Email marketing is bar-none the cheapest
way to strengthen your brand, promote
products, and keep in touch with your
customers and potential leads. 

However, getting people to sign up to your
list can be difficult.  After all, would you give
your personal email address to just anyone?

It’s worth the challenge, to build a large list
of email addresses that belong to real
people that are interested in you and what you offer. 

Here’s a list of best practices which other
people have used successfully to snag
those email addresses: 

#1 Make the Process Easy and Enticing! 

If you expect to get someone’s personal contact information, you need
to provide a carrot to dangle in front of their noses – usually a valuable
free product. 

The value of the carrot will define the value of the people who sign up to
your list.  Your squeeze page is your carrot’s packaging so consider
how it affects the perceived value of your temptation!

The carrot is the incentive that starts the ball rolling, but the process is
what makes or breaks things. 

Your opt-in needs to be painless, quick, smooth, and hassle free or
your prospect will bail before completing the opt-in, regardless of the
value of the carrot. 

#2 How You Follow Up With Your List

After the opt-in, how you follow up is important.  From the very first
email you send to the last email your subscriber opens, your follow up
determines the length of time they subscribe to your list. 

It’s easier to keep a subscriber happy than to rustle up another one. 

If you can keep a subscriber extremely happy, they’ll not only stay
subscribed they’ll probably help recruit new subscribers, via word of
mouth. 

The first contact you make with a subscriber should be your welcome
email.  It should be:

A. welcoming

B. the best sampling of what they should expect in the future! 

In the welcome email, deliver the original carrot you promised on
your squeeze page, but to go a bit further and over-deliver by giving
them some added “surprise” value, just for opening the email up! 

Repeatedly offering extra value will, over the course of their
subscription, ensure that they look forward to receiving emails from
you and will give them more reasons to open each email.

After all, having someone on your list that doesn’t open your emails
is as bad as not having them join your list at all!

When they start opening your emails, you’ll want to make sure that
you don’t bombard them too often, with too many emails. 

Send your emails out on a regular schedule that is reasonable so as
not to clog up their inbox with more material than they can absorb. 

Don’t send emails out when you don’t have anything to say! 

Another good rule of thumb is to watch the statistics provided by
your auto-responder to see which emails you’re sending make a hit,
and which ones miss! This will help guide you to the sort of content
your emails should be providing! 

Holding back information, if you must, to meet the demands of your
scheduled delivery date is a good idea. Not sending an email on time
is sometimes as bad as sending too many.

You can tease your subscribers with snippets of what is yet to come
if you need to stretch your available content across two delivery dates. 

Don’t expect everyone on your list to read every word you write - most
people are too busy, and have too many emails in their inbox! 

Make sure that you cater to your speed-reading subscribers by
formatting your emails with double spaces to divide separate ideas,
and bullet points that draw attention to what’s really important. 

Links that you want or need your subscribers to click on don’t always
stand out in the bright blue that web surfers have come to expect in
emails. So, make sure the important links are formatted in a way that
stands out, with a call to action, which makes clicking the link enticing! 

Make sure that your always friendly to your readers and that your text
is edited and makes sense. 

This last bit of advice was born out in the example of my doctor’s
newsletter.

I always expected not to be able to read his handwriting on my
prescription slips, but when his newsletter started to become full
of misspelled gibberish, I dropped it AND him like a hot tamale!

#3 Make It Sharable

If you’re doing everything above correctly, it’s time to help your happy
subscribers share your emails, so that they can become apostles for
your brand’s cause! 

Most auto-responders make it easy to share your newsletter, so
make sure that you take advantage of the share features they provide. 

If you do the rest right, people will take advantage of the share buttons
and your list will grow all on its own!

So, to recap, you need:

1.            A great carrot

2.            A great squeeze page

3.            An auto-responder

4.            The ability to follow up and communicate well

5.            The willingness to share great stuff with your list

Not to get you too muddled up, before you begin the process, you’ll
need a domain name and hosting too – if you want your squeeze page
to go live!