List Building Mistakes – what many marketers do wrong (even some of the big ones)!
I have to get this of my chest, and I just want to say up front that this is my PERSONAL opinion, something that I find is done wrong by many marketers out there, sometimes even the big ones.
We all know that “the money is in the list”, so everybody is trying to build a list of buyers/subscribers by putting a sign up box on their blog or offering a free product or something. So everybody is out trying to collect as many subscribers as possible, because the longer the list, the better the profits!
Now, I am still on the “subscriber” side of the game, as I have not got my own list yet (I have started trying, though, as you can see there is a “Subscribe to this blog” box on my blog 😉 ). What I want to talk about here comes from my experience as a busy subscriber.
You have to know, and I am sure many will agree with me here, if you start out in Internet Marketing, there are so many programs and offers out there, and you just try to get the most info together in the shortest amount of time. So what I did is every time I saw something on the net which I thought worthy, I subscribed to it. My inbox started filling up quite rapidly with all these emails from all these lists I was subscribed to!
And you know what has happened? Many of the emails I get from lists I subscribed to state only the name of the person who is behind the list. There is NOTHING there telling me any more where this subscription originated from! So I get so many emails from “some name” like “Mike” or “Sean ThisandThat”, and I wonder – what do these guys have to tell me? What was the reason I subscribed to them in the first place? Where did I sign up?
So what I have started doing is deleting ALL the subscriptions which I cannot work out any more where they came from. Period.
It is so easy to lose track. I think every marketer who wants to keep people on their list needs to make sure that any emails they send state the origin of the subscription. For example, when somebody will subscribe to my blog (want to be my first subscriber??? 😉 ), any emails they will get will state the following “From”:
Petra [petra-weiss.com]
So if they want to know where they subscribed, they can just look it up again! Simple!
It is SO easy to do, but so many marketers don’t do it, and I am pretty sure there are many subscribers out there like me who further down the track think “What is this? Who is this guy?” and simply go and delete the subscription.
I would like to hear some opinions on this, see whether there are more people out there thinking like this, or whether I am totally wrong!
Category: How To
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Hi Petra,
You are spot on with this post. I definitely agree that a marketer should put something else on the “From” other than just a name.
If you have subscribed to a newsletter and receive an email “once in a blue moon”, then these will get lost in the multitudes of spam, unless, of course, you know the marketer.
I have signed up to many lists from Giveaway Events – one thing you have to do when claiming free gifts – and don’t know half of the names.
A little tip. Open an email account especially for newsletters and check once a week.
Good post.
Regards,
Gary
Any tutorials out there how to become expert in List Building ?-*~
Lexi, start with getting the free ebook I advertise on my sidebar (from Alex Jeffreys)
Those are bunch of spammers. Subscribers should have the option to unsubscribe and in the first place you must have the choice to subscribe where you want to subscribe. Same here most of the time I’ve received emails coming from nowhere and I’ve asked my self when did i subscribed in this website? These emails are really annoying and a real headache.
Joan recently posted…Ensuring Email Delivery for Your Clients
hi
very simple and nice tips for me, thanks or your article. i will expect from you “a complete email marketing detail” article soon. once again thanks petra.