List building is one of the keys for success with all of your Internet Marketing campaigns. Whether you are working on niche marketing, article marketing, affiliate marketing or any other aspect of Internet Marketing, you are going to have to master one concept above all. You are going to have to master the art of list building to be able to enjoy your success.

Whether you are talking about the latest and greatest Internet Marketing Guru or the stay at home Mom who works just to make ends meet and add a little extra to the table, everybody making any money at all online has one common factor. They all have worked at building a list so that they can have a ready source of highly targeted traffic, motivated buyers and a captive audience to promote their products to and increase their earnings potential online.

Their skills with list building have allowed them to do what most people in the brick and mortar world can never accomplish. In the brick and mortar world, it is commonly held that there are three primary factors for the success of a business. Those factors for success are location, location and location. List building may very well be the online equivalent since it does ultimately determine the number of people who will be seeing your product with only a minimal effort having to be put forth by you.

Building your list properly will give you a highly targeted and motivated audience to share your information with, share your ideas with and to market your offerings to when it is time to put some cash in your pocket. While there are exceptions to every rule, list building will be the one most determining factor in your ability to compete with the self-proclaimed gurus and other online experts.

List building is about more than just getting people to sign up to your site or your newsletter though. List building is about finding people who already have an interest in your area of expertise or your personal niche or market. If the subscribers to your list are not targeted, you may just as well be buying blind traffic to your site or paying for emails even if you do not know whether they are legitimate or not.

List Building does require some skill to master but as you progress in that skill, your reward will progress along with it. As you master the art of list building, you will quickly learn that it is your most lucrative and close-at-hand source of regular income online. List building will provide you with a regular customer base that is never more than an email away.

Before you begin to master the art of list building, you may want to prepare a steady diet of helpful information that you can give to them. Providing your list that you have built with a constant source of free and helpful information will only empower you more and actually encourage your readers to help you in your efforts to build your list even faster and bigger. The power of free should never be under-estimated when it comes to list building for your future.

List building is important, but all of your efforts will be for nothing if you cannot keep the people there once they have signed up. Only by keeping and maintaining your lists can your efforts at list building be truly successful. Once you can do that, you will have built a list that allows you to compete with anyone in the realm of internet marketing.

There are many reasons for any Internet Marketer to build a responsive and targeted customer list for their successful efforts in an e-mail marketing campaign. This article will review only the top ten reasons but if you are new to Internet Marketing, suffice it to say that you are going to need both an effective email marketing campaign and a well targeted customer list.

Your success and profits will depend on effectively building a list and maintaining an ongoing email marketing campaign. In case you are in a hurry and just want to review the top ten reasons you can review them here but it may be beneficial to read the rest of the article as well.

Top 10 Reasons You Need to build and maintain an E-Mail Marketing Campaign

1. Build and establish a list of recurring Customers
2. Build and establish a sense of faith and trust among your customers
3. Build and establish customer loyalty
4. Have more people promoting you, your products, your Email Marketing Campaign and maximizing your results
5. Maximize your ROI for marketing campaigns and advertising

One: Build and establish a list of recurring customers. You can easily break your advertising budget trying to continually drive new traffic to your site. Ask anyone who has ever worked with adwords and no matter how successful their ads may be, they are much more costly and much less effective than a well targeted and receptive list on the receiving end of your E-Mail marketing campaign.

Two: Build and establish a sense of faith and trust among your customer base. No matter how much information you have on your web site and no matter how much you continue to provide for your readers, you will always have people who doubt the veracity of your information.

Hold back some information and offer it to your readers in a regular (and free) newsletter and you can, over the course of time, win over the hearts of even the most skeptical individuals within your particular niche. Additionally, they will become even more receptive to any special offers that you make available “exclusively to the list of customers” who are taking advantage of your newsletter … and ultimately, of your E-mail marketing campaign as well.

The more exclusive your readers feel themselves to be, the more privileged they will feel to be allowed to be a part of your email marketing campaign and the more they will respond. Now exactly how effective this is, depends a lot on exactly how much you provide for your readers. That is why it is paramount that you always provide the highest quality information and offers to your customer list with your e-mail marketing campaign.

Three: Build and establish a sense of trust among your customer list. This principle is touched on in number two but it deserves some clarification. There are always going to be skeptics and with literally billions of pages on the internet vying for the attention of your readers, it is no wonder that many people are resorting to selling hype and dreams.

That may be an effective way to get someone’s attention and drive traffic to your site but that is not always the best to keep people coming back to your website for more, much less getting them to become repeat customers buying both your products and those products that you have to offer.

A successful e-mail marketing campaign will allow you to provide your customer list with the very important and relevant information as well as assuring them that you have made it a full time job to look out for their better interest. In other words, you can use your email marketing campaign to let your customers know that you are doing all of the work so that they do not have to.

Four: Have more people promote you, your product and your email marketing campaign. Stop and think about this for a minute. How many newsletters, e-zines and other email marketing campaigns have you personally participated in? In other words; how many customer lists have you subscribed to? How many of those did you unsubscribe to?

If you are like most Internet Marketers, you have likely subscribed to a number of peoples email marketing campaigns … and quickly either unsubscribed or simply marked the emails as spam because the other person did not provide what you believed they would in their mass email promotions to you? Now, look at the other hand for a moment … at least when it comes to Internet Marketing and issues of faith and trust.

How many email marketing campaigns that your friends (not some other Internet Marketer) have told you about have you signed up for? Again, if you are “average” among Internet Marketers, you have probably signed up for anywhere from six to ten of these email marketing campaigns based on the recommendation of friends. You probably have not unsubscribed from many of them either.

The more people that you have on your mailing list, the more likely it is that they will recommend other people to sign up for your email marketing campaign. They are also generally more receptive to your offers and more responsive when it comes time to actually make sales pitches through your email marketing campaigns.

Five: Maximize your ROI or Return On Investment. Again, this is a topic that has been touched upon, and indeed, many of these topics overlap, but it is something that is very important to every internet marketer and something that can be greatly enhanced with an effective e-mail marketing campaign.

Trying to constantly find new sources of revenue can be difficult. Trying to constantly get new streams of “virgin” traffic or unique visitors to your site is also an expensive and daunting proposition for many people. Again, going strictly based on averages, you are probably only showing somewhere around a two percent return for your efforts.

Your E-Mail Marketing campaign should show average results of somewhere between ten to twenty percent average returns. Those numbers may be rather broad but even at the worse end, they still beat the average two-percent returns based on other sources of web traffic and customer generation.

The list of reasons that you need to establish, build up and maintain an effective e-mail marketing campaign go far beyond those few that are covered in this article but that should give you enough food for thought to begin thinking about it. The ultimate success of your email marketing campaign really does depend on you and what you do with it but rest assured that absolutely nothing will happen until you begin building a list.

]]> http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/93/top-5-reasons-to-build-an-e-mail-marketing-campaign/feed/ 2 http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/35/the-basics-of-internet-marketing/ http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/35/the-basics-of-internet-marketing/#comments Tue, 21 Apr 2009 23:33:12 +0000 http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/?p=35

Everyone has heard of the people who struck Internet gold by being in a news story or otherwise in a position to immediately attract thousands or millions of links. Situations like those make it sound like promoting a business on the Internet is an easy proposition. While the Internet gives you a platform from which you can communicate with hundreds of millions of potential customers, it doesn’t actually do that for you.

Successful Internet marketing requires a well thought out business plan just like marketing for a brick and mortar store. Simply sending links and emails in every direction, hoping that the “right” person will see it is not a good strategy, and the odds are heavily against it working.

The biggest challenge to anyone creating a presence on the web is just that: creating a presence. At first, nobody knows about you or your site. Of course you can promote your site offline, with your business cards or print ads, and some of your closest friends and relatives will know about your site, but it takes time, effort, and patience to establish yourself as a “brand” on the Internet. There are so many weirdos out there who set up a “business” that they have no intention of doing any actual work with, that you have to immediately set yourself apart and convince anyone reading your site that you’re for real. There are many ways to do this, and you should take advantage of all of them.

The most important thing you can do is to have a well-made website. If your website is cluttered, overly flashy, or gimmicky, people will not take you seriously enough to buy any of your products or services. Good website design is clean and perhaps a little understated. It should be easy to navigate and easy to understand without “talking down” to visitors. Make sure all the links from your page work. If your website automatically plays music or video anytime someone visits, you will drive away more traffic than you’ll accumulate.

As with having a well-designed website, having good content on that website is vital. Your website is what introduces you and your business to the world. You don’t want it to be full of silly, empty content. Make sure that your text is well-written and well edited. Your text content should also be interesting, but should make it clear that you’re a real grown-up with a real business. Graphics can be great additions to websites as long as they are relevant and well crafted. In short, you want your website’s home page to be a high-quality interface between you and your customers.

You don’t want your website to be a static entity that will be exactly the same now, next week, and next month. A good website engenders a sense of interaction between the business and its clients or potential clients. Updating your website regularly, say, weekly, with fresh articles or other content will keep people interested. And it is perfectly OK to put information to this effect on your home page like this: “Every Wednesday we add a new ‘how-to’ article about some aspect of woodworking. Keep checking back regularly!”

If you keep a blog on your site and regularly update it with fresh posts, you will generate repeat web traffic. Blog posts don’t have to be very involved or formal, but they should provide some nugget of information that will keep readers interested. Suppose you sell knitting yarn. Maybe an entire blog post could consist of a photo of new stock you’ve received along with an announcement: “We just got our first shipment of winter-weight cashmere yarn, and we can’t wait to start making hats!” If blogging isn’t your style, you could instead send out a regular e-zine by way of email. If you do this, put a prominent link on your home page that people can use to sign up for your e-zine.

While you’ll see ads all over the Internet promising blogging or marketing methods that will bring hundreds of visitors to your site overnight, or promising to share their “secret” method of drumming up massive web traffic, in reality, there is no substitute for doing the groundwork yourself. If you put in the time and effort to build trust, communicate with your customers, and make visitors to your site feel like they are interacting with a real person rather than just a web page, you’ll be making a wise long term investment in your business’s profitability.