In the traditional sales world, sales people used to use a Rolodex (remember those?), business cards and a call log – and of course, their telephone. Many still do today. Of course, modern CRM systems have automated this process nicely. The Rolodex was the “list” back then… today, CRM software has largely displaced the Rolodex.
In my last several blog posts, I stressed the importance of building a relationship with your list of subscribers. Don’t have a list of subscribers?
Oops! You probably aren’t turning a profit online if you aren’t building and nurturing your list – are you?
Today I had a nice discussion with a work at home mom about her attempts to make money online. She had invested around $5,000 in affiliate marketing and advertising based on some “make money” course she saw on TV… well, I’m always saddened to hear these kinds of stories, when good people are taken advantage of by scams or incomplete sales processes…
I explained to her that the only way to turn a consistent profit in an online business is with a list of customers, subscribers and prospects. The reasons for this is actually quite simple. It’s simple economics.
It costs too much to advertise and bring a visitor to your website. On the first visit to a website, 99% are probably not yet ready to buy whatever you’re selling. Well, it’s impossible to turn a profit when only 1% or fewer people buy from you, given the cost of bringing visitors to your site.
Instead, it’s a proven fact that in order to run an advertising-driven, profitable online business, you must build a list of subscribers – who you then can develop a relationship with over time and market to them on an ongoing basis.
It seems simple enough, yet I’m still amazed at how many small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t do this properly. There’s tons of great information freely available on how to develop landing pages that get visitors to register and there’s certainly no shortage of email auto-responders to choose from (arguably there’s too many of them to choose from today).
So what’s the issue? Why are so many companies and people starting out still missing this critical piece of the online profit puzzle?
Perhaps it’s because they lack the content – the so-called “money magnet” needed to attract the right kinds of people to register and subscribe in the first place. Money magnet is a term that’s been used in a variety of ways, but I first heard the term applied to online marketing by Frank Kern, a very experienced and successful Internet marketer.
A money-magnet is anything you can give away for free or nearly free that attracts the right kinds of prospective customers to register and become a subscriber. Now I realize this is online marketing 101 stuff, but like I said, there’s so many people who are skipping right past the basics to put a gorgeous looking website up and then wonder why it’s not making money, that apparently it needs to be stressed more.
I outlined the entire process for building a profitable online business in a post earlier this year called “A PROVEN ONLINE SUCCESS FORMULA“, where I go into quite a lot of detail on proper goal setting and putting the necessary online selling machinery in place.
Incidentally, all of this is spelled out in even greater detail in the Online Leadership Guide, which comes with some very cool free tools and a mini-course you should check out (it’s very affordable, at only $19.95). Incidentally, this is a decent example of a money magnet and landing page.
So if you’ve tried Google AdWords or other online advertising and are disappointed with the lack of sales results, if you weren’t using a proper landing page with an enticing money-magnet free offer for your visitors to register and learn more, go back and fix your front-end “lead generation” process and start building your list.
Several earlier posts discuss the importance of developing a relationship with your subscribers, giving them even more value for free, then eventually *some* of them will be ready to buy – and when they are ready, some will buy from you.
Done properly, your subscriber and customer list become your more valuable online business asset – much like that Rolodex was to a salesperson in the offline world. Invest in building your list and the relationship with those on your list, and I promise you’ll be amazed at how much it will help you.
If you’ve been in business for a while as a small business, chances are you already have a “list” of sorts – a mailing list in the making inside your Gmail contact manager, Outlook or other mail client. This is, in effect, your mailing list – all your contacts. If you’re like me, you have hundreds of business cards squirreled away in a desk drawer somewhere.
Getting these entered or scanned into your contact manager will begin to round out your business contacts. Keep in mind that these folks would probably accept a personal email from you, but would consider advertising or other forms of direct promotion as spam, so be careful how you use these resources.
If you are a more established medium to large corporation, then you most likely have a corporate CRM system, which is a primary list source for you. You also probably have lists scattered all over the place and you may need to do some list consolidation, de-duping and cleansing. It’s well worth the effort, as these lists are pure gold when used properly with a focused email marketing strategy.
Finally, keep in mind that one of your best sources for lists is leveraging lists of your partners through cooperative marketing campaigns, whereby your partners promote your offer to their lists, bringing lots of qualified traffic to your landing page and building your targeted list.
Ultimately, you’ll need to break out from your core contacts and build focused lists of prospects in each of your target markets. It does take time, but done properly, it is well worth the effort and investment.
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Email Lists – The key to sustainable online profitability – http://b2l.me/adm9j (via @rickbraddy)
Email Lists – The key to sustainable online profitability http://twittley.com/r/dn0 #productlaunch #emailmarketing
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