How can you increase your profits by 500%? Whether you are in online marketing, or have a traditional bricks and mortar business which needs marketing, your business profits can be grown exponentially through list building.

Who will be on my list?

1. Past customers – past customers are valuable as once they have purchased from you (and had a GOOD experience), they will be likely to trust your good service and buy from you again. This means the easiest way to increase your profits is to offer relevant products or services to your past customers. One of the fundamental errors people make is not adding existing customers to their list! Crazy isn’t it .. If your systems do not automatically add customers who have purchased from your business to your list – then fix that immediately.

2. Potential customers – these people may have shown interest in some of your products and services, but not yet purchased. These people will have made it to your list via some form of competition you have run, an advertising campaign you have run where they have signed up for more information, or perhaps they have stumbled across your website and joined your list. If you haven’t done so already, incorporate a place to build a list on your website – because if people have landed there, then they are probably interested in the type of goods and services which you offer.

So how do you get people to join your list?

As I mentioned above:

1. Ensure all customers who purchase from you get automatically added to your list

2. Incorporate a squeeze page or some other list building strategy into your website. Make sure this page provides a relevant special offer (preferably free) to encourage people to sign up. Think carefully about the sort of information you need to collect from customers. Often, you will only need their name and email address in the first instance (you can always get more information such as their postal address at a later time) – but there may be some pressing reason that you need additional information, and this can be incorporated into your form.

Use traffic driving techniques to drive relevant traffic to this page. It is well worth driving traffic to this page rather than straight to your website. If you plan it properly, everyone will have the opportunity to sign up to your list, before they get redirected to your website – although you should allow people who do not want to sign up to click directly through to your website. The benefit of doing things this way is that even if people do not buy from the website the first time – if they sign up to your list, you have an opportunity to build a relationship with them and get them to return to your site sometime down the track.

3. Sign up for innovative software which helps you to exponentially grow your list. There is usually a monthly fee for this, but if you get a reputable one, it can lead to a rapid growth of your list. There are a few good free ones too.

How to Profit From Your New List!

Your strategies for list use will differ depending on your overall Business Strategy. This article does not cover building your business strategy – but the use of your list should be driven by your strategic objectives. For example, if your business plans to expand into new services or products, or new locations, over the next 12 months – how might your list support :

• Reputation and recognition of your business (i.e. you build trust and brand recognition through your list)

• Product trialling (i.e. you can use your list to get an indication of the types of products which may or may not work)

• Location trialling (i.e. if you have the right information collected, you can sort your list by location and market to various sections of your list)

• Split testing ads (i.e. you can split your list and market one half one ad, the other half the same ad with a different heading and see which converts better)

• Improving Customer Satisfaction (i.e. you can use your list to get feedback on your company and improve your services)

• Advertising and Sales (i.e. you can market complementary products to customers who have already purchased, and you can market various ‘special offers’ to all on your list)

• Ad swaps (i.e. you can reach a whole new audience if you ‘ad swap’ with someone with a similar sized list – i.e. they market your special offer to their list of 100, and you market their special offer to 100 people on your list) Provided the offer is relevant to your list, and visa versa this can be a good win-win.

Signing up to a good email marketing service can make life a lot easier if you will be doing primarily internet list building. Even if you are just starting out and currently have a list of “0”, a good service can really help you to organise your plan, and set up very professional looking campaigns – so that when you start paying to drive traffic – your conversion rate should be high. There is usually a monthly fee – but a good service can be worth it’s weight in gold. Your campaign or broadcast messages are sent out on time without you having to ‘remember’ when to send things to each list subscriber.