Define Your List Building Goals:

What is behind list building

Hi Brian Jowers here, carry on from our previous activity with theQSC Challenge I am looking at the wha we needto aim for, what are our list building goals.

And what happened in the week?

Last Saturday, in East Anglia, was a nice autumnal type of day, cool but bright and sunny. Ideal for painting outside.

Let the sunshine dry out the condensation from te front andback doors, then proceed with painting. Julia had chosen a nice slightly bluey green colour in a satin finnish, but I did not think it went that well with the white gloss so paired it with a creamy stone colour in a gloss. Painting the inner panel in the green without getting it on the cream was tricky, but I got the knack n the end.

Both of us satisfied with the finish and colour, will need a second coat to finish it off.

Defining Your List Building Goals

When you are building your list, it’s important to have a set of goals in mind. By implication, goals involve numbers, but they also should involve a complete understanding of what you want to accomplish with your email list. When you build a list, what do you want to accomplish?
It’s important to define goals for your list. The most important goals that you should strive for are to have a responsive, targeted, nurtured and growing list.

For A Responsive List

When you email your list do you meet or exceed the average response rate for your industry? If you aren’t meeting that goal you will need to look at a variety of factors to determine what needs to change or be tweaked. Possible causes are:

• It could be your lead magnet
• Your copy, not congruent with offers
• Page design or layout

You’ll have to dig deep into analytics to figure it out and try out different things using split tests to see what works best.

For A Targeted List

If you’re doing a good job targeting the right audience to become subscribers of your list you’ll start getting subscribers. If you are targeting well you’ll have a good response to your lead magnet or your low-price offer. You do know who your audience  is and where they hangout on line? The people who respond, if they are indeed your target audience, will not just get the freebie and then unsubscribe. Though, there are a number of people who are ‘freebie seekers’, just looking for free items. In the early days there will only be a few people that will open your email messages. If they’re not, you may want to revisit your lead magnet and copy to ensure it really is targeting your ideal audience.

For A Nurtured List

If you have a nurtured list, you’re sending them regular and consistent messages based on the segment of your list they’re on. Send relevant educational, informative, engaging and promotional content to them often and consistently. Set up the autoresponder to segment based on your subscribers’ behaviour for example:

• if they click on a link
• if they download a report
• if they buy one of your products
• if they buy an affiliate product you recommend

That way you can keep nurturing them based on who they are and how they respond.

For A Growing List

Finally, your list should be growing. It’s going to grow and contract, grow and contract. This is a good thing as you want people who aren’t interested in your offerings to drop off your list. You can manually delete unresponsive people after time of not openin OR you can send more aggressive follow up messages that might get them to open. This may allow some form of self-segmentation, dependent on your autoresponder, otherwise manual deletion of the people who aren’t going to open or respond. But the real key to growing your list is to find ways to launch something new often that will attract your audience such as more freebies, more low-cost products, more webinars, more engagement opportunities. These actions will ensure that your list grows.

We have direction and purpose in list building

Of course, you also want to tie your goals to something measurable. You can measure how many people are on your list, but you should be measuring responsiveness more once you get them on your list. The responsiveness of the subscribers will let you know if you’re on the right track in terms of targeting your audience and providing the right solutions to them.

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How are you progressing?

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Thank You

Brian