List Size Isn’t Everything!

Most of the courses online talk about building a list as being the most important aspect of an online business. And I would agree. However, list size is not everything. I’ve regularly heard from people, and read posts in forums, complaining that they can’t make any money because they’ve only got a small list.

Well… it’s possible to send the same number of clicks with a list of 1000 that most people can send with 20,000. You just have to…

Connect with them!

Your relationship with your list is 1000 times more important than the size of the list itself.

Let me show you an example. Here’s one of my lists:

As you can see this list only has 986 contacts on it, but… it got 521 clicks.

And there’s a very good reason for this:

• I provide them a lot of useful content, most of what I provide for free others charge for
• I truly want to help my readers succeed
• The email was hyper targeted to their interests

With a worldwide global average open rate of 19.7% and click through rate of 3.6% on email marketing, hyper targeting makes a significant difference. If we wanted 521 people to click on our link based on the average worldwide global click through rate, we would need to have a list of 14,472.

That’s a list size over fourteen times the size of my one in order to generate the same number of clicks!

What you should be focusing on is building hyper targeted lists. Even if you already have large lists you can do this and see your click through and open rates soar. I use InfusionSoft, which makes it very easy to tag a contact with interests. But if you’re using another auto-responder then you can simply ask your entire list to go to a new landing page and enter their details if they’re interested in finding out more information about something specific. This could be a product or promotion, but it can also be general content your providing, a new course etc…

You’re then building a new list segment of people from your own list who are specifically interested in that one thing. This is hyper targeting. And it’s possible to get over 80% of the list clicking on your link during the course of a three or four email series if you do this.

With this in mind, if you’re new to list building then you should be looking to:

1. Find a high quality traffic source
2. Concentrate on building hyper targeted lists
3. Providing your list with high quality content regularly

If you already have a list then test using hyper-targeting on it, I promise you that you won’t be disappointed.