By The bigger the list the better. Right?
Wrong.
You can be a big player with a tiny mailing list.
I was at a networking event about six months ago, and this guy comes up to me and starts talking at me about mailing lists.
He asks me the size of my list and I’m like… why does it matter?
After having an arrogant snort he comes out with some crap like…
“Don’t you know the money’s in the list! The more people on the list the more money you’ll make, so you should focus on growing your list. I’ve got about 100,000 people on mine.”
Apart from giving me the instantaneous feeling that I wanted to be as far away from this person as physically possible, he’s also got it totally wrong.
What he was spouting was something he read on a forum somewhere. Clearly he didn’t understand it, or the person who wrote it didn’t know what they were talking about either.
Because the list size doesn’t matter. You can make thousands of dollars from a hundred people.
Now I know I’ve been over this before, but I’ve received a load of emails about it recently so I want to cover it again.
You can make a lot of money from a tiny list by… segmenting.
Segmentation is where, when someone takes an action you mark that they’ve taken this action.
Let me give you an example…
You write a blog post about video marketing and you’re going to link that into a product on the same topic.
Start by sending an email out to your blog post, everybody who clicks that link gets a mark saying they’re interested in video marketing.
The next day send a similar email out again to everybody who didn’t click the link first time round.
So far so good.
Let’s say you’ve got 500 people on your list. On the first send 50 people click and on the second send 30 people click. You have now marked 80 people as being interested.
To everybody who hasn’t clicked you can now send a teaser email asking if they want to hear about this awesome product that will show them how to generate a ton of traffic from video marketing. If they want to hear more then click the link to let you know. When they click the link you can send them to a thank-you page on your blog but… you also mark them as being interested in video marketing.
Maybe another 30 click on this link, now you have 120 people from your 500 who’ve actively told you they want to learn more about video marketing.
Next… write your sales emails to these guys, but wrap it in content. Whenever you write an email it should be entertaining.
You can now write three, four or even five or six emails to the people on this sub-list you’ve made selling the product.
They won’t get pissed off because they’ve specifically asked you to send them information on video marketing.
Using this process you should easily sell 12 or even 20 copies of the product, and the chances are you’ll sell a lot more if you do it right. If you’re getting $20 per copy then you just made at least $400 in one week, from a list of only 500.
This stuff works.
A real example…
When selling an affiliate product in the gambling niche, I segmented out just under 300 people on my list who were interested in that type of product.
Only a tiny fraction of the entire list, but I kinda had a hunch that not many people would be interested.
I then warmed those people up by telling them I wanted to share a new product with them but first was going to tell them why.
I gave a ton of information about how I used the product, the extra stuff I did and then how I came to be involved in the product and why I was letting the know about it.
The result… I converted at 91%.
91%! WTF!
Pretty much every single person I’d segmented out as being interested bought it. I was the clear affiliate leader and I did it from a list of just under 300 people.
The reason… those 300 people had told me they wanted to get information about that product.
If you want to segment and you use Aweber, then AWProTools can do all that segmenting jazz for you.
Michael
What do you think?