How to build a responsive email list

As you may know, I recently interviewed Lee McIntyre and one of the questions I asked him during our interview together was “Since you’re well known for having a very responsive list, can you please share with us some tips on how you would recommend building one from scratch?”

As I’m sure you can guess, Lee revealed some awesome tips which I have included below.  

Lee McIntyre:  “Okay. Unlike a lot of the gurus and so-called experts out there, I’m not actually going to give you any theory now. I’m going to take a step back and I’m going to tell you about how I built my list. It’s almost exactly a year ago that I had zero subscribers in the Internet Marketing niche. I created a product that was called Auction Profits Unleashed. I drove traffic to that product using affiliates.

I went out there, recruited affiliates, gave them an incentive to promote my product for me, and as they promoted my product, those customers who bought the product joined my list. I didn’t have any contacts at the time. I didn’t have any JV partners. I just did it completely from scratch.

After two weeks of selling that product completely from scratch with no contacts and no JV partners, I built a list of 602 people. I then took part in an e-mail promotion for John Thornhill’s launch. I ended up being the number three affiliate with just a list of 603 people. People below me in the affiliate ladder had lists of 50,000 to 80,000 people! It’s just incredible when you think about it.

I want to share with you how that works. By the end of the month, I had a list of 1200 people. It might surprise you to know that up until week two, when I had a list of 600, I didn’t have a squeeze page. I didn’t have an opt-in form on my blog. All I had was a product that I was selling.

Undoubtedly, if you want to start by building a responsive list, you need to focus on getting buyers into your funnel. You can still concentrate on getting free subscribers from giveaways and from your blog. That should be part of your marketing process. The primary focus when you first get started to build a responsive list should be to create a high-value product that is actually low priced so that you sell that product in volume. As people buy that product, they’ll join your list.

I only had a list of 600 people after two weeks. It was 600 buyers, though. There are people out there with a list of 30,000 who won’t have 600 buyers on their list. They’ll have about 100 buyers potentially. That’s where the responsiveness comes in. I would rather have a list of 600 buyers than a list of 100 buyers and a list of 29,900 freebie seekers. There’s nothing wrong with that either, but I’m just telling you my personal perspective.

That’s what I did. I created a product and I recruited affiliates. I gave affiliates a powerful reason to promote my product for me. That is completely how I would build a list. That’s how I built a list from scratch.

The second element of that is there is no use having a list if you can’t build relationships with it. You need to be able to cultivate and maintain relationships with your subscribers. The best advice I can give people on that particular topic in terms of how to do that is to treat your subscribers like individuals. By that, I mean don’t just treat them as a number on a balance sheet. Don’t just treat them as something to sell things to. Treat them as you would members of your own family.

You need to be aware that if you just try to sell them stuff all the time and you just treat them as numbers on a balance sheet, they will become unresponsive or less responsive to the offers you send. If you actually give good value, create content and send them content for free, for no expectation of anything in return, then they will respond to your offers.”

By the way, if you are interested in purchasing my entire interview with Lee, it is currently available for only $10 at http://www.gettingstartedonlinefast.com/lminterview/

To your success!

Jit Uppal

www.GettingStartedOnlineFast.com
www.MustHaveInternetMarketingTips.com