Hi there 🙂
We humans look at numbers and measures all the times.
And for marketers, one of the things we worry about is the size of our mailing list.I’ve seen a lot of part-time marketers totally give up on list building, because they only have a tiny list.
However, there’s more to it than size (you knew that, right?)
Just look at the tiny one to the left… Cuteness can go a long way, don’t you think?
Not that I’m cute, but I’ve personally landed on leaderboards with a small list.
But before I tell you more about that, I want to make sure we’re on the same page, so…
Let’s look at something important to understand.
The difference between list building and email marketing
Until recently I didn’t know there was a difference between the two.
I just figured that it was two different words for the same thing.
But there’s actually a huge difference.
List building: This is adding subscribers to the list.
You can do that in many ways, like by offering a freebie and making people subscribe through a squeeze page, or by selling a product and adding customers to your list.
You can get the traffic from SEO, solo ads, article marketing, affiliates, Facebook ads…
But basically, list building is just the act of adding new subscribers to your list.
Email marketing: This is how you write the emails to your list.
The word “marketing” implies that you’re selling stuff, but it could also just be building a relationship. Branding yourself.
It’s a well-known fact that people trust other people they know and like.
So every mail you write to your list is a part of your email marketing.
And what does all that have to do with size?
I’ve seen a marketer (A) with 500K lists make 2 sales of my product, while the same product gave another affiliate (B) with only 2000 subscribers 70 sales.
As you can see the difference is not the number of subscribers. The difference is in the email marketing.
Affiliate A was always just spamming promotions to his list. He didn’t even write the mails himself, but left it to the vendors to come up with a few words about their product.
Affiliate A didn’t review the products himself. He promoted several products daily. And he even gave them wrong categories (say, PLR instead of Amazon).
Affiliate B cared about her list.
She promoted products she’d read or viewed herself.
She wrote in a personal way, and although most of her mails (if not all) is about promotions, then her style is quite different from affiliate A’s.
She wrote the review herself based on her findings, and she offered a bonus.
So her rather small list outsold the huge list many times.
Gives us all hope, doesn’t it?
Tomorrow: 94 subscribers = $576.78 (with proof)
When I hear fellow marketers push a button, mail out and make $$$ because of their 200K lists, I’m not that impressed.
But seeing proof from a guy I know who had a tiny list of 94 subscribers and because of the way he did his email marketing, he was able to make much more money than even guys with big ones do… THAT impresses me!
And I think it great news for people just starting out.
But now I’m off. It’s Friday, and I’ve plenty of things to do before my weekly relaxing day.
Have a great weekend,
P.S. Tomorrow I’ll also tell you about something really embarrassing. 😉