A Beginner’s Guide to Building an Email List

A Beginner’s Guide to Building an Email List

An email list is probably the most important asset you'll ever have in your blog or website business. If you have done any research on online marketing, you would have probably come across comments such "my biggest mistake was not building an email list from the beginning," "most of my income comes from my list", "the money's on the list" and so on.

In this article, you will discover what an email list is, why to build one and how to get started building an email list.

What is an email list?

An email list is a collection of email addresses of people messaging with regards the product or service you are selling.

Why would I want an email list?

Easy. An email list lets you connect directly to those interested in you and what you are offering. They want to know what your product or service is and hear what you have to say.

Is an email list for everyone?

An email list is not for everybody. If your aim for opening a blog or website is just to express yourself, you are not interested in gaining followers and customer, then you will not necessarily be needing an email list.However, if you plan on getting followers or customers, then building an email list is vital and highly recommended.

Is email necessary when there is social media?

There are many reasons why it is important to own your list. You do not own your social media pages. You do not have control over your social media audiences. The social media networks own them, so you are essentially renting them. If those networks pack up today or change their terms, you might be out of business. For example, many people were making a lot of money with MySpace at its peak, until the platform gradually slid into oblivion and along with it, customers and their income. Having spent a lot of time building relationships, curating great content and building a network, it would be unwise to leave it all in someone else’s care.

So how can one get email addresses?

Email addresses can be gathered by buying them but this is probably illegal and spammy. People may go mad and remove themselves from your list if they see your email as spam. So to get people to voluntarily sign up for your email list, provide valuable information that they wouldn’t want to miss, then invite them to drop their email address so they can continue to receive more valuable information directly and never miss out on anything. .

You can offer a freebie or a “lead magnet which could be short but helpful information in a print, a tip sheet, worksheet, images of something else that your subscribers will be happy about. When potential subscribers ask what’s in it for me? Make sure you have an answer ready. Ensure your lead magnet is related to your content going forward or subscribers might become uninterested if the rest of your emails in unrelated.

Now that people have subscribed, what should be put in emails?

There are basically 2 choices which are:

1. Blog Posts: These are mostly sent to your email subscribers to alert them of a new blog post you have made. The model by which it works is a “sell it and forget it” model and you don’t have to add anything to what’s already on your blog and finally,  it’s all free. However, these kind of lists mostly grow stale. It’s like building a garden and having to let it go. They might still produce, but with more attention and care, there can still be some produce.

2. Stand-alone Content: This is different from blog posts. These include newsletters, autoresponders, or broadcast emails. This can be tweaked based on what your readers are responding to and get engaged with. In addition, you have full control of the process of using content. You can also highlight contents or products which you couldn’t have done with blog posts. The main downside to this method is the extra work you have to do to get subscribers to sign up to a different list which can cause confusion and frustration.

How To Manage the Email Addresses you Collect

It is not advisable to build your email list in your regular email client like Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook. There are companies specialized in doing this and they are called Email Service Providers (ESP). Signing with an ESP can help resolve all your email marketing needs. Their system is set up to automate and manage all the processes involved from signup to sending to stat taking and more.

One of the free services for this is FeedBurner. FeedBurner handles most email marketing tasks but FeedBurner is not truly a ESP in the sense that it just collects email addresses to send blog posts and other content to your subscribers. FeedBurner is pretty limited because one-off emails can’t be sent to your list. But on the other hand, there are many ESPs that you can sign up to and won’t charge you till you hit a certain number of subscribers.