Crap! only got a 3.6% open rate! aaaaaaRRGH!

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Hello! We’re hot on the topic of internet marketing again, and today is about building your list and increasing your open rate.

Yes, the how-to of building your list.

If you haven’t yet signed up for the empower network, you should, just because it will be the start of a long and meaningful relationship between us, but because you’ll get to know what I know, and that will help you start and grow your online business, in whatever field you’re in.

You might be selling hand-painted egg cups on Ebay, or a how-to series on ’60s style tie-and-dye, or the latest customer acquisition software and marketing system that has ever yet been released.(²) (I already bought into that by the way!

Whatever it is that you promote online of your own or as an affiliate for someone elses product, you should have learned by now that there is an UTMOST IMPORTANCE in building your list of subscribers who have shown an interest in something that you have offered.

Internet marketing is a simple activity made to seem complex(I admit I did buy one, just to see what I got, it’s all part of teh great “life experience” in marketing on the internet!)

The simplicity is this.

1. find something to sell (don’t sell things that you don’t want to, your heart won’t be in it, and it’s how you feel about selling that counts in the end)

2. find traffic (people) likely to buy it (targeting, SEO, niche research)

3.promote your offer (e-mail, ads, website, blogs)

4.GET peoples e-mails when they show interest (they might not buy right away, most don’t in fact) that’s how and when you build your list.

5.Promote to your list.

ONLY a 3.6% open rate! Arrrgh!

Ok, so what’s that?Well it means that for a particular e-mail in my follow up list only 3.6% of the subscribers that received the mail actually opened it.

That means that I could now do two things.

1.I can send a mail directly to that 3.6%, knowing that they have read my mail and that it was interesting enough to attract their attention,and

2. re-send the original mail, WITH A DIFFERENT SUBJECT LINE to the other 94%. (that way my creative e-mail writing time is not ‘wasted’ and I can test the effectiveness of another subject line.

All this is well covered in the book, Scientific Advertising by Claude C Hopkins

 Yes, of course I have an amazon.com affiliate account (you’d be silly not to!)

By using a good autoresponder software or service (handled on your computer or hosted by a company) you can track your mails, to find out an amazing amount of data about your mailing campaigns to increase your open rate (which you must do if anyone is ever going to read the mails you send them!).

This is where it gets fun, interesting and scientific. You can test subject lines for opens, you test email body content for clicks, you test linked content for actions and so you work to increase your success rate in all of these.

This is called “increasing your metrics” in marketing lingo-speak.

It’s all about people, and you have to love them.

Yes, it really is all about people and how you can present your offer, so that they can relate to it emotionally and ‘sensibly’, because what any selling comes down to in the end, is, does the product or service being offered fill a need (real or imagined) that the potential buyer has, and have you correctly appealed to that need with your ad.

[If you’re not “good with people” and find it difficult to relate, you can simply go to a really busy place with lots of people and look at them for an hour or three until you feel that you can ‘have’ more easily people in your life, then get back to marketing!]

If you can understand that simple fact, you can construct all the e-mails, ad campaigns and sales actions around that.

If you get this and you do 1 to 4 above, you’ll be well on your way!

I hope you have found this article useful, and please share it with your friends and contacts (your contacts might even become your friends for helping them to create their online business!)

And as I always say, (and for good reason!)

Flourish and Prosper! (I know you can do it!)

Jeremusic

(²) Ask me about this software(!)

Explanatory note: I am using the Empower Network platform for two good reasons. Firstly to provide the means wherein I can free myself and my wife financially in order to be able to work full-time on the accomplishment of my definite major purpose and, thanks to the authority level of this domain (91 in USA, 336 worldwide) my message of hope and wisdom and planetary peace and harmony can more effectively be disseminated.

Links to discover a little more of who I am…

 my official personal website of my music (and the reason I got involved in this whole internet marketing activity in the first place! )