Email Marketing – A Beginner’s Guide – How To Create a Killer Email List From Thin Air

Email Marketing – A Beginner’s Guide – How To Create a Killer Email List From Thin Air: This is a type of direct marketing that uses customized, mass emails to teach/educate and convince a lead into taking a specific action, such as making a purchase.

Email marketing has been around forever, and for good reason. It’s the most direct and effective way of connecting with your leads, nurturing them, and turning them into customers, consistently winning out over all other marketing channels.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the entire process of setting up your email marketing funnel so that you can acquire leads and generate sales, 24/7.

This guide is for those who’re ready to commit to email marketing. If you’re unsure, you may want to read our guide on why you need to build an email list RIGHT NOW!

By using this definitive guide to email marketing, you’ll understand:

1. How to build an email list full of targeted leads and buyers.
2. How to optimize your emails for the highest open rates and click-through rates (CTR).
3. How to automate the process of nurturing your leads and turning prospects into customers.

The following is a step-by-step process that you can follow if you have absolutely no email list.

How to Create an Email List From Nothing

You can’t create an email list if you don’t have a few other things in place first. At a minimum, here are the resources that you should have before you start creating your email list.

1. You must understand your audience

Who are you targeting? Before you begin building an email list, it’s helpful to have an idea of who these people are.

I recommend that you create a marketing persona — a made-up person that represents your ideal customer.

The image above represents what a persona form would look like. To complete the form, fill the outlined gap correctly

2. You must have a website

Next, you need a place where your potential list members will gather.

Basically, you need a website.

Creating a website can be a big scary step, so let me explain how to make this as easy as possible.

You don’t need a huge website in order to create an email list. In fact, all you really need is a landing page — a single-page website that contains your email opt-in form.

Also Read: Steps for Creating Aim Mail Login Account – Email Account – Aim Mail Com Login – Aim Mail Login with Gmail

You can create a beautiful landing page in just a few minutes using any one of these services:

1. Landerapp.com
2. iContact.com
3. Hubspot.com
4. Leadpages.net
5. Unbounce.com
6. Wix.com

You need an email marketing service

In order to communicate with your new email list, you’re going to need an email marketing platform.

There are plenty of platforms to choose from. You can start simple and inexpensive with a service like Mailchimp.

As your email marketing grows, you’re going to be doing a lot more with your email list, like sequencing, drip campaigns, etc. If you’re starting from scratch, however, just focus on collecting those addresses in a safe and legitimate way.

4. You need a tantalizing offer

Whatever you’re offering, selling, building, creating, or asking, people need a reason to join your list.

Think about it. If you came across a landing page that asked for your email address, you wouldn’t want to do it unless you were going to get something in exchange.

Start building your email list with your existing resources
Buying an email list isn’t a good idea. Use what you have to add your first few email addresses.

What kind of resource do you already have? You probably already have a few email addresses in your work email or Gmail accounts.

Can you just add these to your email list?

No.

But you can email these people personally and send them to your landing page.

Here’s how one blogger did it.

He sent an email to a friend, asking, “Want me to include you?”

His email included a nice “hook” — “cool places in Nashville to hang outdoors.” It also included an attention-grabbing image.

His friend emailed back:

In My Opinion, I would recommend sending these people the link to your landing page. That way, you’re not manually inputting the email addresses of people who want to be included. Instead, they are personally opting in themselves.

Where else can you find people to add to your list?

Social media

If you have a social media account, you can post a link to your landing page. Posting the link on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and everywhere else you can think of will definitely pull in a few email addresses at least.

Social media will give you exposure far beyond your own circle of friends and family. Most social media platforms, for example, allow your information to be publicly accessible.

Using the right hashtags on Twitter will give you a broad range of exposure to hundreds of people.

Another powerful social media method is to join relevant groups where your target audience is active. Often, these groups allow you to post links to your own product or services, allowing people to opt in.

LinkedIn groups are one of the most powerful methods of gaining exposure and interaction. LinkedIn groups often consist of members who are exactly the people you are trying to reach.

Give yourself a week to a month to pound social media for results. You may be shocked by what you get. As long as you have an appropriate offer, your email list may explode to dozens or hundreds of email addresses.

Now, it’s time to take things to the next level.

Purchase ads

So far, you’ve been able to build your list organically. This is the best way to do so, but it’s not necessarily the fastest — not yet anyway.

As you build subscribers, create content, and gain organic traffic, your email list will grow spontaneously. But you can jumpstart your list by purchasing ad traffic.

What kind of paid traffic? Here are the best sources:

1. Facebook ads. Using Facebook’s powerful segmentation features, you can quickly target your ad to a very narrow demographic. You may pay a few dollars for every email address, but you will get value by using Facebook ads.
2. LinkedIn sponsored updates. Linkedin’s native ads provide a similar level of targeting. Obviously, a LinkedIn audience is going to differ in nature and purpose from Facebook, but if this is your audience, give it a try.
3. Twitter ads. Twitter ads will promote your tweets to a growing audience, bringing more traffic to your landing page and potentially gaining more followers, too.
4. Using AdWords, you can grow your list by ten times. AdWords gives you a huge influx of targeted traffic that will blast the size of your list to unbelievable heights.

Doesn’t all this cost money?

Of course, it does. Don’t run from it just because of the associated costs.

Remember, the money is on the list. Whatever money you spend on gaining email addresses, you will get back in the revenue from this list.

Start getting subscribers with content marketing

Everything that I’ve described so far is a very targeted method of list building.

However, there’s a far more powerful strategy that I haven’t even touched on yet.

Content marketing.

Whether you’re a beginner or advanced in content marketing, you probably know how powerful it can be.

Content marketing builds your list indirectly by first attracting users to your content, and then inviting them to be part of your mailing list.

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This is the exact strategy I use on my blog. At the very top of my blog, I invite people to join me on my journey. By entering their name and email address, they gain access to my lessons on building traffic.