How to Get Visitors to Look Forward to Your Emails

If you want to make money online, it’s important to build an email list. Period. This is a fundamental way of building a conversation with your buyers. It’s important logistically, because with an email list you can communicate directly with a lot of people and make money doing it. It’s also important psychologically, because things start on your blog, but if someone signs up for your email list, they’re taking the next step.

It perhaps seems like a small thing, but the visitor understands that they don’t have to sign up for your list. It’s completely voluntary, and the fact that they’re choosing to sign up is of significant psychological importance. They’re moving down the sales funnel, and they’re moving your relationship to the next level.

Signing up for an email list a large commitment of course, but it DOES take a commitment. This person understands that they’re going to receive direct communication from you now, and they’re raising their hand as an interested prospect. In truth, it’s a huge vote of confidence in you. Don’t screw it up! It means that the person signing up for your list has found significant value in what you offer, and they want even more. Hopefully, you have something more to give them!

The key to getting people to look forward to your emails is to give them MORE than they expect

As usual, the principle of success here is fantastically simple. One rule I learned in sales is to always under promise and over deliver. If you do this, you will always create a positive impression on your subscribers. Follow these simple principles, and you’ll have your email readers hanging on your every word:

1. Give them time to miss you. In other words, don’t email too often. Everyone has a threshold. Even the best content can come in too quickly and be overbearing. I honestly think most professionals (even some of my favorite internet marketers included)  email too often and if they emailed LESS, they would make MORE money.
2. Build different lists. Categorize your subscribers. This takes forethought of course, and it can be done a number of different ways, but the point is that when you send out a message, it’s important for it to be as targeted as possible. Sending out a single message to everyone on your list is one thing. Sending out a targeted message to a specific group of people for a specific reason is an entirely different animal. Which one do you think is more effective?
3. Give more. If you promised a report or an ebook or a premium of some kind in exchange for them signing up, make sure it is delivered promptly. Then, follow up a week later with ANOTHER free report or some gift that relates to the first they received. Repeat on occasion. Under promise, over deliver. Do you think this will get people checking their email to see what else they’re going to get from you? It will.
4. Make your email highly deliverable. This may seem like a no-brainer, but if someone doesn’t receive your email because it was blocked by their spam filter, it doesn’t matter how effective it would have been. They didn’t get it. So it’s important to take steps to make sure your messages are as deliverable as possible. I recommend checking your messages against this free email spam checker. Often, making some small change to your outgoing messages can make a big difference in how many people actually receive it. There is no way to ensure 100% delivery rate, but being mindful about what you’re doing pays off.
5. Do more than sell. Email lists are powerful sales tools. It’s true, and I recommend you sell things to everyone on your email list. It’s a great way to extend value, continue your conversation with your visitors and make money online, all in one step. But anything can be overdone. If all you do is hardsell people with every message, you will make sales, but you will also suffer from inordinately high opt out rates and low response rates. Concentrate on the quality of the dialog you’re building. You can use your email list as a means of conversation, getting people’s opinions on different product ideas, etc. The possibilities are endless, and with a little creativity, you can explode the effectiveness of your operation through email marketing, but only if you look at your email list as more than a sales tool. The double benefit of doing this is that it will make your sales efforts more effective as well.