I am sure you have heard of the phrase that money is in the list or the money is in the follow-up.
Right.
And I’m pretty sure you have an idea why.
Building an email list and learning how to build relationships so that you can sell people or something is important.
And that’s why you are reading this blog post.
I wanted to take it a step further and show you some practical reasons and examples to basically prove to you why having a list is the single most important thing you can do for your business.
Email marketing is so effective when used correctly, that even local businesses like restaurants and hair salons are using it to convince their customers to come back.
So let’s jump right in.
Here are five practical reasons why your most important online asset is your email list.
1) Make it Expensive
Number one, selling a product or service that costs one hundred dollars or more.
Doesn’t matter if you have an e-commerce site selling physical products or your own landing page selling digital products or a sales funnel, selling a coaching service.
If you are charging one hundred dollars or more per transaction, you are going to have a hard time convincing someone to take out their credit card the first time they hear about you and your business.
I tried it.
I did an experiment and put one of my best-selling courses into the business academy, which previously sold for four hundred ninety-seven dollars without any bonuses on a website and drove tons of targeted coal traffic to it.
Even though there was a long sales page explaining all the benefits and tons of testimonials, nobody bought it.
So I added a 50 percent discount of two hundred fifty dollars and drove more traffic to it.
Still, no one bought it.
I decreased the price to one hundred dollars and added bonuses.
Still no one.
How about fifty dollars?
OK, one person finally bought it.
It wasn’t until I dropped my 500 dollar product down to thirty dollars that visitors started buying it.
Obviously, I am not suggesting that you should lower your products down to thirty dollars.
That was just an experiment I did.
To illustrate a point, you can actually do an experiment yourself to the next time you are on Facebook, YouTube, Borisovna, and you see an ad, click on it.
Just go to the landing page and see how much they are charging you for their products.
I can almost guarantee you that most product offers are around thirty dollars.
Oh, excuse me.
Twenty-seven dollars.
And they do that for a reason.
Even if they are interested they will do research on your product, compare prices and look for reviews.
And after jumping from website to website, they will get distracted.
Forget why they were researching about you in the first place and move on.
Oh my God, what the hell.
But this is just the reality of online marketing in 2021.
No one knows how valuable your product is and they won’t give you the time to explain why it’s worth it the first time they land on your page.
This is why when you see ads from entrepreneur experts like Russell Brunson and Dan Lok promoting their books, they say their books are free.
Just pay ten dollars shipping, even though their hardcover books worth way more and they may be losing money right now.
They are actually buying a lead.
They are using their book as a lead magnet to get your email address.
Why?
So that they can follow up and send you more offers later on.
They will make more money off you in the long run.
And that’s why you need to start doing two for the same reason why it’s difficult to sell even a medium ticket item to a first-time buyer.
2) Sales Cycles
The second reason for building a list is that sales cycles are increasing.
A sales cycle is the time it takes for a brand new customer to purchase something from you.
A study done by Sirpa marketing agency shows the average conversion rate of customers divided into the time it took.
You can see that ten percent of brand new visitors will buy from you after one month of hearing about your business.
Then in one or three months, thirty percent of them will convert into your customer in four to six months.
Twenty-four percent, seven to 12 months.
Twenty-six percent and after more than a year of hearing about you, huh, the last ten percent.
Well, finally know what’s good for them and buy your stuff.
So what does this mean?
Your potential customers are getting wiser these days.
They are bombarded with ads and offers daily and they are sick of it.
They are not going to give up their hard-earned cash the first time they see you.
They really do need to trust and like you.
And that takes time.
This means the money is made in the follow-up.
If you are only focused on short-term gain, trying to sell your products in the first month, and then giving up in search of new leads, you are basically losing at least 90 percent of your sales.
That’s crazy, right?
This can be devastating to your business.
That’s a ton of money left on the table and people who are not using emails to follow up are making this mistake without even knowing about it.
3) It’s Personal
The third reason for building an email list is that.
E-mails are very personal, even if your customers follow you on social media or social media posts are public announcements.
The more followers and subscribers you have, the more impersonal your photos, videos or blogs will appear.
But emails are different.
Even if you have an email list of thousands of people and you start your email each time with something impersonal, like Hello everyone, or Happy Monday, your email subscribers will still feel you are talking directly to them.
Why?
Unless they are marketers themselves, most people are not subscribed to many lists.
Their inbox is already filled with work, family, and leisure interests and simply no space for extra spam in their lives.
That’s why people are very careful about which email lists they decide to subscribe to.
This means people on your lists are more likely to listen to your recommendations and offer them from someone they follow randomly on social media.
I hope that you don’t feel that it sounds pretentious when I say that your email subscribers feel you are the good friend because you truly are.
They truly have to like you and trust you and believe that you can give them real value for them to stay on your mailing list before the pandemic.
Some expert marketers who own local businesses use this strategy.
A sandwich shop near my home got my email address.
When I ordered a sandwich, they gave me a free pack of potato chips and a drink in exchange for my email, which I thought was a pretty good deal.
Since then, every Thursday at 12:00 p.m. sharp, they send an email to me saying, Happy Thursday.
I know you worked hard today.
If you don’t want to cook tonight, you can call us right now.
Order a sandwich and we will prepare it for you and have it ready for you to pick up at 5 p.m. when you leave for work.
This sandwich shop did not dress me by my name, and I know they have thousands of people on their email list, but for some reason, every time I see their email, I’m like, Oh, how thoughtful.
And I end up picking up a sandwich for dinner and I usually don’t eat sandwiches for dinner.
4) 99.99% Free
The fourth reason for only a list is that it’s free traffic until the end of time.
When you run ads, you have to pay for them.
This means you are always at the mercy of the ad platforms.
If you want traffic, you have to pay them and they can cut you off any time they want.
During quarantine.
My online business almost died.
I was selling courses and products and running ads on Facebook and YouTube.
Guess what happened?
My Facebook ad platform got shut down and some of my YouTube video ads also got denied.
I spent hours writing emails and calling customer support only to be put on hold and then to be told that they were working on it.
When you are frustrated, you will realize that no one cares as much about your business as you.
I hated the feeling that my business was controlled by Facebook and Google.
If it wasn’t for my email list, no one would have known that I came out with a new product or much less bought it.
I was able to make money during the first month of quarantine because I had a list to promote my products to and the traffic costing me zero dollars.
This concept also extends to your followers on social media.
You don’t own your followers on Instagram and you don’t own your subscribers on YouTube.
Do you know who owns them?
Instagram and YouTube do.
And every time you want to contact your followers, you have to go through the middleman to be able to do that.
So what’s the solution?
Cut out the middleman and build your email list.
The fifth reason for building a list is one of my favorite because it’s something that only the expert marketers do.
5) Contact Them
Use your list and contact them on social media.
If you have done email marketing before, you know that e-mail open rates are always declining right now.
If you can get a 15 percent open rate on your emails, you will be incredibly grateful.
If you get twenty percent, you are a top marketer, and if you can get thirty percent, oh my God.
Break out the champagne and throw a party because you are now popular.
Let’s just say you did your best, learned a lot of tactics and implemented them, and got about a 20 percent open rate on your email marketing campaign.
What about the 80 percent who didn’t see your e-mail or are ignoring you?
Do you know what you can do?
You can upload your email list onto Facebook or Google’s ad platform and run ads specifically to those people.
The ad cost will be cheaper and conversions will be higher because those people are narco traffic.
They know who you are.
Do you know how powerful that is?
Let’s say if you are promoting a 48-hour flash sale and send your email list and offer even those who open your mail may be in the middle of something when they saw your mail and cannot purchase it right away.
But if you retarget them and everyone on your list the next time they are on.
Or Facebook or YouTube, they will be reminded of your offer and be like, oh, that’s right, you are having a flash sale.
Conclusion
I better get on top of it and take you up on your offer.
I hope you can see by now that having an email list is the foundation of your business empire.
Without it, you will never be truly secure.
You will be always at the mercy of running ads or trying to generate traffic with a list.
You own that traffic and you are the boss of your business.