In order to generate sales online, there’s nothing better than an email list. Building an email list of engaged customers is the holy grail of online marketing.
How do you build an email list of engaged customers? Take this amazing, free course now! It involves setting up forms, success pages, thank you pages, squeeze pages, double opt-ins, lead magnets, list segmentation, auto-responders and more baffling technical jargon.
The course takes you through the process using two of the foremost email marketing providers – Aweber and Mailchimp. There are many other providers in the market place but these two are the best for small- and medium-sized companies and the solopreneur.
Remember, collecting a list of your potential customers’ email addresses and marketing to them is probably the best thing you can do to get sales online. There’s a right way and a wrong way of doing it. Let’s do it right!
Let’s try to demystify the technical jargon and explain about the course at the same time.
Email capture form
An email capture form is where you actually collect the emails. It can be on the sidebar of a website (here on RobCubbon.com it’s available when you click a button on the sidebar). But, ideally, email capture forms should be in many places of your website to maximize the number of emails you collect.
Squeeze page
A squeeze page is a page on your website where you, typically, ask for an email and nothing else. There are no links out of the page, no logo, no header, no sidebar, no footer. Here is my squeeze page.
Double opt-ins, thank you pages and success pages
MailChimp and Aweber insist that collection of email addresses has to be via a “double opt-in”. So after a visitor has entered their email address, they then receive a confirmation email which contains a link that they have to click to be registered.
This is the procedure for the double opt-in registration:
Visitor fills out form > Goes to “Thank you” page > Receives confirmation email > Clicks link in confirmation email > Goes to “Success” page > Receives “Welcome” email.
Lead magnet
The lead magnet is the offer, “bribe” or free gift that is used at an incentive to the visitor to enter their email address. This is usually in the form of a free PDF e-book or report. This should be available as soon as the visitor has clicked the link in the confirmation email and can be available on the “Success” page.
Sequential auto-responder sequence
The auto-responder is a perfect example of how automation can make you money online when you sleep. An auto-responder sends a series of emails to a new subscriber over a period of days, sometimes months, sometimes years.
Typically, this would be three or four emails containing information that is of extremely high value to the recipient. This builds rapport and authority so that, when they receive a special offer or “sales email”, a high proportion of subscribers will buy.
Broadcast emails
“Sales emails” and “value emails” exist outside the auto-responder sequence as well.These are called broadcast emails. They can, and should, be sent anyway, especially after the auto-responder sequence has finished.
You can mail out to your list up-to-the-minute information, value emails or special offers of your products or services. Again, always space out “sales emails” with three or four “value emails” between them.
RSS / Blog broadcast emails
And a third type of email is a the blog broadcast email which is automated and sends out an update from a blog, usually at a set time of the week.
List segmentation
As a business’s email list grows segmentation becomes necessary. The list can be segmented or tagged by the products they’ve bought, their interests, what they’ve clicked on, etc.
A/B split testing of emails
In addition, lists can be randomly segmented to test the subject line and content of an email. Typically a list can be grouped into two segments of 10% of the list and one segment of 80%. The two 10% segments will be sent the same email with one slight difference and the remaining 80% will be sent the one with the higher open rates or click-throughs.
You can do it
You can build a email list of engaged customers that will buy from you when you mail them. But you need to do it in the right way with Aweber or MailChimp so check out my course it’s FREE! I’ll be adding more videos soon.
Hi Rob,
Sometimes, I am flummoxed by the tech jargon and I’ve been at this online thing for 5 years! I hear certain words and my eyes glaze over, lol….and other words, well, I just zone out when I hear them. You did a fab job breaking down the email basics because so many folks are just plain intimidated by list building, due to the handful of terminologies and abbreviations to digest, to get this business-building technique down pat.
The free course looks like it’ll rock.
Happy to tweet it!
I hope you’re still enjoying Cool, Dry Chiang Mai…..best time of the year to be there!
Ryan
Thanks a lot, Ryan. Yes, email marketing does seem to have more than its fair share of technical jargon.
Loving Chiang Mai although we’ve just come out of a cold snap. You wouldn’t believe it, I actually felt cold in Chiang Mai and needed to buy a jacket!!!