then become repeat customers. You know from your off-line life that the businesses that you continually use are the ones that did a good job and treated you right. Once you gain confidence in them, you continue to go back to them. The same is true on the Internet.

I read an eBook called The 30 Day Blueprint for Success that convinced me of the importance of building a mailing list. The book was a compilation of articles from 15 highly respected Internet professionals from different arenas of the Net who were challenged with the following scenario.

“Dear Internet Marketing Expert,

You suddenly lose all your money, along with your name and reputation, and only have your marketing know-how left.

You have bills piled high and people harassing you for money over the phone.

Plus, you have a guaranteed roof over your head, a phone line, and an Internet connection for only one month.

You no longer have your big guru name or JV partners. Other than your vast marketing experience, you’re an unknown newbie.

What would you do, from day 1 to day 30, to get yourself back on top?”

(The above quote was excerpted from Volume I of The 30 Day Blueprint for Success.)

The most common method that these individuals used was to rebuild a customer list as quickly as possible so they could be effective in building the business they once had. Just as an aside, the book was very revealing about the thought patterns of these experts during their 30 day quest to restore the income steam that they once enjoyed. There are four volumes of this book, but I only read the first one since the pattern they used was repeated.

In a class that I took under him, my friend and mentor, Jim Cockrum (author of The Silent Sales Machine Hiding on eBay) said that if his office caught fire the first thing he would save was the backup with his mailing list on it.

Got the idea?

Managing a Mailing List

Some might consider this a little backwards, but let’s plan for how we are going to handle the list before we figure out how to build it. We need to be able to capture basic information like name and email address. We need to be able to automatically send a reply to the person joining the list and verify that they were indeed the person who sent the request to join. (This is called double opt-in and it is vitally important so you can prove that you are not sending SPAM in the future). We will need to send out emails to the people on the list in the future when we start selling to the customers on the list.

To handle this in any volume is an impossible task, but there are services called autoresponders on the Internet that will handle all of this for you.

There are free autoresponders such as FreeAutoBot.com and there are paid autoresponders such as Aweber.com and GetResponse.com. Free sounds good for a start up, but the downside is the fact that the autoresponder puts its link and sometimes advertising on the emails that it sends for you. It does not look as professional as a message from a paid autoresponder. If you use a free autoresponder and then want to switch over to another one later, you face the conversion problems of converting your mailing list. This can be done with import features in autoresponders that allow for mass input of lists, but it is additional work and the autoresponder will take a close look at the list since this is how large SPAM mailing lists can be loaded into an autoresponder. This is your choice and should be carefully researched before you make your decision.

I use Aweber.com so that is the one we will discuss. The site has a 30 day free test drive that will allow you to experiment with it and decide if it is for you. Go to http://www.aweber.com/?211286 and fill out the information. Go ahead and do it now and come back after you look around.

If you decide to use it (and you will have to use an autoresponder to build a list of any size), one month of service from Aweber.com is $19.95 as of this writing so you can start off with a monthly plan. Once you are satisfied that this is for you, you can save $60.00 per year with an annual plan.

After you have signed up, log on to Aweber.com and go to the “How to Get Started” page. This is very complete and has great instructions and tutorial videos to help you set up your first autoresponder. I like the feature of Aweber.com where you compose your messages off line and then import the info into the autoresponder. You will need Notepad or Wordpad to compose your messages. These are found under your Accessories in the Programs on your MS Windows. If you have not already done so, I recommend that you set up a shortcut icon on you desktop or on your systems tray for one of these plain test editors. It is very handy to be able to open this quickly. I use it as a scratch pad for copying and pasting things from web pages to print so I can use the info in research later.

Another consideration is whether you will use text or HTML email messages. I have stayed with text to prevent any conflicts with the proper display of HTML messages and to minimize the download time for the many people who still have 56K dialup connections.

Always test a new concept before you unleash it on your customers so set up an autoresponder. Create the original response message and as many follow up messages as you want to test. Change the follow up time to one day to test it quickly. Send an email to it to activate it (Aweber.com will assign you a default address that ends in @aweber.com for the purpose) and make certain it works the way you want it to.

We will not spend more time on this subject since Aweber.com has excellent instructions and a very complete help section. There are the standard FAQ’s, there are tutorial videos to view, you can send an email question and there is instant on-line chat support. I was also impressed that a REAL person called me about a day after I set up my account to talk with me and ask if she could help. Aweber.com does have REAL people in customer support.

Now that we have your autoresponder set up, how do we get names on it? There are numerous ways to add names to your mailing list and we will cover each of these in separate topics.

Go to the BE Home Page and for the next topic.