Targeted traffic from an email list you build from scratch
Acquiring a solid email subscriber base from scratch is one of the most challenging things when first starting out in Internet marketing. Sure one can scrape Google for emails or purchase an email list from some provider but there is nothing better than an actual targeted and opted-in email list that is responsive.
Getting a solid email list of people who are specifically interested in the information you are writing pays huge dividends. Why hope for traffic from people who may be interested in what you are selling or writing about when you can get laser targeted traffic of die-hard readers.
While there are a ton of book and blogs detailing various methods for acquiring an email list, here is the method that has worked not just for myself but for countless others that I have also privately shared this methodology with. All of whom have been tremendously successful with generating large email subscribers lists that are 100% opted-in.
There are a ton of ways to build different email lists; some more traditional than others that may be more blackhattish, and anyone reading this (especially noobs just starting out) would certainly benefit from searching online or watching videos on youtube on ways to generate huge email lists.
I for one have learned a lot over the years on this topic, spending countless hours reading forum posts, watching videos and talking with others and would suggest to anyone just starting out to do the same. You can learn so much by a simple search in youtube…. just start searching “Building Targeted Email Lists, Email Marketing How To, Get Email Leads ” and you will find lots of great methods to try that actually work depending on what you are promoting and the audience you are targeting.
I am going to share with you a strategy which has effectively helped me build HUGE opted-in email lists.
Now, before I break this method down let me state that this technique as described here may not work for everyone, as offers and audiences all vary and this method is just a general idea and the method should be adjusted to meet the campaign goals and objectives you may have for your email campaign; but the overall method as I will explain it, if properly implemented is effective for building huge email lists.
Things To Have:
- A WordPress Website
- Contact Form 7 Plugin
- Mail Poet- A free wordpress plugin that will allow you to manage your email list including sending large email lists directly from your server.
After these are all set up, it’s now time to get the thinking cap on and come up with your campaign concept to capture email leads (the CTA) and the method to generate the traffic to the site.
Idea On Capturing the Lead
Your concept on how to capture your leads is one of the most important phases of developing a successful strategy. The creative ideas behind your strategy for the site’s call to action is something you must come up with as there is no way I can do all the creative work for you, but what I can do is share with you an idea that has worked for my own campaigns while building a huge email list with more than 15K opted-in subscribers in a very short period.
The first place to start when developing your campaign strategy is to clearly define your goals. Usually the basic goals start very simple. For example
- Generate X amount of visitors to the landing page.
- Capture X amount of leads from these views.
In this specific example we were trying to capture leads for businesses or individuals that were interested in learning more about online security as we had specific website security products that we were pumping out as an affiliate offer. With my goals set high, I had to come up with something that would grab the user’s attention and get a response back from them. What I came up with is a short 10 question survey on Online security and Privacy Rights issues.
It was important to keep the survey very short and simple. Of course the survey was anonymous (so users did not have to submit any personal details at all), so even a short glance from a visitor would show that there would be no personal risk to answering the questions. I used used contact form 7 to create the anonymous survey.
Anytime I create some type of lead capture system I always create 2 or 3 capture points and in this example I created 2. The first email capture point I placed on the 5th question of the survey, which asked the question about how much the visitor knew about online security with multiple choice selections of “none, a little and a lot”. Once this question was answered, no matter the input a dynamic question would generate asking the visitor if they would like to learn more about online security and privacy rights. If they answered yes, then a dynamic email field would generate and the user their inputs their email address (this was the first capture point).
I placed the second email capture point at the end of the survey asking the visitor if they would like to receive the results of the survey once published, and again if answered affirmatively a dynamic field would generate for the user to submit their email address (Please note, that if the user previously submitted their email in the first capture point the logic of the forms would not generate this second capture point).
With the lead capture system in place I was now able to capture leads specifically for people looking to learn more about online security and privacy rights.
With the lead capture form idea in place as detailed above, you should be able to come up with a creative idea to capture leads in your niche so you can build your 100% opted-in email subscriber list. But now what do you do? This is the part that most people get stuck at and often give up.
You can create tons of things on a website, but the bottom line is if you cannot get the traffic to the site then no matter how ingenious your idea may be all your efforts will prove to be a waste of time. There are a lot of ways to generate traffic, some more effective than others. This forum is filled with thousands of techniques some more traditional than others.
For starters it is often best to keep to the basics looking to generate traffic from classical sources like Linked-In, Facebook or even paid advertisement if one has the money. Personally, I am an old school marketer that believes in the power of direct marketing. What I mean by this is just don’t be passive, building a site and waiting for google to rank you or sitting around waiting for someone to refer someone to your site. You have to be proactive and directly engage people and groups; else if you just sit around you will have a 97% chance at failure.
Now for this specific campaign I targeted website owners and webmasters. I made this choice because I believed web owners would be a very targeted audience that would be interested in online security and privacy rights, especially after the past year and a half of hacking affecting so many people across the world wide web.
With the lead capture system as described above in place and ready to capture emails, I began our contact form marketing campaign. Contact Form Marketing is where you directly contact webmasters through the contact form of their websites directly. This form of marketing has grown tremendously over the last couple of years. One can do contact form marketing manually or as in our example we used a publicly available contact form submitter to submit to 10’s of thousands of webmasters in a very short time frame.
In a two week time frame we were able to generate more than 25k form submissions with more than 15k of these having emails also submitted through one of the capture points. Needless to say I was very pleased with the results of the campaign.
Disclaimer…While I was successful with my campaign, I am only using it here as an illustration on how to build a huge email list fast and effectively and this method as written may not work for the product/services you are offering. This is where your own creative genius needs to come into play as your own thoughts and ideas should be unique.
Just spend some time brainstorming and come up with ideas and test them out. Not all ideas work the same and not all products/services can be marketed the same way. If your creative, come off as genuine in your marketing with an idea that captures people’s attention, then people will respond.
Keep in mind: there are many methods to building email lists.
The best advice I could give to anyone just starting out in IM, that wants to build a good email list is to try many methods. Do a little research and cross test the methods to see what works for you. As I mentioned above, spending a little time reading this forum or watching youtube videos will go a long way to helping you think of ways to generate traffic and capture the leads that you want.