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/42/internet-marketing-without-a-website/ http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/42/internet-marketing-without-a-website/#comments Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:59:08 +0000 http://www.reviewoftheguru.com/?p=42

If you have a business that doesn’t translate well to a “shopping cart” system on an e-commerce site, you may wonder how you can get word out about your services without having a website. While you should definitely consider having a website, there are ways to market your services on the Internet even before you set up a website. The ultimate goal is to build a community of people who know you, know what services you provide, and who like you well enough to recommend you to others. There are many ways you can go about accomplishing this.

Email marketing is the 21^st century version of direct mail marketing, but it’s much easier. Writing a weekly e-mail about your services and sending it to clients and contacts is a very inexpensive way to advertise your services. Make it easy for new contacts to sign up, and encourage contacts to forward your weekly email to people they think would be interested in what you have to offer. Some of these people may themselves sign up to receive your weekly email.

One reason blogging is so popular for business and commercial enterprises is that blogging works. Your blog is the perfect way to stay in touch with your clients and contacts. Blog posts don’t have to be long – in fact, it’s best to keep them short and sweet – and they need to be friendly and inviting. Encourage people to comment on blog posts. Somewhere on your blog, have a way for visitors to sign up for your weekly e-mail. Break up longer blog posts with relevant pictures and graphics to keep readers from becoming bored.

There are several free blog hosts that offer convenient and easy setup with numerous available blog templates, so you can make the look of your blog reflect your business. Setting up a blog takes only a few minutes, and it is a great investment for your business.

Even if you don’t have a website, you can write articles and get them in front of people’s eyes. One way to do this is to write an article as a Google Knol. Google encourages links between Knols, which means your article may pick up some very helpful back links, helping it rise in popularity. You can have links to these articles from your blog and from your weekly email. Google Pages is a way to create a page for free with your content on it. Again, if you do this, put links to it in your blog and your emails.

E-zines are similar to blogs and weekly emails, but they are archived rather than updated like a blog or email. If you include genuinely helpful information, attractively packaged in, say, a portable document file, you have the potential to serve as a reference for clients and prospects, plus you regularly remind these people who you are and what you do.

There are ways to advertise your services online without having a website. Any number of providers allow you to specify a monthly advertising budget, create ads, and have them run on sites that are likely to generate some interest in your business. Text ads cost the least, ads with pictures cost a little more, and ads with videos cost the most. Some plans let you set up your ads, and then only charge you when someone clicks on one of them. Of course, you should include your website (if you have one) on your ad, or your business email address.

Viral marketing can’t be bought the way ads can. This is where your blog comes in. You want your product or service to generate buzz, not hype, and you do that by getting individuals interested enough in your services to mention it to their friends, who mention it to their friends, etc.

Make the local press into your friend. Local newspapers and television stations like having a ready stable of experts they can turn to when they need quotes or commentary on a news item. Send by snail mail a package of information about you and what you are an expert in. Explain that you would be happy to be a resource if a news story coincides with your expertise. Reporters like knowing there are people who are willing to talk. Cold calling local experts isn’t always a pleasant task for reporters. Make their jobs easier and get your name, face, and business in front of lots of people at the same time.

While you should at some point invest in a good website for your business, there are many things you can do that don’t require setting up a business website. If you’re selling services rather than products, then tools like regular emails, e-zines, blogs, and “word of click” viral marketing can work well in attracting new clients and contacts.