It won’t come as a surprise to online marketers who’ve been around for a while, but many of the same principles that worked in “old-fashioned” email marketing (Web 1.0?) apply pretty much directly to successful marketing using newer social media.

As the Web Marketing Ninja says in an article on ProBlogger.net,

You can take exactly the same approach you’ve been refining for your email list-building activity, and apply it to these new channels—the basic principles are exactly the same.

The four core attributes of successful email marketing are:

• Make your email capture findable.
• Provide incentives for people to sign up.
• Craft well-written, engaging messages.
• Give more than you ask from your list.

Translated into techniques for, say, promotion on Facebook these become

• Make your Facebook URL and Facebook pages findable.
• Provide incentives for people to sign up.
• Create content specifically targeted to your Facebook subscribers.
• Offer real value and quality content.

This means you should treat your Facebook channel as a way to connect in a meaningful way with a whole new group of people. These people are not necessarily going to subscribe to your list. You must engage them right within Facebook (and other social media.)

To read more see The Money’s Not In the List, it’s In the Connection

In a guest post on ProBlogger.net online blogger and marketer the Blog Tyrant tells how he turned an article rejected as a guest post into a successful list-building ebook. The rejected article became the basis for a free ebook that he gives away on his own site to build his subscriber list.

It turns out that this ebook was considerably more successful than any of the others he had tried – for a while getting between 100 and 200 subscribers a day.

Why did this happen? That’s the important part for bloggers, and the Blog Tyrant tells us why he thinks it worked so well. It was because of an unintended strategy that he had previously put into place without knowing it. The ebook that drew so many subscribers is called Capture 120% More Email Subscribers Overnight, and he realized that he had inadvertently pre-sold many readers through a series of guest blog posts he had done over the previous month or so. As he says,

I went back and looked at all the guest posts I’d written in the past few weeks which were still bringing in traffic. In every single one, I had talked about growing a mailing list, the importance of community, or something to do with that rejected-post-turned-ebook.

In essence, I had built a whole lot of hype around the ebook without even realizing that I was doing it. If I was a marketing firm I would have charged a lot of money for that strategy!

As a result he developed a strategy for replicating this success:

1. Research your ebook topic very thoroughly
2. Create guest posts that target and promote the topic of the ebook
3. Interact with people who comment on guest posts
4. Have a strong call to action in your blog where you give away the ebook

To read the complete post go to How a 30 Minute Reject Post Brings Me Hundreds of Subscribers a Week

Internet marketers are fond of saying “Build a list, build a list!” Under the best of circumstances this is a difficult challenge, but even more for a local business.

Say you’re a car dealer, landscaper, chiropractor, hair salon or real estate agent. What is the point of building a list of email subscribers?

The job of the marketer

If you were to draw a little schematic diagram of the marketing process you might begin with two boxes. On the left is Box A – “My Products” – the things you sell to people, and on the right is Box B – “My Target Market” – the individuals, companies or organizations you are trying to sell to.

As a marketer your job is to push information about Box A to the people in Box B. You have to do it in a convincing enough way that some people in Box B will buy some of the stuff in Box A.

Breaking down your target market

Say you have a home renovation business and you want to market it to your local community. Who is in Box B? What is your “Target Market”? Or to put it another way, who should you address your marketing efforts towards?

The easy part is coming up with a rough statement something like this:

“My target market is Homeowners within a 30 mile radius of my home base”

Fair enough. But when you start to think about this a bit more you realize there are important sub-divisions within your target market. And each of these sub-divisions may require a slightly different message.

The most important sub-divisions will be between groups with different levels of attachment to your business – typically the list will look something like this:

- current customers
- warm prospects (including past customers)
- cold prospects

Generally speaking the job of the marketer is to move people up the ladder – to turn them from “cold prospects” to “warm prospects” and then to “current customers”. Having a carefully developed email list is a great way to feed right into this process.

How this applies to List Building

First, to have an effective email system you will probably need more than one list. A good place to start is to have one list for current customers, and a second list for warm prospects. What you need is the ability to tailor your messages to different segments of your target market.

Second, you have to realize we are basically talking here about a “permission-based” email system. This is one that subscribers have opted into (either explicitly or implicitly). Anybody who has voluntarily joined your list is automatically a “warm prospect” – someone who has expressed some level of interest in your products or services. And obviously current customers are the warmest contacts (and prospects for future business) that you have.

Third, “cold prospects” are, by definition, not on your list. They are just out there in a faceless mass waiting to be introduced to your company and converted to warm prospects.

Challenges of moving people up the ladder

The challenges involved in this kind of system are pretty clear.

1. First, how do you turn “cold prospects” into “warm prospects”?

This is another way of asking how you get them on your list. The standard answer is “Advertise”. Since you cannot reach these people in a “personal” way (such as email) you have to reach them in an impersonal way.

This does not usually mean sending out mass emails to people who have not opted into your list. Rather it usually means running ads in places like Google Adwords, Kijiji, or Facebook.

These ads can all be targeted to specific groups (homeowners, for example). In your ad you make an offer for a “free home renovation guide” or whatever. In order to receive the free gift they have to sign up giving you their name, email address, and (sometimes) phone number. By signing up they become “warm”. You’ve moved them up the ladder.

2. Second, how do you turn “warm” prospects into paying customers.

In theory this is relatively simple. You keep in touch with the people on your list by sending them a message on a regular basis.

Most eMail marketers will send out a combination of different types of messages. Some will be strictly informative with no sales pitch at all. Others will offer a “free” service – a “gift”. Some will encourage people to get involved by commenting on a blog post or by entering a contest. And others will be a sales pitch for products or services, often in the form of a “special offer” – a discount, for example.

The long term objective is not just to enhance your brand, but to build a relationship of trust with your warm prospects, and ultimately, to turn them into customers. Email marketing lets you reach different segments of your target market with different messages. That makes it ideal for tailoring your message to the specific job required for each segment.

One of the most commonly used techniques in web marketing is the use of a giveaway to entice people to subscribe to your email contact list. If you are considering doing this, here is some advice on creating a “list building system”.

A “list building system” consists of several components:

Component1: The GiveAway Item(s) – Most online marketers use a free “report”, free video (or set of videos), or even a free piece of software. Real Estate promotion lends itself nicely to the free report. The report is usually on some “hot” topic of the moment – something that your target market wants to know about.

The giveaway item does not have to be something original (that you wrote). It can be a report purchased from a service you subscribe to, an organization you belong to, etc. But if you use something created by someone else, be sure to give the original writer or creator credit where required. Don’t just steal stuff from other people without explicit permission to use it.

Component 1: Your list – This is usually just a list of contacts with names, email addresses, and other relevant information such as phone numbers and addresses. Where you keep your list is the important question. In order to “build” your list you will need to keep it in some kind of database – normally in an autoresponder. If you don’t know what an autoresponder is, read on.

Component 2: Your Database – A “database” (db) is simply a file containing information in table form – arranged in columns and rows. Most of us are familiar with Microsoft Excel – you’ve probably seen the ubiquitous “Excel spreadsheet” on a few occasions.

The advantage of keeping your contact information in a spreadsheet like Excel is that it can be easily updated and exported. For example, if you are using Outlook to do your mailing, you can export your file from your database program, and then import it into Outlook. It comes in with all the information neatly arranged so you can use it immediately. You don’t have to enter everything manually.

If you don’t own MS Excel (and even if you do) a good alternative is Google Docs. Google Docs is free and contains a spreadsheet program that does 99.9% of what you will need it to do. See my blog post about Google Docs for more information.

Component 3: Your Autoresponder – Once you learn how to use an autoresponder you will consider it the heart of your list building system. Most good autoresponders do a number of things:

1. Sends out emails to your list.
2. Contains your list in database form. That means you can import lists into it. (See below for importing limitations.)
3. Lets you create a subscription form that can be placed on a web page. When someone fills in the form their information is added to your list.
4. Sends an automatic email response to subscribers when they sign up.

The significance of this last point (#4) can easily be missed if you are not familiar with what autoresponders do. Imagine that you have set up a giveaway, offering a free report download. Someone signs up from your website. Their contact information is automatically “captured” in your db (if you have it set up to work this way). And then… what?

What you want to happen is to have your subscribers directed to the download page. The easiest and most effective way to do this is to use an autoresponse. When they subscribe your autoresponder immediately sends them an email message saying: “Thanks for signing up. You can find your download at LINK.”

The fact is, once you have your “system” set up your autoresponder takes care of the rest. It collects the contact information, stores it in a special database, and sends out responses directing your subscribers to the download page.

You can even set up most autoresponders to send out a series of messages at timed intervals. Say, for example, your giveaway is a “course” in “What to Look for in Your Dream Home”. Of course you can put all this information into one report. But why not stretch it out over a series of email messages. Turn it into 5 or 6 shorter “lessons”, and send them out over 5 days (1 each day) or 10 days (1 every 2 days). This puts your name in front of them 5 times rather than once.

In many cases autoresponder functions will be built into standard contact management programs – the sort of thing you may already be using. Check it out before you go looking for another program to master.

If you don’t already have autoresponder capabilities, then you will need to find the best and easiest solution for you. There are two basic types: hosted (by the provider) and self-hosted.

Self-hosting requires that you have access to a web server (usually where your website is hosted), and know something about setting up scripts on the server. It is not difficult once you know how to do it, but can be baffling when you don’t. The easiest self-hosted autoresponder I’ve found is called ListMailPro.

Hosted autoresponder services are set up on the provider’s server and you are given access to your own account for a monthly fee. By far the most popular is called AWeber. I wrote an overview of the AWeber system a couple of years ago.

I used hosted services for quite a few years before changing over to self-hosted ones. The biggest advantages of a hosted service are first, that you don’t have to worry about the technical stuff gong on in the background. Second, the system is (supposedly) set up in a “user friendly” way to help you get things done.

I say “supposedly” user friendly because after trying two or three different systems over the course of about 5 years I concluded they had just too many options and getting little things done involved too much wading through of stuff I had no interest in.

The other disadvantage of a hosted system like AWeber is that they will not just let you import your contact list into their system. They do this to protect themselves against spammer abuse. If they just let everybody load their lists into the system, many would go out and buy a list of 50 or 100,000 “targeted consumers” and start spamming people using the hosted system.

You can load your list into the system, but they force you to send an opt-in message to everyone. And they have to approve the message.

Component 4: The Capture Page – Internet marketers often call this a “squeeze page” because it is intended to “squeeze” your website visitors down to a form where they fill in their name and email address.

Basically your capture page is a web page that contains a signup form. It often contains a “pitch” as well – to get people to sign up. But the important component on this page is the form that captures the information. Usually this is generated by your autoresponder program. When you set up your list in the autoresponder there will be an option called something like “Create Subscribe Form”. Clicking on that will give you some code that you then integrate into your web page.

Obviously if you don’t know anything about web pages this will be a challenge. But it should be a piece of cake for you web designer.

Here is an example of a capture page integrated with a list in ListMailPro:

Free Blogs That Work Report – filling in this form will generate an email response that gives you the address of the free download.

Here is an example of a capture page integrated with access to a membership site:

Free Green Tips Membership (yes it’s free!)

Either of these pages can serve as a template for a signup page. Just have a look at the source code (View/Source) to see how it is done.