Building a List

Building a List

The easiest way to introduce new products to your followers is through email. The main purpose behind building our own blog/website is so that we can bring visitors to our website and get them to join our mailing list; thus allowing us to market to them on an ongoing basis (hence the term "permission marketing").
Permission Marketing Permission marketing is a specific kind of marketing that includes getting new customers or prospective customers to grant you permissions to contact them in some form, whether it's through email, by phone or by mail.
The opposite of permission marketing is interruption marketing. Commercials and TV are great examples of interruption marketing because they interrupt the TV shows you're watching.
Permission marketing is very powerful because you can build a list of thousands of people who have told you it's ok for you to contact them. Contrast that attitude with the attitude most of us have towards commercials, we either ignore them or we TiVo the show in advance and just skip them.
When building an affiliate website the easiest way to build a list of current or prospective customers is through email. In the next few sections we'll cover the details of how to collect and market to an email list.
Think of your business like an iceberg. Above the water you can tell basically how much is there. It's obvious and straightforward. However you know that below the surface of the water there could be many times the amount of ice that's above the water but you can't tell.

The tip of the iceberg represents our efforts to acquire new customers and sell them up front or one time. The rest of the iceberg represents upsells and the efforts we make to sell our products to our current customer.
Forgetting about the ice below the surface of the water is like forgetting about all the customers who have purchased products from our website via our customer acquisition channels like PPC and SEO. First we need to understand that all those customers represent people who have trusted us enough to pull out their credit cards and buy from us.
It is far easier to retain current customers than it is to acquire new customers
EXAMPLE
Lets say you have a website that does $100,000 in sales in one year. After expenses you'll have $15k-$20k in take home profit. Not bad at all for website but it can definitely be better if you implement permission marketing.
Now lets say during the course of the year you had built up an email list of 10,000 customers who have already bought from you. Every other month you sent them a promotional email offering them a discount or some special deal. Here are some reasonable numbers to expect from an email campaign:
25% open rate = 2500 people
35% click through rate = 875 people
10% conversion rate = 87.5 people buy
If your average profit per order is $50 that means for every email you sent out you got $4,375. 6 emails per year would net you an EXTRA $26,250. That's $6,250 more than you made with just your one time sales to new customers.
As you can see permission marketing can be very profitable, and if you don't implement it you'll be missing out on a LOT of money.
In the next few sections we'll show you how to build a list and how to write emails that convert into all those extra sales.
so we need to make the most of the relationship we have with our current customers and strengthen it.