4 Mistakes You Shouldn’t Make With Your Email Marketing List

One of the best and most consistent ways to make money online is to build a strong email marketing list. List-building works in almost every niche. One of the reasons it’s so effective is because you pretty much have a captive audience for all of your email marketing messages.

There are many factors that go into building a good list and reaping its potential rewards. Unfortunately, there are many ways to screw it up as well! Be on the lookout for these 4 no-gos if you want to keep your list profitable.

Don’t just send out sales messages. People didn’t join your list in order to help you get rich. They did it so that they could help themselves.

"Help people get what they want, and they will help you get what you want." This is the key to success. And this is doubly true if you’re selling information products.

That’s why you should give away useful information to your list. Give them how-tos and tell them things to avoid. Give honest reviews of a product you’ve used or been sent for review. Tell a funny story every once in a while.

Even if you really don’t care about helping people, you need to do it anyway in order to have a list that generates income. People will open your emails if they know they’ll get something out of it. They won’t open them it all if they know your messages basically say, "Click on this link so that I can get rich!"

Don’t use pre-fab messages. Many product owners have prefabricated sales messages written up to give to their affiliates for use in the affiliates’ email lists. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this. These messages can be good models for you to structure your own messages around.

Unfortunately, many affiliate marketers use these messages without changing a single word! While there’s certainly nothing morally wrong with this, just put yourself in your readers’ shoes for a minute.

It’s highly likely that people who have subscribed to your list have subscribed to similar lists as well. And when a product comes out, if they see three different list owners using the exact same email, and one with a unique email--well, who would YOU buy from?

Don’t flood your subscribers’ in-boxes. At the very most, you want to email your subscribers no more than once a day. You can maybe get away with breaking this rule on special occasions (many list-owners do it with major product launches). But in general, you probably shouldn’t send more than one daily message--if that.

To be honest, one message a day is too much for some niches. How do you know what’s right for yours? By paying attention to what the leaders in your niche are doing. Which brings us to:

Don’t exist in a vacuum. Long before you build your list, you need to subscribe to the major lists in your niche. Are people mailing every day? Every other day? Once or twice a week? You’ll likely see patterns emerge before long.

Of course not every list owner will follow the same pattern. The very successful and exceptionally unsuccessful marketers will likely be at variance form the norm. A good rule of thumb is to start out with what’s standard, then test variations until you’ve got your own system in place.