Successful Management Of Your List

by Scotty Rushing Certified Life/Business Coach

Having a list of leads or prospects is the single most important thing you need for successful Internet marketing, but many people neglect a very important skill: successful management of the list.

When I work with a coaching client to improve their marketing efforts we always reach a point where I ask them about their list. Almost 100% of them will begin to describe what amounts to their Gmail list of contacts. When I explain to them that this is not an acceptable list for producing dynamic results they are always deflated.

If you want to join the big boys in the arena of Internet marketing you're going to have to have some type of list-management system in place, for a variety of reasons. I'm going to detail the advantages of such a system in this article. This is not an endorsement for any specific provider. I personally use AWeber, but there are certainly other options and I encourage you to shop around and find the one that works best for you.

I also want to say that some folks are more than capable of setting up their own autoresponders through their hosting provider. More power to them. I'm a complete dork when it comes to anything beyond basic web design so I find that a list-management service works well for me.

BASIC ADVANTAGES OF LIST MANAGEMENT SERVICE

1. All legal bases are covered via opt-in, opt-out methods.

When someone subscribes to your list in this manner they have asked to receive your communication, and when they no longer wish to receive it they can unsubscribe. End of story. I want to make this abundantly clear: If you are emailing complete strangers without permission and failing to offer an option to unsubscribe from your mailings, you WILL receive spam complaints which can lead to termination of your email account.

You would think that is pretty simple. Pretty basic, right? Wrong. Almost every client who comes to me for coaching is using their personal email address to email a "list".

Mistake. Major mistake.

2. Write one email to the entire list.

Self-explanatory. If you have a new product you wish to send to the list it is a simple matter of writing the email and hitting SEND.

3. Tracking allows you to see which sign-ups are performing and which aren't.

If you use a variety of capture forms as I do, it sometimes helps to know which ones are working and which aren't. I can then adjust my campaigns to display those capture forms which are having the greatest success ( for example, Form A offers a free report and Form B does not---A outperforms B, so I integrate more free reports into my forms).

These are just a few very basic reasons why you must have a system in place to manage your list. Do not keep it in the same place that you keep Granny's email, i.e your contacts.

Unless, of course, Granny has opted-in to your free newsletter.