Building a Valuable Email List: You Must Train Your Audience That They Are, In Fact, Customers
Here’s a marketing lesson I learned the hard way about a decade ago, and it’s still relevant today. Back around 2006, my wife asked me to build her a web site. For a while, it was a small site, relatively speaking (and my first Wordpress site, by the way).
Soon after that, we decided to take some online marketing classes and build it out more. Specifically, we had the idea to grow our email list by coming up with a cool freebie giveaway and offering that as an incentive for signing up.
So, we spent time developing the freebie, and also spent time developing a bunch of follow-up freebies to further solidify our relationship with the new subscribers. We set these up as auto-responders, which means that, after someone signed up, subsequent mailings went out automatically on a schedule we specified. As an example, it went something like this:
- Visitor signed up and got access to our main freebie (which was a recipe book, by the way).
- A few days later, they got an email saying something like, “We hope you liked that book! And, by the way, here’s a bonus recipe for you!”
- A few days after that, they got another, introducing some cool areas on our web site.
