Before you can use email marketing to build relationships with prospects, you must begin by building your community properly. That starts with attracting the right people to become subscribers.
If you cast your net too wide, you’ll get a lot of uninterested and unresponsive people on your list. Instead you want to target the exact people who are your perfect prospects.
When it comes to email marketing, the size of your list does matter – but so does quality. Of course, bigger lists are better, but only if the quality of the subscribers is high as well.
Here are seven ways to attract the right people to you – and get them to subscribe!
1. Describe Your Prospect – Think about how you’ll grow your community AND exactly who you want on your lists. Identify your target audience, specifically and clearly write down the information on paper so you can follow it. Develop customer personas that can help you build a community of members who want to hear what you say and to whom you can add value. Be like an author and create an imaginary person when you write. For example, for Working Moms Only, I write to an imaginary mom named Julie. She is 38 with two kids and she works a full-time job. She doesn’t have a lot of time and needs every email to be worth her time to read.
2. Set Subscriber Expectations – Let subscribers know exactly what you’ll be sending them, when and how often, with a clear welcome message by email. The clearer you can be, the more you’ll weed through people who don’t want that information and only build a list of people who want your information. There is no need to reason to trick people into signing up. You want only the people who want to be there.
3. Give Them Something Valuable – When creating your free give-a-way, focus on a very narrow and specific audience. You want to give them something that truly adds value to their lives and even solves one of their main pain points. You want the offer to be so specific that only people who belong in your community will want to sign up for it.
4. Make Signing Up Simple – Avoid asking for too much information up front. At the most, ask for a first name and an email address. I do recommend getting their first name (rather than just their email address). Why? So you can personalize future messages to them and build your relationship by putting “Dear Julie” in your message. Your name is one of your favorite words to hear. 
6. Monitor Your Stats – While email is a wonderful tool that can be fully automated, physically monitor your email stats at least weekly. You can get a lot of insight into what’s happening with your subscribers by looking at the analytics.
Review the number of visitors to your optin/squeeze page – and calculate your optin rate as the number of subscribers divided by the number of visitors. Each week work to raise this number.
Then when you send out broadcasts to your community, monitor the open rate, the click rate and the unsubscribe rates. Use these numbers to make decisions on which topics are the most popular and which promotions are the most effective.
7. Connect on Social Media Too – Once people have joined your community as a subscriber, be sure to let them know where else they can locate you on the web. It should be easy for them to connect with you in multiple places like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube. Believe it or not, this will increase trust as they get to know you and your brand outside of just their email inbox.
Finally, only send valuable content when you email your subscribers. Yes, you’re going to promote your products and services to them. But you’re also going to inform, educate and engage with them so that you can build strong and lasting relationships of value.
Ready for even more secrets to effective email marketing? Get my Ultimate Email Checklists here.
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